GEORGE FIFE ANGAS (1789-1879) AND THE BELIZE COFFEE-HOUSE AND HOTEL

Belize, with which my distant cousin George Fife Angas traded from his London base, has a checkered past. It began life as a harbour for British pirates, whom the local Spanish rulers were unable to dislodge. In the seventeenth century, the buccaneers moved, like more recent gangsters, into legitimate business activity.

Their main trade was the felling of the bloodwoodtree (such a piratical name for a tree!): the timber was exported to Britain where it was used for dyeing cloth. As demand for bloodwood fell off, they began to harvest rain-forest mahogany in huge quantities. It was this which drew George Angas to Belize, to supply the hardwood timber requirements of the family’s coach-building business in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

 George Fife Angas (1789-1879)

In order to make his ships pay on both legs of the journey, Angas loaded them on the outward voyage with luxury goods from Europe, Jamaica and North America, for which there was a steady demand from the British Hondurans. They may have foresworn actual piracy, but the British settlers were still a hard-living, fiercely independent population. Their taste for rich plunder remained, and Angas always carried strong alcoholic cargo to satisfy their prodigious thirst, as announced for example in this notice in the Honduras Gazette and Commercial Advertiser of Saturday 10^th March 1827:

One sea-captain who had the misfortune to be shipwrecked on Honduran shores spent many months with the bloodwoodsmen while waiting to be rescued. Admittedly this was in 1720, a century before Angas’s time, but he described his hosts as “generally a rude drunken crew, some of which have been pirates.” There was, he noted, “but little comfort living among these crew of ungovernable wretches, where was little else to be heard but blasphemy, cursing and swearing.”

But there is honour among thieves and a code of rough justice even among pirates. By 1738 the community had begun to elect magistrates from amongst its population to rule on common law; and in 1826 it was those magistrates who edited a new weekly newspaper for the settlement, the Gazette in which Angas and his fellow traders advertised their wares.

In March 1827 the magistrates felt confident enough to delegate the editorship to the paper’s printer, James Cruickshank, but relieved him of it only eight months later on the grounds of his intemperance. In retrospect the seeds of his drunkenness were in this notice appearing in the second edition for which Cruickshank was responsible. Cruickshank was taking on another new role, as hotelier:

The Belize Coffee-House and Hotel sounds to me exactly the sort of establishment which would have been enjoyed by the town’s piratical founders two centuries earlier: the private rooms for parties, the emphasis on grog, ale, porter and wines by the gallon or quart or case. And James Cruickshank seems to have been unequal to the task of resisting temptation when, as a partner in the hotel venture, he presumably had his own key to the Coffee-House liquor store. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.

GEORGE FIFE ANGAS (1789-1879) AND THE HONDURAS GAZETTE & COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER

George Fife Angas was a cousin of my 3x great uncle Joseph Angus. The spellings of their surname had diverged with different branches of the family several generations earlier. George is revered, and well documented, as the father of South Australia; but his exploits in Central America are much less well known.

George Fife Angas (1789-1879)

George’s father Caleb Angas was a builder of horse-drawn carriages in Newcastle-upon-Tyne who imported his own mahogany from Honduras. George, the youngest of Caleb’s seven sons, learned the ropes and in 1824 formed a separate shipping company to handle the timber imports. Britain had been granted mahogany-cutting rights by the Spanish authorities in 1786, and the Honduran port of Belize was the centre of their operations, a British colony in all but title. (The area around the port only became an official part of the British Empire, as British Honduras, in 1862; and when it gained its independence in 1981 it reverted to Belize.)

On their outward journeys to Belize, the ships carried all manner of goods for which Angas judged there might be a market among the British mahongany cutters. The arrival of the latest cargo was announced in the port’s English-language newspaper, the Honduras Gazette and Commercial Advertiser. On 3^rd January 1827, for example, a notice declared:

Such was the strength of the British enclave at Belize that, although not yet formally a colony, it had many of a colony’s institutions, including its own magistrates. The Gazette was established in July 1826, primarily as a vehicle for legal notices of one sort or another. Jurors, for example, were summoned to their duty through its pages – a very public summons which, one imagines, made it much easier for the accused to influence his or her jury.

The magistrates took on the editorship of the Gazette for most of its first year of publication before leaving the task in the hands of the newspaper’s printer JamesCruickshank. Eight months later however, as Thomas Pickstock (one of George Angas’s fellow importers) recalled, they “in their wisdom took it out of his hands, by reason of his intemperance, and very properly appointed a Committee for its better Government.” Perhaps it was the pressure of the weekly deadline that got to him [writes this weekly blogger!].

The Honduras Gazette and Commercial Advertiser
[Vol. 1. No. 39.] Belize, Saturday, March. 24, 1827. [Price 1s. 8d.] 
James Cruickshank's second edition as editor

In only the second edition under his charge, Cruickshank reported an alleged theft from the cargo of one of George Angas’s fleet. It appeared that

a negro man named Green … a seaman on board the schooner George Angas, had plundered from the cargo of that vessel, while on her passage from this port [Belize] to Ysabal, some Pracianas and Cambrics, which he sold in the place last mentioned. He however endeavoured to account for his possession of the goods, after a great deal of prevarication, by saying he bought some of them here, but did not know from whom, and that others were given to him by a negro woman slave to sell on her account. He was fully committed to trial at the ensuing April Summary Court.

