Corps of Colonial Marines

Corps of Colonial Marines

Corps of Colonial Marines were raised from former slaves as auxiliary units of the Royal Marines for service in the Americas: Two of these units were raised and subsequently disbanded. The first was a small unit which existed from 1808 to 12 October 1810, the second was more substantial and existed from May 1814 to 20 August 1816.

Contents

The First Corps

The first Corps of Colonial Marines was raised in 1808 by Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane while commander-in-chief of British naval forces on the Leeward Islands station during the Napoleonic Wars. The British had captured the island of Marie Galante earlier that year but the French Governor of Guadeloupe attacked the island on hearing that illness had weakened its British garrison. Marie Galante slaves assisted the British on being promised that they would not be returned to their proprietors and by this means the island was preserved until the arrival of three companies of the 1st West India Regiment. Cochrane embodied the ex-slaves as a Corps of Colonial Marines, which was subsequently enlarged with fugitive slaves who came over from Guadeloupe. The Corps was paid from Marie Galante revenues, clothed from Royal Navy stores and commanded by Royal Marine officers. Following the re-possession of Guadeloupe, Cochrane kept up the Corps, and on 12 October 1810 redistributed the men: 70 among the ships of the squadron, 20 to 30 to the battery at the Saintes (a group of small islands to the south of Guadeloupe), and 50 remaining in the Marie Galante garrison. They saw no further action as a distinct body but were subsequently listed in ships’ musters among the supernumeraries for wages and victuals under the description of Colonial Marine until mid-1815. Cochrane’s second Corps of Colonial Marines was a separate entity.

The Second Corps

Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, as Commander-in-Chief of British forces on the North Atlantic Station, ordered the recruitment of a body of Colonial Marines. Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Cochrane's second in command on the Atlantic coast, implemented the order, recruiting the second Corps of Colonial Marines from among the four thousand Black refugees of the War of 1812. They served as part of the British forces on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States during that war.

The main part of the Corps was embodied in the Chesapeake on 18 May 1814 and made its combat debut in the raid on Pungoteague. The Corps then participated in actions in the Chesapeake campaign.

On 3 September 1814 three companies of the Corps were to join with the three remaining companies of the 3rd Battalion Royal Marines (which had been established in 1813) to make a new 3rd Battalion Royal and Colonial Marines. [1] The Corps conducted further recruitment on the coast of Georgia in the first quarter of 1815.

The Corps served in many actions in the Chesapeake during 1814, with losses at Pungoteague and Baltimore. Greater losses to the Corps occurred from an outbreak of dysentry in January 1815, which killed the surgeon and 69 men of the battalion.[2]

The Corps's last combat during the War of 1812 took place in January 1815, when members of the Corps formed part of the British land forces in the attack on the fort at Point Peter.[3] Members of the Corps were involved in the occupation of Tangier Island, and Cumberland Island off of the coast of Georgia, where they assisted the emigration of several hundred slaves up to the time of the promulgation of the Peace Treaty.

After the end of the war, with the departure for Britain of the three European companies, the 3rd battalion was reformed as the 3rd Battalion Colonial Marines [4] to do garrison duty in the Royal Naval Dockyard then under construction on Ireland Island, Bermuda, and was finally disbanded in Trinidad in August 1816 to form a free Black farming community which still retains its identity, carrying the name of The Merikens.

A detached company, recruited by Captain George Woodbine in the Gulf of Mexico under the direction of Colonel Edward Nicolls, remained at Apalachicola in Spanish East Florida after British left at the end of the war. Those members of the detached company who survived the destruction of Fort Gadsden (or the Negro Fort) in July 1816 joined the southward migration of Seminoles and Blacks in the face of American advance, and probably were among the group that escaped to the Bahamas in 1822 and founded, on the west coast of the island of Andros, a community that similarly retains its identity.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ NICOLAS, p265
  2. ^ NICOLAS, p287
  3. ^ NICOLAS, p267-8
  4. ^ NICOLAS, p268

References

  • WEISS, John McNish: The Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16 (London: 2002)
  • WEISS, John McNish: ‘The Corps of Colonial Marines 1814-16: a summary’ (Immigrants and Minorities, 15/1, April 1996) Note: this early article is amended by the book 'The Merikens' and by the web article linked in 'External links'.
  • NICOLAS, Paul Harris (2010 [1845]): Historical Record of the Royal Marine Forces, Volume 2, 1805-1842

External links


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