A spectacular Naval General Service Medal 1793-1840, 1 Clasp: Algiers, awarded to Boy 3rd Class George Flux, Royal Navy, together with its named and rare surviving original card box of issue. Flux, whose family heralded from in or around Whippingham, a small village to the south of East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Hampshire, originally volunteered in July 1816 to service aboard the 10 gun bomb vessel H.M.S Infernal, which crewed by only 76 men, and only seven days later sailed for operations in the bay of Algiers. He was then present in the thick of it at the bombardment of Algiers on 27th August 1816, the bomb vessels being employed directly close inshore bombarding the Algerian defences. Only 11 men, comprising 2 officers and 9 ratings from Infernal lived to claim the medal. As a Boy 3rd Class he would have been almost certainly been employed as an officer’s servant.
Naval General Service Medal 1793-1840, 1 Clasp: Algiers; (GEORGE FLUX.), housed in its original and rare named card box of issue, bearing the recipient’s name written on the lid.
Condition: Extremely Fine.
George Flux was born in or around Whippingham, a small village to the south of East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Hampshire, where his family name appears in numerous records, and he was originally volunteered for service as a Boy 3rd Class aboard the 10 gun bomb vessel H.M.S Infernal at Portsmouth on 21st July 1816, this vessel was small and had only a crew of 76. As a Boy 3rd Class he would have almost certainly been employed as an officer’s servant. Seven days after he had joined Infernal, he departed aboard her as a part of a fleet of 19 vessels from Plymouth Sound, bound for Gibraltar and the bay of Algiers.
On 9th August 1816 the fleet arrived at Gibraltar, where it joined the Dutch squadron, which had arrived the previous evening, and which, it was agreed, would join the expedition. Whilst at Gibraltar the fleet was victualled and preparations made for the forthcoming battle, with gunnery practice taking place.
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Royal Navy no longer needed the Barbary states as a source of supplies for Gibraltar and their fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. his freed Britain to exert considerable political pressure to force the Barbary states to end their piracy and practice of enslaving European Christians.
In early 1816, Exmouth undertook a diplomatic mission to Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, backed by a small squadron of ships of the line, to convince the Deys to stop the practice and free the Christian slaves. The Deys of Tunis and Tripoli agreed without any resistance, but the Dey of Algiers was more recalcitrant and the negotiations were stormy. Exmouth believed that he had managed to negotiate a treaty to stop the slavery of Christians and returned to England. However, due to confused orders, Algerian troops massacred 200 Corsican, Sicilian, and Sardinian fishermen who were under British protection just after the treaty was signed. This caused outrage in Britain and Europe, and Exmouth's negotiations were seen as a failure.
As a result, Exmouth was ordered to sea again to complete the job and punish the Algerians. He gathered a squadron of five ships of the line, one 50-gun spar-decked frigate (H.M.S Leander), four conventional frigates (HMS Severn, Glasgow, Granicus, and Hebrus), and five bomb ships (HMS Belzebub, Fury, Hecla, and Infernal). HMS Queen Charlotte —100 guns—was his flagship and Rear Admiral David Milne was his second in command aboard HMS Impregnable, 98 guns. This squadron was considered by many to be an insufficient force, but Exmouth had already unobtrusively surveyed the defences of Algiers; he was very familiar with the town, and was aware of a weakness in the field of fire of the defensive batteries. He believed that more large ships would have interfered with each other without being able to bring much more fire to bear. In addition to the main fleet, there were four sloops (HMS Heron, Mutine, Cordelia, and Britomart), eight ships' boats armed with Congreve rockets, and some transports to carry the rescued slaves.
When the British arrived in Gibraltar, a squadron of five Dutch frigates (Melampus, Frederica, Dageraad, Diana, and Amstel) and the corvette Eendragt, led by Vice-Admiral Theodorus Frederick van Capellen, offered to join the expedition. Exmouth decided to assign them to cover the main force from Algerian flanking batteries, as there was insufficient space in the mole for the Dutch frigates.
The day before the attack, the frigate Prometheus arrived and its captain W. B. Dashwood attempted to secretly rescue the British Consul and his wife and infant. Some of the rescue party was discovered and arrested. The attack was described by the U.S. Consul.
The plan of attack was for the larger ships to approach in a column. They were to sail into the zone where the majority of the Algerian guns could not be brought to bear. Then, they were to come to anchor and bombard the batteries and fortifications on the mole to destroy the defences. Simultaneously, HMS Leander—50 guns—was to anchor off the mouth of the harbour and bombard the shipping inside the mole. To protect Leander from the shore battery, frigates HMS Severn and Glasgow were to sail inshore and bombard the battery. Troops would then storm ashore on the mole with sappers of the Royal Engineers. Exmouth in Queen Charlotte anchored approximately 80 yd (73 m) off the mole, facing the Algerian guns. However, a number of the other ships anchored out of position, notably Admiral Milne aboard HMS Impregnable, who was 400 yards from where he should have been. This error reduced the effectiveness of these ships and exposed them to fiercer Algerian fire. Some of the other ships sailed past Impregnable and anchored in positions closer to the plan. The unfortunate gap created by the misplaced HMS Impregnable was closed by the frigate HMS Granicus and the sloop Heron.
In their earlier negotiations, both Exmouth and the Dey of Algiers had stated that they would not fire the first shot. The Dey's plan was to allow the fleet to anchor and then to sortie from the harbour and board the ships with large numbers of men in small boats. But Algerian discipline was less effective and one Algerian gun fired a shot at 15:15. Exmouth immediately began the bombardment.
The Algerian flotilla of 40 gunboats made an attempt to board Queen Charlotte while the sailors were aloft setting sail, but twenty eight of their boats were sunk by broadsides, and the remaining ran themselves on shore. After an hour, the cannon on the mole were effectively silenced, and Exmouth turned his attention to the shipping in the harbour, which was destroyed by 19:30. One unmanned Algerine frigate was destroyed after being boarded by the crew of Queen Charlotte's barge, who then set it on fire. Three other Algerine frigates and five corvettes were destroyed by the fire of mortars and rockets. The burning shipping drifting in the harbour forced some bombarding ships to manoeuvre out of their way.
Impregnable was isolated from the other ships and made a large and tempting target, attracting attention from the Algerian gunners who raked her fore and aft, severely damaging her. 268 shots hit the hull, and the main mast was damaged in 15 places, with 50 killed and 164 wounded.
The fleet also bombarded the city, but there was comparatively little damage as the construction of the houses resulted in cannonballs passing through their walls, leaving neat holes, without destroying them. The explosive mortar shells and rockets caused some destruction to domestic buildings, and the shipping in the harbour burned so fiercely that the warehouses nearby caught fire and burned down.
One sloop had been fitted out as an explosion vessel, with 143 barrels of gunpowder aboard, and Milne asked at 20:00 that it be used against the "Lighthouse battery", which was mauling his ship. The vessel was exploded, but to little effect and against the wrong battery.
Despite this, the Algerian batteries could not maintain fire and, by 22:15, Exmouth gave the order for the fleet to weigh anchor and sail out of range, leaving HMS Minden to keep firing to suppress any further resistance. The wind had changed and was blowing from the shore, which helped the fleets depart. By 01:30 the next morning, the fleet was anchored out of range. The wounded were treated, and the crew cleared the damage caused by the Algerian guns. Casualties on the British side were 128 killed and 690 wounded, (16 percent killed or wounded). As a comparison, the British casualties at the Battle of Trafalgar had been only 9 percent. The allied squadron had fired over 50,000 round shot using 118 tons of gunpowder, and the bomb vessels had fired 960 explosive mortar shells. The Algerian forces had had 308 guns and 7 mortars.
The following day at noon, Exmouth sent the following letter to the Dey: "Sir, for your atrocities at Bona on defenceless Christians, and your unbecoming disregard of the demands I made yesterday in the name of the Prince Regent of England, the fleet under my orders has given you a signal chastisement, by the total destruction of your navy, storehouse, and arsenal, with half your batteries. As England does not war for the destruction of cities, I am unwilling to visit your personal cruelties upon the unoffending inhabitants of the country, and I therefore offer you the same terms of peace which I conveyed to you yesterday in my Sovereign's name. Without the acceptance of these terms, you can have no peace with England."
He warned that if they were not accepted, then he would continue the action. The Dey accepted the terms, not realising that they were a bluff, as the fleet had already fired off almost all of its ammunition. A treaty was signed on September 24, 1816. The room it was signed in had been hit by nine round shot and was a perfect ruin. The Dey freed 1,083 Christian slaves and the British Consul and repaid the ransom money taken in 1816, about £80,000. Over 3000 slaves in total were later freed. Drescher notes Algiers as 'the sole case in the sixty years of British slave trade suppression in which a large number of British lives were lost in actual combat.’ However, despite British naval efforts it has been difficult to assess the long-term impact of the Bombardment of Algiers as the Dey reconstructed Algiers, replacing Christian slaves with Jewish labour, and the Barbary slave trade continued under subsequent Deys.
Having seen extensive service aboard Infernal at the Bombardment of Algiers, Flux returned home aboard Infernal, and was discharged on 24th October 1816 when the ship was paid off. Flux was one of only 2 officers and 9 ratings from H.M.S Infernal to survive to claim the Naval General Service Medal 1793-1840 with clasp for Algiers. There is a possibility that he later was found guilty of larceny and deported to Tasmania, as there is a convict by this name who was transported out there in 1844, he having been tried and found guilty at Newport. He did not return after his seven year sentence and died out there in the 1860’s.