Ysabel was a Spanish port on the east coast of Texas at its border with Mexico. Cambric is a fine cloth of linen or cotton. I have no idea what a praciana was. Cruickshank carried a report of the trial itself two weeks later.

The schooner George Angas had been freighted [hired] to a Spanish gentleman named Ramoon [sic] to carry his goods to Ysabal. Ramoon had been led to notice the prisoner disposing of merchandise similar to that bought by him. This occasioned him to open several of his [Ramoon’s] packages, which turned out to be deficient in quantity. It also appeared that the goods sold and given away by him [Green] were of the same quality as Ramoon had bought, and the number of pieces missing corresponded precisely with the number found in the prisoner’s possession.

Mr Miller [one of Angas’s partners in trade] who conducted the prosecution on behalf of the firm stated his inability to produce further evidence. He had felt it his duty, he said, to bring the prisoner before the Court, as suspicion rested so strongly upon him. The rest of the crew were at sea, and consequently could not be brought forward as witnesses.

The prisoner in his defence said that he had bought some goods in Belize to sell in Ysabal, but positively denied the possession of the quantity the indictment specified. He further stated that all the goods had been safely landed under the immediate eye of their owner, and that therefore it was impossible for him [Green] to rob the trunks, particularly as the vessel was small and several persons on board. The jury deliberated for a few minutes and returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

Perhaps Green was a careless thief, fencing stolen goods so openly and lucky to be acquitted. Perhaps Ramoon saw a chance of a bogus claim, either against a former slave or against a British trader. It’s interesting that Green was employed on one of Angas’s ships, and I wonder if he ever sailed to Britain; Angas is credited by some for his part in the abolition of slavery in the territory in 1831.

British Honduras: Mahogany being squared for export

(postcard c1890) 

GEORGE FRENCH ANGAS (1822-1886) AND THE NYALA

George Fife Angas, an English banker and businessman and a cousin of my 3x great uncle Joseph Angus, is credited in large part with establishing South Australia as a formal territory. While remaining in London he founded the South Australian Company in 1836 and promoted the early colonisation of the region, some of it at his own expense. His commitment to the settlement of South Australia left him in financial difficulty and in early 1843 he sent his son John Howard Angas to Adelaide to revive the family fortune. Towards the end of the year John’s older brother George French Angas followed, arriving in January 1844.

George French Angas (1822-1886)

the frontispiece to his third folio, Kafirs Illustrated, published 1849

(engraving by Charles Baugniet, who incidentally also designed the first Belgian postage stamp)

George’s father had encouraged him to enter the family business, but from an early age he showed an interest and an aptitude for art and natural history. He travelled far and wide in Australia and New Zealand over the next eighteen months making watercolour sketches of local flora and fauna and the native populations. By exhibitions in Adelaide and Sydney he raised the money to publish two collections of hand-coloured lithographs on his return to London in 1847 – South Australia Illustrated and The New Zealanders Illustrated.

He was an accurate observer, an instinctive naturalist and ethnologist; and the two collections are today rich records of indigenous antipodean cultures. In his respect for local traditions he reflected the attitude of his father, who pursued legislation to protect aboriginal rights. His encouragement of Christian missionary work amongst the native people of South Australia may seem paternalistic now but in his day he was progressive; George Angas senior regarded William Penn’s treaty with the native North Americans as a model for fostering good relationships between local and European populations.

Illustrations by George French Angas from The New Zealanders Illustrated (1847) and Kafirs Illustrated (1849)

George junior now turned his attention to southern Africa and the results were published in a third collection, Kafirs Illustrated, in 1849. It contained the now successful mixture of illustrations – native costume and accommodation, vegetation and wildlife. Amongst the new batch of images were two of particular personal interest and satisfaction to George.

George French Angas’s descriptions of the male and female nyala antelope were the first, of a species previously unknown to European natural science. As the nyala it had of course been known to local hunters for thousands of years. By the scientific community it was now named Tragelaphus angasii, the Angas antelope.

The male Tragelaphus angasii, painted by its western discoverer George French Angas in 1849

George claimed modestly that John Edward Gray, the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum at the time, had so named the new animal in honour of George’s father. But there is no evidence for this, and no sense in naming an African mammal after an Australian enthusiast. The honour surely belongs to the son and discoverer.

The nyala is a shy herbivore, preferring to live not in open countryside but in thickets within woodland, from which it emerges cautiously to drink at waterholes. As Angas observed and depicted, the male and female of the species are extremely different in appearance, more so than any other antelope. Unfortunately the magnificent twisted horns of the male make it a highly prized game trophy, but at the moment the nyala is not considered endangered. Just as well, because although George only discovered it 165 years ago, fossil records suggest that it has surivived as a distinct species for some 5.8 million years.

