‘A ship is the most living of inanimate things’.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice and legal scholar, 1881.¹

‘The Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic, the ocean of the present, and the Pacific, the ocean of the future’.

John Hay, U.S. Secretary of State, 1898.2

In June 1802 two naval officers met in Sydney Harbour. Although strangers to one another, they had much in common. The pair shared a mutual interest in science and exploration, and each struggled to maintain authority over often recalcitrant subordinates and to fulfil orders from the distant metropole. The visit ended with warm professions of friendship and a promise that the guest would buy his host dinner when they next met in London. The host was Sir Philip Gidley King, British governor of New South Wales. His visitor was the Frenchman Nicolas Baudin, sent by Napoleon to Australia on an extra­ordinary voyage of scientific discovery. Their friendship was both remarkable and utterly typical. Remarkable because King and Baudin represented the two greatest naval powers in the world, which had then been at war for the past nine years. Yet Baudin came to Sydney with a crew terribly depleted by scurvy, and King graciously shared the colony’s sparse resources with his erstwhile enemy for five months.³ While such generosity says much about King, it also forms part of a far bigger story of western navies’ interactions and mutual dependence in the Asia-Pacific region. Many of the themes of this visit— assistance in a crisis, cultural and scientific exchange, tension between maintaining friendly relations on the ground while pursuing national interests—were repeated throughout the nineteenth century, which saw a concentration of western naval power in the region.

This chapter explores the interactions of nineteenth-century western navies in the Asia- Pacific region.

To date, the history of western navies in the Asia-Pacific region has been written mainly by specialist naval historians, who have tended to focus on a single western navy or naval division and its local impact or voyage.⁶ More recently, historians have studied interaction between two navies in the region.⁷ Such histories are often designed to add the naval voice to the existing diplomatic narrative; for example by demonstrating how the U.S. Navy in the Pacific served to both support and shape State Department policies. There has been much less attention to the cultural history of these navies, either individually or compara­tively, although Jane Samson’s study of the Royal Navy’s interactions with Pacific island communities makes an important contribution.⁸ Jan Ruger’s insightful study of British and German responses to their navies at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, has not yet been matched by a transnational study of the cultural significance of western navies in the Pacific.⁹ This chapter moves beyond both national narratives and the focus on military and geopolitical history to draw attention to the cultural and social interactions between naval personnel. This is a story about people rather than just ships, and while there is still a preponderance of captains (reflecting the pattern of extant primary sources and secondary sources) other voices are included wherever possible.

This is ostensibly also a story about peacetime. Yet the Pax Britannica was peaceful only in the narrow sense that, other than the Spanish-American War of 1898, there were no declared wars between western powers in the region until the First World War. Western powers including Britain, France, Russia, Prussia (later the German Empire) and the USA did engage their naval as well as military forces in numerous conflicts with local rulers in order to acquire or consolidate territory (e.g., Britain’s wars against the Maori in New Zealand in the 1860s, the U.S. annexation of Hawai’i in 1898). In China, Japan and Samoa, moreover, western naval forces worked together to force local rulers to submit to trade and territorial agreements. More common still were individual acts (or, even more frequently, threats) of violence against indigenous people from naval vessels. This was especially common in the islands of the South West Pacific where individual warships, particularly British and French vessels, exacted (or threatened to exact) revenge for murder, theft or destruction of property of western missionaries, traders and, later, settlers. But British commanders also attempted to mediate between islanders and Europeans, and their ‘sense of mission’ involved a wide array of responses which included but were not limited to violence.¹⁰

There were certainly numerous moments of tension between western powers and pre­dictions of war. Yet on the whole, western navies not only coexisted in the Asia-Pacific region, they often cooperated willingly. The interplay between self-reliance and depen­dence, between tense and warm relations, can be seen in three areas of western naval activity in the Asia-Pacific region: scientific expeditions to Sydney, western naval activities in Japan and China in the 1860s and 1870s, and ‘flying the flag’ visits from Britain’s HMS Galatea (1867-1871) to the United States’s Great White Fleet (1907-1909).