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Congo Free State

The Congo Free State, also known as the Independent State of the Congo (État indépendant du Congo), was a large state and absolute monarchy in Central Africa from 1885 to 1908. It was privately owned by King Leopold II, the constitutional monarch of the Kingdom of Belgium. In legal terms, the two separate countries were in a personal union. The Congo Free State was not a part of, nor did it belong to Belgium. Leopold was able to seize the region by convincing other European states at the Berlin Conference on Africa that he was involved in humanitarian and philanthropic work and would not tax trade. Via the International Association of the Congo, he was able to lay claim to most of the Congo Basin. On 29 May 1885, after the closure of the Berlin Conference, the king announced that he planned to name his possessions "the Congo Free State", an appellation which was not yet used at the Berlin Conference and which officially replaced "International Association of the Congo" on 1 August 1885. The Free State was privately controlled by Leopold from Brussels; he never visited it.

The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908, when the Belgian Federal Parliament reluctantly annexed the state as a colony belonging to Belgium after international pressure.

Leopold's reign in the Congo eventually earned infamy on account of the atrocities perpetrated on the locals. Ostensibly, the Congo Free State aimed to bring civilization to the local people and to develop the region economically. In reality, Leopold II's administration extracted ivory, rubber, and minerals from the upper Congo basin for sale on the world market through a series of international concessionary companies that brought little benefit to the area. Under Leopold's administration, the Free State became one of the greatest international scandals of the early 20th century. The Casement Report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of officials who had been responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903.

The loss of life and atrocities inspired literature such as Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness and raised an international outcry. Debate has been ongoing about the high death rate in this period. The highest estimates state that the widespread use of forced labour, torture, and murder led directly and indirectly to the deaths of 50 per cent of the population in the rubber provinces. The lack of accurate records makes it difficult to quantify the number of deaths caused by the exploitation and the lack of immunity to new diseases introduced by contact with European colonists. During the Congo Free State propaganda war, European and US reformers exposed atrocities in the Congo Free State to the public through the Congo Reform Association, founded by Casement and the journalist, author, and politician E. D. Morel. Also active in exposing the activities of the Congo Free State was the author Arthur Conan Doyle, whose book The Crime of the Congo was widely read in the early 1900s.

By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic manoeuvres led to the end of Leopold II's absolutist rule; the Belgian Parliament annexed the Congo Free State as a colony of Belgium. It became known thereafter as the Belgian Congo. In addition, a number of major Belgian investment companies pushed the Belgian government to take over the Congo and develop the mining sector as it was virtually untapped.

Early European exploration
Diogo Cão travelled around the mouth of the Congo River in 1482, leading Portugal to claim the region. Until the middle of the 19th century, the Congo was at the heart of independent Africa, as European colonialists seldom entered the interior. Along with fierce local resistance, the rainforest, swamps, malaria, sleeping sickness, and other diseases made it a difficult environment for Europeans to settle. Western states were at first reluctant to colonize the area in the absence of obvious economic benefits.

Stanley's exploration
In 1876 Leopold II of Belgium hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference, inviting famous explorers, philanthropists, and members of geographic societies to stir up interest in a "humanitarian" endeavour for Europeans in central Africa to "improve" and "civilize" the lives of the indigenous peoples. At the conference, Leopold organized the International African Association with the cooperation of European and American explorers and the support of several European governments, and was himself elected chairman. Leopold used the association to promote plans to seize independent central Africa under this philanthropic guise.

Henry Morton Stanley, famous for making contact with British missionary David Livingstone in Africa in 1871, explored the region in 1876–1877, a journey that was described in Stanley's 1878 book Through the Dark Continent. Failing to enlist British interest in the Congo region, Stanley took up service with Leopold II, who hired him to help gain a foothold in the region and annex the region for himself.

From August 1879 to June 1884 Stanley was in the Congo basin, where he built a road from the lower Congo up to Stanley Pool and launched steamers on the upper river. While exploring the Congo for Leopold, Stanley set up treaties with the local chiefs and with native leaders. In essence, the documents gave over all rights of their respective pieces of land to Leopold. With Stanley's help, Leopold was able to claim a great area along the Congo River, and military posts were established.

Christian de Bonchamps, a French explorer who served Leopold in Katanga, expressed attitudes towards such treaties shared by many Europeans, saying, "The treaties with these little African tyrants, which generally consist of four long pages of which they do not understand a word, and to which they sign a cross in order to have peace and to receive gifts, are really only serious matters for the European powers, in the event of disputes over the territories. They do not concern the black sovereign who signs them for a moment."

