A tale of war, deception, and ransom in the West Indies

I have written quite a bit about the Cannonier family history in St Kitts, Montserrat, and Dominica. This includes a connection between the Cannonier and Chambers family names in St Kitts that I’ve been able to flesh out somewhat recently. There is a St Kitts vital record from 1899 that documents the death of a woman called Annie Cannonier Chambers. It turns out that she was actually born Annie Cannonier Henville, and her husband was a Methodist minister named Thomas Meade Chambers. Thomas was born on the island of Montserrat in 1824, attended Weslyan University in the United States, and served as pastor in Antigua, St Kitts, and Barbados. Thomas died in St Kitts in 1892. His death record lists him as a Weslyan minister and planter, a man of mixed race, who died due to respiratory complications from a case of influenza. Annie and Thomas Meade are documented as husband and wife in birth records for two of their children in Antigua, in the years 1859 and 1861.

Trying to look further back, there was a prominent family from Montserrat during the 17- and 1800s named Chambers. There were also two generations of men called Thomas Meade (the elder died in 1759, the younger in 1829). The will of William Chambers of England and Montserrat, who died in 1762 in the UK, mentions a Thomas Meade, so a likely source of Thomas Meade Chambers’s name. It’s a pretty good bet that TM Chambers is a descendant of William, with a 100 year gap between their births.

A 1798 deed from Montserrat recorded that Sarah Chambers, a widow, freed three “mustee” (of majority European ancestry) children named Eliza, Edward, and James, whose mother was an enslaved woman Nancy Sankey. £140 was paid for the manumission by Thomas Chambers, the reputed father. As it happens, Sarah (née Blake) was the widow of William Chambers, and Thomas Chambers was one of her three sons. In 1801, Sarah Chambers also manumitted a mustee woman called Ann Sankey (Nancy could very well have been the nickname for Ann Sankey). It’s possible that Thomas Meade Chambers is descended from one of these people (or a Chambers family member from similar circumstances). TM’s father was apparently a barrister in Montserrat.

The connection of Annie Cannonier Henville to the Cannonier family I am researching is still unknown, other than the obvious fact that her husband was from Montserrat, where the Cannoniers I’m interested in were from.

So where does the war, deception, and ransom come in?

A letter published in the Antigua Observer newspaper of August 29, 1901 (originally appearing in the Montserrat Herald paper) lamented that the grave of a woman in Montserrat had been desecrated somehow, mentioning that her husband had been a “king’s counsel” lawyer. The woman’s name was Sarah Chambers, and her son was “John Chambers, Esquire”. These details fit perfectly with the William Chambers and Sarah Blake from Montserrat, whose son John (Thomas Chambers’s brother) was also a lawyer. The letter went on to tell a fascinating story of Sarah’s involvement in a pivotal period in history, when Napoleon was attempting to expand his empire throughout Europe. A huge obstacle to further conquest was England, whose navy ruled the global seas in the early 1800s.

In 1805, British naval commander Horatio Nelson was battling the French forces in the Mediterranean Sea, struggling to maintain defenses from Gibraltar and Portugal in the west, to Turkey and Egypt in the east. Napoleon decided to mount a strategy to distract the English, hoping to spread their navy out so thinly that their lines would be easily broken through and defeated. One of Napoleon’s fleets was led by admiral Édouard-Thomas de Burgues, comte de Missiessy. Missiessy was sent to the West Indies to engage British ships there, causing as much damage and confusion as possible. His orders were to first drop weapons and supplies on the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, then capture the small British island of Dominica. He was then to wreak as much havoc as possible in any of the other small British possessions in the region, finally returning to the Mediterranean to vanquish the scattered and depleted British forces.

Missiessy’s fleet arrived in French Martinique in February of 1805. They sailed soon after to Dominica and its capital Roseau, where their ships appeared off the island flying a British flag. The Dominicans were lulled into believing there was no threat. At dawn on February 22nd, the French flag was raised and thousands of foot soldiers landed on the island, where they quickly prevailed. The French demanded £6000 sterling ransom, but eventually accepted £5500. Misseissy then moved on to the islands of Nevis, St Kitts, and Montserrat, extorting payments along the way. The 1901 letter writer from Montserrat described the critical involvement of Sarah, the widow of William Chambers:

“After levying a contribution on the people of Roseau, which was destroyed, the French Admiral set sail four days after for this island, and St Kitts where a contribution of £18,000 was levied and some merchant men burnt [armed merchant ships]. The amount which was demanded from this island, I have never learnt either from history or the oral accounts I listened to when a boy from persons who lived at the time. But the island was saved from destruction and the horror of a bombardment, by Mrs. Chambers paying down the amount as a ransom. This amount the French Government had to disgorge after her death when peace was restored, by the treaty of Vienna in 1815, which was paid in Guadeloupe to her heir, Thomas Chambers. Esq.”

Napoleon’s West Indian strategy didn’t work in the long run – Misseissy was only sailing among the islands for about six weeks in 1805 without any great strategic impact on Europe, and of course Napoleon was defeated and exiled from France in 1814.

Was Sarah the great-grandmother of Thomas Meade Chambers? The timeline would work out nicely, if his father was one of the children of Thomas Chambers Esquire and Nancy Sankey (or a cousin of the same generation). Those children were born about 1790, and Thomas Meade Chambers in 1824. Could very well be!

Sources

1. Antigua Observer, Thursday 29 August 1901
2. “Antigua and Barbuda, Civil Registration, 1856-1979”, , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/
3. A Voice from the West Indies by John Horsford, published 1856
4. Rickard, J, The Trafalgar Campaign, http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_trafalgar1.html
5. The Naval History Of Great Britain Vol. 4 by William James, The Digital Library of India, 1837