The Imperial Order of the Crescent 1st Class (the Sultan’s M...

Hammer

£11,000

The Imperial Order of the Crescent 1st Class (the Sultan’s Medal for Egypt 1801) to Captain Philip Beaver R.N. (1766-1813). The 54mm gold medal with original gold chain suspender (3.4cm), fastening hook and yellow riband (9.8cm x 3.5cm) contained in a Spink folding glazed easel case with plaque reading: SULTAN'S GOLD MEDAL FOR EGYPT 1801 - GRANTED TO CAPT. PHILIP BEAVER R.N. H.M.S. FOUDROYANT – FLAG CAPTAIN TO ADMIRAL LORD KEITH. 

Provenance: by direct descent through the male line to the vendor. The circumstances behind the award of the Sultan’s Medal, as recounted by Capt. W. H. Smyth in his biography The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver - Late of his Majesty's Ship Nisus (Murray 1829), are transcribed below. 

Philip Beaver’s naval career began in 1777 as an eleven-year-old midshipman on board the Monarch. His career and life ended, towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1813, at Table Bay as a 47-year-old in command of the frigate HMS Nisus. Apart from his distinguished naval service, Beaver has gone down in history as an anti-slavery adventurer, who gave a fascinating first-hand account in African Memoranda (1805) of the short-lived settlement of the island of Bulama, near Sierra Leone, in 1792.

Within months of joining the Navy, Beaver witnessed the opening shots of the latest Anglo-French War, when HMS Arethusa fired on the Belle-Poule, and soon afterwardsexperienced fierce enemy fire in which the Monarch was shot up at the First Battle of Ushant. In 1782, aged sixteen, he found himself in command of a prize ship which he navigated to Tobago. Here he fell so dangerously ill that his death was considered a foregone conclusion and announced in the Jamaica Gazette and copied in the London press. The following year he was promoted lieutenant at an unusually young age and soon after, when peace came, placed on half-pay. Beaver, who ‘was never so happy as when sure of meeting an enemy every day’, endured the decade of peace with France at first in self-education – he was ‘an almost omnivorous reader of solid books; during one cruise he read entirely through the Encyclopædia Britannica’ – and then in the Bulama scheme with the abolitionist, Henry Hew Dalrymple, who had freed his family’s slaves on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1789. Together they embarked, decades in advance of Britain’s Slave Emancipation Act of 1833, on a scheme to cultivate sugarcane, coffee, cotton and indigo on the fertile West African desert island of Bulama, where, in close vicinity of the slave markets, it was intended slavery would be outlawed and employment given to free natives.

A year after purchasing from the kings of Canabac in June 1792, five-month-old news reached Beaver that France had declared war on Britain on February 1st 1793 and all British naval officers had been ordered to make themselves ready for service in England. Beaver promptly wrote to the Admiralty that ‘having the direction of a small colony to, whose very existence depends upon my presence’ he was unable to comply and pointed out that ‘if I disobey their Lordships orders in the Gazette, I know that I am liable to lose my commission; and if I obey them, I never deserved one.’ The Bulama experiment had at this stage already proved to be a bloody and febrile affair and with only three of the original 275 British settlers left, it was abandoned four months later in November 1793.

After reporting for duty at the Admiralty in May 1794, the second phase of Beaver’ naval career began with his appointment as First-Lieutenant of the 64-gun ship, the Stately.Transferred to Lord Keith’s flagship HMS Barfleur, he famously court-martialled his younger rival, Lieutenant (later Admiral) Lord Cochrane, at Gibraltar in 1799. Cochrane, the other rising star of the Royal Navy and inspiration for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower was serving as Barfleur’s eighth lieutenant. Admonished for flippancy, he was acquitted of the charge of disrespect and Beaver reprimanded for bringing a court-martial without consulting his superiors, which as Lord Keith pointed out, necessitated ‘all the flag-officers and captains [being] called together, at a time when the wind is coming fair and the ships ought to be under way [for Cadiz]. I think I am made the most ridiculous person of the whole!’

