HMS Curacoa: The Corvette That Declared Two Pacific Protectorates

Constructed at Govan

HMS Curacoa was built by John Elder and Company at Govan on the Clyde, launched on 18 April 1878, a Comus-class steel corvette and the third Royal Navy vessel to carry the name, itself taken from the Caribbean island of Curaçao. She displaced 2,390 tons and measured 225 feet in length, commissioning for the first time in February 1880 under Captain William Cuming.

The yard that built her is the reason she could do the job at all, which is a neater piece of history than it first appears. John Elder was the engineer who took the compound steam engine, in which the steam is used twice, at high pressure and then again at low, and made it work reliably at sea. The saving in coal was enormous, and coal was the thing that had kept steamships tied to the short routes: a ship that burns half as much can go twice as far, or carry cargo instead of fuel. One contemporary judgement was that Elder's work amounted to a revolution in engineering second only to Watt's. His firm had begun as a millwright's business in 1834, went into shipbuilding in 1858, and moved in 1868 to a stretch of the Govan riverside that had been Fairfield Farm.

The name change came eight years after Curacoa was launched. In 1886, under William Pearce, John Elder and Company was reconstituted as the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, and one of the stated objects of the change was to make it easier to attract Admiralty work. It succeeded rather well: Fairfield went on to build battleships, cruisers and destroyers for the Royal Navy for the next eighty years, and its name turns up in a great many of the articles in this series. Curacoa belongs to the period just before that, when the firm's reputation still rested on machinery rather than warships, and a corvette designed to spend four years at a time on the far side of the world was exactly the sort of ship its engines had been invented for.

She was built to a design typical of the Royal Navy's transitional era between sail and steam, carrying a mixed armament of 7-inch and 64-pounder muzzle-loading rifles alongside lighter quick-firing Nordenfelt guns and torpedo carriages, a remarkably varied arsenal reflecting a period of rapid and sometimes uneven naval technological change. It proved a design with a limited shelf life: within little more than a decade, the whole Comus class was being quietly overtaken by the wave of modern cruisers built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, leaving ships built for exactly this kind of steady, wide-ranging imperial cruising increasingly redundant almost as soon as their crews had learned to trust them.

There is one detail of the design worth knowing, because it explains what she was for. Curacoa was among the first small cruisers built with a metal hull, and yet below the waterline she was sheathed in copper over a layer of timber. The timber was not structural. It was there purely to keep the copper away from the iron, because the two in contact in salt water eat each other. And the copper was there because a ship sent to the Pacific for four years at a stretch could not come home to have the weed and the worm scraped off her. Add a full sailing rig, for the same reason applied to coal, and you have the whole philosophy of the ship: built to be sent a very long way away and left there.

Years on the China Station

Long before her famous Pacific postings, HMS Curacoa spent 1881 to 1883 on the China Station, calling at Hong Kong and Shanghai and cruising as far north as the Japanese ports of Yokohama, Nagasaki and Hakodate, with a visit to the Russian naval base at Vladivostok besides. She remained in Far Eastern waters until 1886, the best part of a decade's experience of exactly the kind of long-distance imperial cruising her class had been designed for, long before she ever set eyes on the Pacific islands she would later help bring under British rule.

Declaring Protectorates in the Pacific

HMS Curacoa's most historically significant service came during her posting to the Australia Station, where she arrived on 5 August 1890 and served until December 1894, her ship's company relieved partway through, in December 1892, by fresh drafts arriving aboard the liner SS Cuzco, the routine but essential logistics that kept a distant station running.

In October 1892, her captain, Herbert Gibson, formally declared the Ellice Islands, today part of independent Tuvalu, a British Protectorate during a series of visits between 9 and 16 October, an act of imperial administration carried out directly from the deck of a Royal Navy corvette rather than through any grander diplomatic ceremony.

The reason Britain wanted those protectorates at all is not a comfortable one, and it starts with the labour trade. Through the second half of the nineteenth century Pacific islanders were recruited for the sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji, and a great deal of that recruiting was kidnapping: ships would arrive, take men off by force or by fraud, and sail. It was called blackbirding, and the Royal Navy's Australia Station spent decades chasing the ships that did it. In September 1871 the practice killed the wrong man. Bishop John Coleridge Patteson went ashore at Nukapu in the Santa Cruz group and was murdered, almost certainly in reprisal for a blackbirding raid that had taken islanders shortly before. HMS Rosario was sent to burn the village, which helped nobody, and the news of a murdered English bishop did what years of reports about kidnapped islanders had not: it produced legislation, and then the Western Pacific High Commission, and eventually the protectorates that Curacoa proclaimed.

Captain Gibson repeated the exercise in June 1893, proclaiming the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, extending British colonial authority over yet another substantial stretch of the Pacific, a reminder of just how much of the practical work of empire, in this period, was carried out by relatively modest naval vessels visiting remote island groups rather than by any large-scale military campaign.

The mechanics were the same each time and they were not elaborate. Curacoa worked the Solomons in June and July 1893 in company with the gunboat HMS Goldfinch, and at each island a party landed, hoisted the Union Jack, fired a feu de joie and read the proclamation aloud, with the chiefs making their marks afterwards. The first reading was on Mono Island in the Treasury Group on 11 June 1893. Sixty-five years later the Royal Navy came back to survey the same island properly and discovered, as recounted in the article on HMS Chiddingfold, that Mono was sitting four and a half miles from where the chart said it was. Which tells you a good deal about how thoroughly anybody had looked at the place Britain had declared itself responsible for.

It is worth following those two protectorates forward, because the twentieth century was not kind to either. The Solomons administration settled at Tulagi in the Gela group from 1897, and in 1942 the Japanese took it and the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, and what followed was six months of some of the hardest fighting of the Pacific war on and around islands where Curacoa's landing parties had read a proclamation forty-nine years earlier. Tulagi was destroyed. The capital that replaced it in 1945, Honiara, was built out of an abandoned American base. The Ellice Islands got off more lightly and were still occupied: American forces landed on Funafuti, Nanumea and Nukufetau in 1942 and put airfields on them.

Both went their own way in the end, and in the same year. The Ellice Islanders, Polynesian and largely Protestant, had spent decades administered together with the Micronesian Gilbertese and voted in a United Nations-observed referendum in 1974 to separate; they became independent as Tuvalu in 1978. The Solomon Islands became independent in 1978 as well. Eighty-five years separate the reading of the proclamation on Mono Island from the lowering of the flag, which is not very long: there are people alive in both countries whose grandparents were adults when a British corvette turned up and told them they were now a protectorate.

A Collision at Devonport

HMS Curacoa, by then serving in a training cruiser role in the Atlantic, was involved in a serious accident on 23 January 1899 when HMS Collingwood collided with her outside Devonport, leaving HMS Curacoa heavily damaged with several compartments of her hull flooded, a stark reminder that naval accidents close to home could prove just as dangerous as anything encountered on distant foreign stations.

She recovered sufficiently to undertake a Mediterranean cruise between February and April 1900, calling at Madeira, Las Palmas, São Vicente, Gibraltar and Arosa Bay, a more conventional and considerably less eventful deployment than her earlier Pacific service had been, and very much in keeping with the pattern of instructional voyages to Madeira and the Canary Islands that filled much of her final years as a training cruiser.

The End of Service

HMS Curacoa was sold on 17 May 1904 to King of Garston for breaking up, closing out a career of just over a quarter century that had taken her from routine service on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Station to a truly significant role in the formal extension of British colonial authority across parts of the Pacific, a legacy considerably weightier than her relatively modest size and armament might otherwise suggest.