Navigating Empire: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers in the Far East

The year was 1810, the place was Canton - a city on the edge of Qing Dynasty China, where trade and tension often mingled in precarious balance. Captain Francis Austen, commanding the Royal Navy’s St Albans, found himself in an unenviable position. The charges were serious: three British sailors, perhaps from the East India Company’s Royal Charlotte, had allegedly ventured ashore, sparking a violent altercation with the local Chinese. In the aftermath, a shoemaker named Hoan a Xing lay dead, his life claimed by a knife’s edge. The Chinese authorities, unyielding in their demands, insisted that the culprits be handed over before they would allow the East India fleet to depart. Yet Austen’s dilemma was far from simple. The fleet’s departure could not be delayed—costs would mount, and the monsoon loomed, a looming menace to their journey home. But sailing without Chinese consent was a gamble that could imperil not just this voyage, but the future of Britain’s trade with China itself.

With no one more senior to turn to, at the far reaches of the expanding British Empire, responsibility lay heavy across the shoulders of Royal Navy captains – not just for naval concerns but also for matters of high diplomacy and trade. As it was, Francis Austen was a remarkable man, extremely talented and able, destined by the end of his stellar career to be knighted and promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank of the Royal Navy.

But he was not an easy man to serve under. A devout Evangelical, reserved, and severe in his private life, he was a strict disciplinarian and commanded what was known, sarcastically, as a ‘praying ship’ – though any criticism of him should perhaps be tempered somewhat by the violent and gruelling times through which he lived. He was also a somewhat disappointed man, having commanded the 84-gun Canopus back in 1805 when, just prior to the Battle of Trafalgar, it had been detached from Nelson’s fleet to pick up supplies, thereby narrowly missing the famous action as well as all the fame and wealth that would have resulted from it – if he had survived, that is.

He had a younger brother also in the service, who would also enjoy an extraordinary career, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. But Charles Austen, though just as religious as his elder brother, was a very different sort of man: warm, easy-going, and blessed with a natural charm. His crews adored him. In 1810, at the time of his elder brother’s diplomatic problem in Canton, Charles Austen was in command of the 74-gun Swiftsure, on the North American station, blockading American trade with Napoleonic Europe, looking out for Royal Navy deserters serving on American ships, and intercepting slave traffic between the British West Indies and the southern American states.

Both men would regularly write home. One can only imagine what it was like for their sister, in 1810 living a quiet life in a cottage in the village of Chawton, Hampshire, reading letters from her brothers sent from the farthest ends of the world. In two of her novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, she, Jane Austen, would feature sailors strongly. But, in these novels, naval officers would be seen only in an English domestic setting. There would be no descriptions in her novels of the brutalities of life in the Royal Navy: the bloody battles, the maimed and killed, the diseases, the floggings, or indeed the drunkenness and fighting on shore that was giving Francis Austen a diplomatic headache in Canton.

Francis Austen resolved the Canton crisis by demanding credible witnesses to the killing of Hoan a Xing before any British sailors could be handed over. On February 11, 1810, he cross-examined two witnesses whose accounts were vague and contradictory. With no clear evidence linking British sailors to the crime—especially as American sailors, similarly dressed, were also in the area—Chinese officials allowed the fleet to depart, though Austen vowed to continue his investigation. The East India Company praised Francis Austen for his skill and tact.

Francis would indeed continue to investigate, discovering that three British sailors from Cumberland, another East India Company ship, had been involved in a fight with some Chinese in Canton, though they denied murder. Again, with changing stories and contradictory statements, he was unable to establish who had actually murdered Hong a Xing.

After many more adventures, Francis Austen would eventually die peacefully at home in Hampshire at the age of 91, outliving his literary sister by many years. Charles Austen, whose career was every bit as successfully eventful as that of his elder brother, would succumb to cholera at the age of 71 while leading British forces during the Second Burmese War, much to the distress of his adoring men.

By the 1920s, long after her illustrious naval brothers had been forgotten, Jane Austen would at last be recognised by scholars as a great English novelist. She would also get to see China for herself, her novel Pride and Prejudice finally being translated there in 1935.

(The author is a novelist with an abiding passion for Chinese history. Views personal.)