In April and May 1800 Beaver commanded the bombardments of plague-ridden Genoa and took the surrender of André Masséna before entering the Egyptian Campaign. Now in command of the flagship Foudroyant, he organised the March 1801 landing of 17,500 British troops at Abu Qir, causing their commander, General Sir Ralph Abercromby, to remark ‘all his wants were anticipated as if by magic’. Of the Battle of Abukir itself, Beaver recalled: ‘the French general, I think wanted judgment … he should have marched down his whole force, and from high-water mark, opposed the disembarking. Had this been done with the requisite nerve, he would, in my opinion, have defeated us’. On the 21st the British Army defeated the French at the Battle of Alexandria – Abercromby was taken on board the Foudroyant mortally wounded and died aweek later – but, according to Beaver, ‘instead of advancing on the tide of success, while the enemy were dispirited, our army has remained strongly encamped about four miles from Alexandria … in short all our operations drag on in a Turkish languor.’  Beaver correctly predicted a long siege and naval blockade – the French Army did not surrender the garrison at Alexandria until early September – and he obtained permission to exchange ships with Captain Searle, the commander of the 24-gun frigate theDeterminée, which Beaver considered ‘as broad a highway to honour as that of a three-decker’ 80-gun flagship.

Beaver’s biographer, Capt. W. H. Smyth, recounted the diplomacy surrounding the award:

The Determinée being sent to Constantinople, with intelligence from the armies, Lord Elgin announced, in a very friendly note, an intended pecuniary gift from the Porte[the Ottoman Court of Salim III], of 2,000 piastres for the captain, and specified sums for the officers and ship’s company; but knowing Beaver’s repugnance to accepting money from a foreign power, his lordship added, “I am well aware of the awkwardness of this, but attempts which I have made, on former occasions, to alter this practice, have proved unsuccessful, this being the established etiquette. The matter, therefore, stands thus: the Porte intend a politeness, and this is the known mode adopted by them”. Notwithstanding this liberal explanation, the captain refused to countenance what he disapproved of, and he therefore declined the proffered favour for himself and officers, but accepted the portion which was intended for his crew.

That this delicacy of feeling was neither misunderstood, nor disregarded, even by the Turks, was soon proved in a second letter from Lord Elgin, who, by unreserved communications on various matters, appears to have placed the highest confidence in the discretion of our officer. “As the Porte,” says the ambassador, “are particularly anxious to pay a compliment to you, both as Lord Keith’s former captain, and as the bearer of good news from Grand Cairo, a diamond-box is prepared for your acceptance, and a gold one for each of your lieutenants.” Beside this mark of favour, Captain Beaver’s services in Egypt were rewarded with the medal of the Crescent; for, by a curious solecism, the Grand Signior [Sultan Selim III] had been induced to institute an order of knighthood, as mode of rewarding his allies.

Beaver’s later career is summarised in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

On the conclusion of the peace of Amiens the Déterminée was ordered home, and was paid off at Portsmouth on 19 May 1802. Beaver now settled down on shore, and was placed in charge of the sea fencibles of Essex in July 1803. Three years later he was appointed to the Acasta, 40-gun frigate, and in her proceeded to the West Indies, where he remained until after the capture of Martinique, in February 1809. He was then sent home in charge of convoy and with a large number of French prisoners. Some months later he was appointed to the Nisus of 38 guns, a new frigate just launched, and on 22 June 1810 sailed in her for the East Indies. He arrived on the station in time to take a very distinguished part, under Vice-admiral Albemarle Bertie, in the reduction of Mauritius (November 1810), and, under Rear-Admiral the Hon. Robert Stopford, in the conquest of Java (August and September 1811). After nearly a year spent in the Mozambique and on the coast of Madagascar, towards the end of 1812 the Nisus received her orders for England, and in the latter days of March 1813 put into Table Bay on her homeward voyage. Here Beaver, who had complained of a slight indisposition, was seized with a violent inflammation of the bowels, and, after a few days of the most excruciating torment, died on 5 April.

Sources

African Memoranda (Captain Philip Beaver - C. and R. Baldwin (1805))

Narrative of a Voyage in the Indian Seas in The Nisus Frigate during the Years 1810 and 1811 (James Prior R.N. – Richard Phillips (1819))

The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver - Late of his Majesty's Ship Nisus (Capt. W. H. Smyth - Murray (1829))

The logbooks of Captain Philip Beaver 1795-1813 – National Maritime Museum

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography