Heligoland Read Free Page A

a maritime league against Britain in which Denmark would play a part, the War Minister Lord Castlereagh issued demands for the surrender of the Danish fleet.
    Having battled around the Skagerrak in atrocious seas only to encounter frustrating calms in the Kattegat, Admiral Gambier’s task force of twenty-one ships-of-the-line, carrying nearly 20,000 troops, eventually arrived off Copenhagen on 2 September. When the Danish government rejected calls for surrender, a heavy naval bombardment of the city began. The most fearsome weapons used by the British, to devastating effect, were bomb-vessels equipped with huge mortars that lobbed 10-inch diameter fragmentation shells. These burst on contact and cut down personnel indiscriminately. By 5 September some two thousand of Copenhagen’s inhabitants had been killed, many more were wounded and, to bitter parliamentary criticism, the remains of the Danish fleet was seized and brought into the Yarmouth Roads. This brutal pre-emptive strike had been a flagrant breach of Denmark’s neutrality, and it threatened to be politically disastrous. Soon the key states under French influence – Russia, Prussia and Austria – declared war on Britain. 3 Significantly, on 17 August Denmark abandoned its neutrality and also declared war on Britain. The British had already been taking stock of Denmark’s possessions, wondering which might be strategically useful, and Denmark’s new stance soon focused British attention on Heligoland.
    The fact that Britain had never before needed to fight a war in Europe on such a scale meant that a weakness now appeared in its campaigning. Numerous hitherto obscure parts of Europe were now suddenly of tremendous strategic value – but Britain had little or no intelligence about them. Rather astonishingly, although Heligoland was only some 290 miles from the Norfolk coast, scarcely anyone in Britain knew anything about the island, or even what it looked like. It seems quite probable that the only detailed chart of it the Admiralty had in its possession was a copy of one which had been made for the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce in 1787. This chart had recently been received from the second-in-command of Admiral Russell’s flagship, HMS Majestic , Lieutenant Corbet D’Auvergne; he had acquired it from one Captain Dunbar, who happened to purchase it over the counter of a commercial ship’s chandler during a visit to Copenhagen in 1806. 4 Fortunately for Admiral Russell, Lieutenant D’Auvergne was not just an exceptionally enterprising officer. He happened to be the younger brother of Rear-Admiral Philip D’Auvergne, otherwise known as the Duke of Bouillon, who was at that time controlling a network of spies gathering intelligence for Britain via the Channel Islands. The Jersey-based Bouillons were Belgian aristocrats who well knew the frailty of small national entities, having fled to England as long ago as 1672 when they were deposed from their homeland by the French.
    The scarcity of detailed knowledge about the south-east part of the North Sea was slightly more surprising because Britain had – albeit intermittently and fleetingly – made various contacts with Heligoland over many centuries. There is a possibility that the island even received its name from a seventh-century English missionary called St Willibrod. The first written reference to the island appeared in ad 98, when it was recorded under the name ‘Hyrtha’ by the Roman historian Tacitus. At the very end of the seventh century, after Willibrod’s accidental arrival there after a shipwreck in about ad 699, it acquired the name Heligoland (meaning ‘Holy Land’), possibly because Willibrod himself came from Lindisfarne, on Northumberland’s Holy Island, or perhaps because it had been a sacred place of the old Norse heathen gods.
    Although for innumerable years thereafter various Viking chiefs vied for sovereignty of the island, such a hold as they were able to achieve was often precarious