The female and young Tragelaphus angasii, painted by George French Angas in 1849

WILLIAM HENRY ANGAS (1781-1832) AND THE SEAMEN’S MISSIONS

Woody Allen has a stand-up routine about a bullet in his protagonist’s pocket saving his life by deflecting a Bible falling from an upper storey. It’s a reversal of the apocryphal story in which a Bible in a soldier’s breast pocket stops a bullet from entering his heart. For sailor William Henry Angas it was a torn pocket edition of Dr Watt’s Hymns (the 1707 classic Baptist collection) which turned his life around.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

hymn writer

I described Angas’s testing early experiences as a merchant seaman in my last post here. He was freed from a French prisoner of war camp at Dunkerque in around 1802, where he had bought the hymnal from one of his captors. Still under twenty-one, his experiences and the completion of his navigator apprenticeship earned him the command of the Venerable, one of his father Caleb Angas’s fleet of sailing ships.

Caleb appointed his ships’ masters as much for their missionary zeal as for their nautical abilities, so perhaps he recognised William’s potential even before William himself did. For several years William sailed to Central America and the West Indies in his father’s service, during which there seems to have been no respite from the trials of life at sea – his 1895 biographer Richard Welford reports that on his second voyage the crew mutinied.

His third trip was if anything worse: on 6^th June 1803, during the outward run, his brother Caleb junior drowned, and on the way back the ship ran aground and was lost along with its cargo (both, Welford notes, uninsured). William began to suffer from regular bouts of yellow fever, which eventually forced him to take a shore job as a ship’s husband – the land-based agent responsible for managing a ship’s crew, repairs, provisions and paperwork.

Dr John Rippon (1751-1836)

pastor to Sailorstown

All the while William Henry Angas’s faith was deepening. He was baptised at the end of 1807 by the great Dr Rippon, one of the giants of the early nineteenth century Baptist movement. Rippon, who in 1787 had published a very successful supplement to Watt’s Hymns known as Rippon’s Selection, was pastor for 63 years of the Carter Lane Chapel in a rough area of south London known informally as Sailorstown.

Carter Lane played a key role in nineteenth century Baptist history. Baptist churches are traditionally quite independent of each other, preferring that each congregation be guided not by any centralised doctrine but directly by God. It was at Rippon’s church that the idea of the Baptist Union, an administrative collaboration of Baptist churches, finally got off the ground in 1812; and on his death in 1836 Rippon was succeeded by a young cousin of William’s, my 3x great uncle Joseph Angus. Joseph was himself succeeded as pastor there by C.H. Spurgeon, the great charismatic Baptist preacher of the late nineteenth century – there must have been something about that congregation!

Rev Joseph Angus (1816-1902) and Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892)

 pastors at New Park (the expanding Carter Lane congregation relocated to New Park in 1833)

Freed from the very physical hardships and duties of actually guiding a ship over the ocean, William began to focus on the spiritual vacuum faced by sailors ashore. The need for a mission to seamen became clear to him, and he set about preparing himself for that mission with single-minded determination. In 1816 he studied theology at Edinburgh University in Scotland (as in later years did his cousin Joseph – because nonconformists were not allowed to receive degrees by the only two English Universities, Oxford and Cambridge). He then spent three years in Europe learning Dutch, German and French, while building up a network of friends amongst the protestant churches of those countries. Finally in 1821-22 he attended Stepney Baptist College back in London, where he was still a member of the Carter Lane congregation. (Joseph Angus also trained for the ministry at Stepney, and at the age of 33 began 44 years of service as its principal.)

On 11^th May 1822, William Henry Angas, the first ever Baptist minister to train specifically for mission work amongst men of the sea, made his public debut,  appropriately on board a floating chapel at Bristol. This was one of several set up in ports around the country by the other great pioneer of Christian mission to seafarers, Rev George Charles Smith, better known as Bo’sun Smith. It was to Smith’s British and Foreign Seaman’s Friend Society that Angas now devoted his missionary service.

Rev George Charles “Bo’sun” Smith (1782-1863)

in a mezzotint by Abraham Wivell, c1819 – the year he launched his first floating chapel at Rotherhithe

As a former sailor himself, William saw seamen not only as souls worth saving but as global evangelists who could carry Christianity across the seas to the furthest and least godly parts of the world. He spent the rest of 1822 energetically travelling up and down the east coast of England setting up Seaman’s Missions. For the rest of his life he travelled widely throughout Europe and the West Indies, often combining missions for the British and Foreign Seaman’s Friend Society and the Baptist Missionary Society (of which Joseph Angus later became Secretary).

William Angas’s legacy today is the work of the Sailors Society, the successor to the BFSFS. And William has justified his love of the sea, first confirmed on trading trips to the Baltic on his father’s ships. On one European tour of Mennonite congregations in the 1820s he travelled as far inland as landlocked Switzerland. But, he wrote, “I long to be on the sea-coast again, within the smell of pitch and tar. That’s my nosegay!”