Flying the flag voyages: HMS Galatea 1867-1871 to the Great White Fleet 1907-1909

In the second half of the century, while ‘gunboat diplomacy' continued in some areas, settler colonies were becoming accustomed to more symbolic displays of firepower. This period saw the development of a series of major ‘flying the flag’ voyages to the Asia-Pacific region.

Thus, despite the fact that they overlapped with the new Gladstone ministry's savage cuts to the British naval budget, the 1867-1871 voyages of HMS Galatea were viewed as proof of Britain's ongoing commitment to the Asia-Pacific region. The voyages included the first visit to the region by a member of the British Royal family and generated widespread interest among local communities both within and beyond the British Empire, especially Australia. They provided a model for subsequent royal tours (including the reliance on navy ships for transport; e.g., HMS Serapis and HMS Bacchante visits) and for the visits by ‘flying' or ‘detached' squadrons.

But for all their novelty the Galatea voyages were also seen as part of a longer tradition of British naval engagement in the region. For at least one local community the Galatea's visit recalled (and indeed compared favourably with) that of the great Captain Cook a hundred years before. In New Zealand, the Maori ‘People of the Island of Aotearoa’ complimented Alfred:

Hither came, before You, Captain Cook's little Vessel, the Paddles of which were Sails,/across the great Ocean...

Many Asia-Pacific communities shared this sense of wonder at the Galatea's size and naval might. However, although she might have been the largest warship yet seen in many ports and thus a powerful example of British naval strength, the Galatea was also recognised as a multi-national community. Crewmembers included a Maltese cook, a Russian-French artist, German junior officers and an Anglo-German captain, Prince Alfred.

Alfred, whose British naval career would culminate in his appointment in 1893 as Admiral of the Fleet, was also destined, in the same year, to succeed his German uncle Ernst as Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. Alfred’s Germanness was openly acknowledged and sometimes celebrated in the multi-national ports he visited. In Australia, for example, the Victorian artist George Gordon McCrae poked fun at Alfred reviewing the Adelaide troops dressed in Prussian military uniform. In his caricature sketch ‘A Saylor on Horse-backe’, however, McCrae focussed as much on Alfred’s awkward steed as on his ‘foreign’ uniform.³⁹ More reverently, torch-bearing German colonists in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney serenaded Alfred with German songs about the Fatherland.

Similarly, Alfred’s voyage inspired declarations of loyalty not just to the British Crown, but also to an international maritime community. Even after a supposed Irish republican extremist attempted to assassinate Alfred at a Sydney picnic raising funds for a sailors’ home in 1868, British officers addressed Alfred in terms of their shared pro­fessional identity rather than just nationality: ‘We, the Commanders of British and Colonial ships in this Port approach you... as being also connected by the ties of profession.’⁴⁰ As fellow naval professionals, they were outraged that Alfred’s good work in helping ordinary sailors could be threatened by such a horrific crime.

To your Royal Highness we as Seamen, would commend that great national institution of which you are now the Master. Under all banners and in all lati­tudes it is ours to recognize and yours to improve that great system by which darkness is made safe to the conscientious mariner and the anxious trader.⁴¹

This concept of an international, professionalised community of western naval and merchant marine officers (and despite sympathy for the plight of sailors and recognition of the need to provide assistance via sailors’ homes, there remained a clear professional and social distinction between the officer class and the ordinary ‘men’) was emphasised in later accounts of naval officers in Australian ports.

Just as he lampooned Prince Alfred, so too George Gordon McCrae sketched and caricatured many other western naval personnel in Australian ports. Like John Piper in Sydney Harbour in the first decades of the century, McCrae (who likewise lived near the harbour entrance to Melbourne) recorded ship arrivals and departures from the 1860s through the 1880s.

The perhaps unlikely genre of commercial sheet music provides another window into the camaraderie established during western naval visits to Australian ports. Just as Prince Alfred and HMS Galatea were welcomed and farewelled with new (or newly labelled) ‘galops’, polkas and waltzes, so too subsequent naval visitors were similarly honoured. Sheet music, sold relatively inexpensively in Australian and other ports, was intended for dances at balls both ashore and aboard ship, where naval bands were in high demand. Much of the music was composed by naval personnel, several of whom apparently had continental European backgrounds. Thus N. La Feuillade ‘Late of H.M. Brig “Arab” ’ and ‘author of Belle Brandon Schottische, Tommy Dodd Galop &c.’ dedicated his ‘Flying Squadron Galop’ to its commander ‘Rear-Admiral Hornby and the Officers of the Squadron under his command’. Similarly, Giuseppe d’Anna, ‘Bandmaster of H.M.S. Endymion’, published his ‘Flying Squadron Waltz’ with the same Melbourne publisher, Charles Troedel. Britain’s ‘flying’ squadron of 1869 proved popular beyond the naval community as well. Intended as a cheap alternative to regular warship patrols of Australian ports, it was received rapturously by a delighted Australian public and inspired numerous letters, poems and lighthearted satires in the colonial press.

The arrival of the U.S. ‘Great White Fleet’ in Australian ports in August—September 1908 thus marked the continuation of a long tradition of visits by foreign warships. The visit certainly needs to be understood within the context of twentieth-century diplomacy and politics. In particular, it demonstrates the newly federated Australia’s enthusiasm for U.S. racial policy in the Pacific (specifically President Roosevelt’s desire to limit Japanese immigration, backed up with a more prominent U.S. Pacific Fleet) and, in turn, a greater distancing from the mother-country, Great Britain, since in 1902 it had allied formally with Japan.⁴⁴ So too the fleet’s display of engine technology was a world away from the sailing vessels of the first half of the nineteenth century or the often awkward mix of sail and steam power seen, for example, in HMS Galatea. Yet in other ways the visit demon­strated many continuities with the past, particularly the ongoing dependence of western navies on their allies. For all the hoopla surrounding the appearance of the sixteen U.S. battleships, painted a dazzling white and wowing spectators with their dramatic and (mostly) skilful manoeuvres into Australian harbours, the ships were as glad to reach port as their nineteenth-century Russian counterparts. Where the Russians were desperate for fresh fruit and vegetables, the Americans were desperate for coal. Indeed the entire voyage revealed the U.S. fleet’s dangerous over-reliance on British coal, and the problems this might cause in time of war.

So too the enthusiastic reception of both officers and men at balls and picnics in Sydney, Melbourne and Albany echoed the very forms of hospitality extended to earlier naval visitors.