The Battle of Grand Port took place from 22 to 27 August 1810. The British suffered a terrible setback in their attempt to conquer the Isle de France which remained a French possession until December of that year when the French militia was, in turn, routed at Baillache – Long Mountain.
The Isle de France and Isle Bonaparte, as Reunion Island was then called, were two French possessions used as outposts in the Indian Ocean to shelter French raiders preying on British vessels crossing the Indian Ocean with commercial traffic.
To French aggressiveness during the Napoleonic wars, the British response to flush the French out came in the form of an invasion of both the Isle de France and Isle Bonaparte.
A military offensive against Isle Bonaparte led by Captain Samuel Pym of a British squadron in July 1810 met with absolute success. Isle Bonaparte fell without much resistance. That take over immediately saw the installation of a British, Robert Townsend Farquhar, as Governor of what would become today’s Reunion.
The misfortune of Isle Bonaparte was that it’s Commander, General Nicolas Des Bruslys, committed suicide just before the launch of the British assault leaving the defending French garrison almost paralysed.
However, the first attempt for the conquest of Isle de France proved more complicated than initially anticipated. The landing on 10 April 1810 at “the small harbour of Jacotet Bay”, according to Professor C. Northcotte Parkinson, author of the ‘War in the Eastern Seas’, found the place unsuitable to start a military operation although the
British soldiers numbering a hundred or so surveyed the terrain as far as the Rivière des Galets.
“Jacotet Bay was evidently judged unsuitable for landing a larger force”, writes Professor Northcotte Parkinson who was of the view that “the raid served to show that the local militia was unlikely to offer any serious resistance”.
Thereupon, Captain Nesbit Josiah Willoughby commander of the frigate ‘Nereide’ after “some fighting” on the beach at Jacotet Bay and having destroyed two French fortifications, re-embarked his troops freeing some local captives to demonstrate “British respect and courtesy towards prisoners”.
Neither was Grand Port, then known as Port Imperial, deemed a more favourable location for accessibility to the mainland. In fact, Grand Port could be reached only through narrow channels flanked by coral reefs and sandbanks, and only experienced seamen and fishermen were able to negotiate through the intricate passages. “The
difficulty of landing on the Isle de France”, writes Northcotte Parkinson, “was due primarily, to the inhospitable rocks by which its coast is fringed”.
That was why the British conscious of the difficulties they would encounter tried to lure the coastal inhabitants into promises of a better living conditions after the conquest should they help with sharing their knowledge of the coast.
Not only did they try to extract information about whether the island was likely to “offer any serious resistance”, but began “inundating” the land with copies of a “proclamation” emanating from Robert Farquhar, the Governor of Bourbon-Reunion.
According to James William, author of the “Naval History of Great Britain”, Farquhar’s message drew “as frightful a picture of the present misery of the inhabitants , as it did a flattering one for their future happiness, provided when the British came to conquer their island, they offered no resistance”.
But as William points out, the proclamation had one objective: by sapping the integrity of the local
inhabitants, the British hoped to render them powerless so as to subdue them more easily.
For making a reconnaissance of the coastal waters around Isle de France, Captain Willoughby secured the services of, according to historian James William, “an excellent pilot, one of the black inhabitants of the Isle of France”.
Of Mozambique origin, the “black pilot” formed part of Captain Willoughby’s crew on board the ‘Nereide’ that anchored at Jacotet Bay. The ‘Nereide’ was one of the four frigates of the British squadron engaged at the Battle of Grand Port.
The “black pilot”, on account of his familiarity with the coast, was of immense assistance to Captain Willoughby in identifying the passages through the coral reefs leading to the harbour. If only for Captain Willoughby’s overzealousness, impulsiveness and impatience, the ‘Nereide’ would have gone deep down the bottom of the sea even without any confrontation with the French.
Historian James William refers to the night of 10 August 1810. It was pitch darkness, a boisterous wind was blowing and the sea was rough when Captain Willoughby ordered a surprise landing at Grand Port from Isle de la Passe where the ‘Nereide’ was staying on anchor.
The ‘black pilot’ dissuaded Willoughby from taking that step. He gave the ominous warning that the sea was impracticable and that any attempt to move closer to land was bound to fail. Despite Captain Willoughby’s insistence and even going to the extent of “offering the man one thousand dollars”, the ‘black pilot’ did not change his mind. Captain Willoughby had no choice but to abandon his undertaking.
The archival research made by historians Marina Carter and Mark S. Hall (Grand Port: Untold Stories) reveals the ‘black pilot’ name was Johnson.
When the French led by Captain Guy-Victor Duperré retained possession of Isle de France after the
Battle of Grand Port, the ‘black pilot’ was shot for “high treason”.
But as Marina Carter and Mark S. Hall point out, Captain Willoughby did not remain insensitive to the plight of the ‘black pilot’s family. During the British administration of Mauritius, Willoughby, they write, “lobbied British Governors of Mauritius and heads of the Colonial office in England to be informed about the fate of the black pilot’s family”.