Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Royal Navy L.S. & G.C., Anchor obverse (Henry Shields, Captain of the After Guard, H.M.S. Andromache, 21 Years), attractive silver looped-bar suspension, good very fine £800-1000

Henry Shields entered the Royal Navy as a Landsman aboard H.M.S. Phaeton in October 1820 and removed to the customs cutter Hyperion in the rate of Able Seaman in October 1825, which ship was employed on anti-smuggling operations on the south coast as part of the Coast Blockade, a period that witnessed many violent encounters with the “Tubmen” - not long after Shields had transferred to the Sybille in 1827, Phaeton’s Quarter Master was murdered by smugglers in Sussex.

Yet this sharp introduction to the Royal Navy policing the seas must have put him in good stead with his next appointment aboard the Sybille, from April 1827 to July 1830, a period that witnessed a number of actions against slave smugglers and pirates off the west coast of Africa. Yet further dangers included malaria, yellow fever and black water fever, all endemic on the coast, some ships being forced to return home as a result of numerous deaths. John Winton’s Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor takes up the story:

‘In Sybille, 101 men died in two years, most of them of yellow fever, and by February 1830, when the ship was cruising off Lagos, about 180 miles from land, there had been so many deaths on board, and the ship’s company’s morale had been so depressed that, according to Mr. McKechnie, the assistant surgeon, ‘at meal hours, when smoking was allowed, the men used to congregrate together with despair depicted in their faces to learn from one another who had gone to the doctor, or who was likely to die during the night.’ The men had actually caught yellow fever from Eden whom they had met at Fernando Po, but the infectious nature of the disease was still unknown (the mosquito’s function as a vector in malaria was not discovered until 1880) and there were various theories about ‘solar heat, damp mists and miasmas’ to account for the infection.

To restore morale on board and to convince the Sybille’s officers and men that the disease was not contagious, the surgeon, Dr. McKinnel, performed an act of peculiar gallantry, braver in its way than any action for the Victoria Cross. He told McKechnie to:

‘Collect some black vomit from the first patient who was attacked by that fatal symptom; accordingly I collected about a pint of it from a man named Riley about two hours before he died. Shortly after, the doctor came to the starboard side of the half deck, when I told him what I had done. He went down to the gun room, and about half past twelve o’clock (the men then being at dinner) returned with a wine glass. Mr. Green, the officer of the watch, was then going below, when he called him over, and filling a glassful of the black vomit, asked if he would like to have some of it; being answered in the negative, he then said, “Very well, here is your health, Green,” and drank it off.’

Dr. McKinnel then went up to the quarter-deck and walked about for two hours, to prove to everybody that he had not done or taken anything to try to counteract the effects of the black vomit. “It is almost unnecessary to add,” said McKechnie, “that it did not impair his appetite for dinner, nor did he suffer any inconvenience from it afterwards.” ’

It is interesting to speculate whether Shields was ever detached for service in Sybille’s tender, the Black Joke, which small craft captured no less than 21 slavers with upwards of 7000 slaves - but not without cost in some heated engagements. Be that as it may, and following further appointments aboard the Barham and Tribune, Shields was awarded his “Anchor” L.S. & G.C. Medal on 1 March 1843, a few days after coming ashore as Captain of the After Guard from the Andromache - one of just 15 examples known to recipients of this rate; sold with copied service record and research.