Looking for gunboats: British Naval operations in the Gulf of Bothnia, 1854–55

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Introduction

One hundred and fifty years ago two Royal Navy steam ships appeared off a small Finnish town in the north of the Gulf of Bothnia, known to them by its Swedish name Gamla Carleby, today known by the Finnish name of Kokkola. They did not come in peace. Nearly 200 sailors and marines were intent on destroying the ships, shipyards and timber stores near the town. They were driven off by a combination of Russian troops and local people, who captured a boat, a flag, a gun, and nineteen prisoners.

Nine British sailors were buried in the local cemetery, where the British War Graves Commission and the local authorities have erected a fitting memorial. Their boat is still there, the centrepiece of the 'English Park’.

The battle of Halkokari was part of the Crimean War, the brief conflict that punctuated one hundred years of Anglo-Russian rivalry for global power. While sparked by Russian demands on Turkey, the war witnessed battles from the Arctic to the Pacific, by way of the Baltic and the Black Sea. The main British Naval effort was made in the Baltic, to counter the large Russian Baltic fleet and to put pressure on the government at St. Petersburg. Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Napier (1786–1860) commanded a largely steam-powered force that entered the Baltic in March. Napier’s fleet of steam and sail battleships was powerful but largely untrained, and without experience of fleet evolutions. He had relatively few cruisers, and those he had were large paddlewheel and screw-propeller steam frigates and sloops. From the start Napier had reminded his political master Sir James Graham, 'A number of small steamers are absolutely necessary’,1 but his requests went unanswered.

Napier’s war orders called for a blockade, and the investigation of the Russian defences.2 He had useful intelligence on the main Russian bases, the fleet and the larger ports, but very little on the northern section of the Gulf of Bothnia. When he came to consider his orders to look at the Aland Islands3 and the Gulf, Napier was concerned that the serried and complex coastline would be an ideal haunt for gunboats, and that without taking the entire fleet he could do little. That he could not find any local pilots made matters worse, but he did not neglect his duty.4 He was anxious to drill the newly-raised fleet into battle order, and check Russian intentions in the Gulf of Finland before pushing any ships into the Gulf of Bothnia.5