King Leopold's campaign
Leopold began to create a plan to convince other European powers of the legitimacy of his claim to the region, all the while maintaining the guise that his work was for the benefit of the native peoples under the name of a philanthropic "association".

The king launched a publicity campaign in Britain to distract critics, drawing attention to Portugal's record of slavery, and offering to drive slave traders from the Congo basin. He also secretly told British merchant houses that if he was given formal control of the Congo for this and other humanitarian purposes, he would then give them the same most favoured nation (MFN) status Portugal had offered them. At the same time, Leopold promised Bismarck he would not give any one nation special status, and that German traders would be as welcome as any other.

Leopold then offered France the support of the association for French ownership of the entire northern bank of the Congo, and sweetened the deal by proposing that, if his personal wealth proved insufficient to hold the entire Congo, as seemed utterly inevitable, that it should revert to France. On 23 April 1884, the International Association's claim on the southern Congo basin was formally recognized by France on condition that the French got the first option to buy the territory if the Association decided to sell. This may also have helped Leopold to gain recognition for his claim by the other major powers, who thus wanted him to succeed instead of selling his claims to France.

He also enlisted the aid of the United States, sending President Chester A. Arthur carefully edited copies of the cloth-and-trinket treaties that Stanley (a Welsh-American) claimed to have negotiated with various local authorities, and proposing that, as an entirely disinterested humanitarian body, the Association would administer the Congo for the good of all, handing over power to the natives as soon as they were ready for that responsibility.

Leopold wanted to have the United States support his plans for the Congo in order to gain support from the European nations. He had help from American businessman Henry Shelton Sanford, who had recruited Stanley for Leopold. Henry Sanford swayed President Arthur by inviting him to stay as his guest at Sanford House hotel on Lake Monroe while he was in Belgium. On 29 November 1883, during his meeting with the President, as Leopold's envoy, he convinced the President that Leopold's agenda was similar to the United States' involvement in Liberia. This satisfied Southern politicians and businessmen, especially Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan. Morgan saw Congo as the same opportunity to send freedmen to Africa so they could contribute to and build the cotton market. Sanford also convinced the people in New York that they were going to abolish slavery and aid travellers and scientists in order to have the public's support. After Henry's actions in convincing President Arthur, the United States was the first country to recognize Congo as a legitimate sovereign state. The United States further participated in the process of recognition by sending the US Navy Congo River Expedition of 1885, which gave a detailed description of travel along the river.

Lobbying and claiming the region
Leopold was able to attract scientific and humanitarian backing for the International African Association (Association internationale africaine, or AIA), which he formed during a Brussels Geographic Conference of geographic societies, explorers, and dignitaries he hosted in 1876. At the conference, Leopold proposed establishing an international benevolent committee for the propagation of civilization among the peoples of central Africa (the Congo region). The AIA was originally conceived as a multi-national, scientific, and humanitarian assembly, and even invited Gustave Moynier as member of the International Law Institute and president of the International Committee of the Red Cross to attend their 1877 conference. The International Law Institute was supportive of the project under the belief that it was aimed to abolish the Congo Basin slave trade. Nevertheless, the AIA eventually became a development company controlled by Leopold.

After 1879 and the crumbling of the International African Association, Leopold's work was done under the auspices of the "Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo" (Comité d'Études du Haut-Congo). The committee, supposedly an international commercial, scientific, and humanitarian group, was in fact made of a group of businessmen who had shares in the Congo, with Leopold holding a large block by proxy. The committee itself eventually disintegrated (but Leopold continued to refer to it and use the defunct organization as a smokescreen for his operations in laying claim to the Congo region).

Determined to look for a colony for himself and inspired by recent reports from central Africa, Leopold began patronizing a number of leading explorers, including Henry Morton Stanley. Leopold established the International African Association, a charitable organization to oversee the exploration and surveying of a territory based around the Congo River, with the stated goal of bringing humanitarian assistance and civilization to the natives. In the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, European leaders officially noted Leopold's control over the 1000000 sqmi of the notionally independent Congo Free State.

To give his African operations a name that could serve for a political entity, Leopold created, between 1879 and 1882, the International Association of the Congo (Association internationale du Congo, or AIC) as a new umbrella organization. This organization sought to combine the numerous small territories acquired into one sovereign state and asked for recognition from the European powers. On 22 April 1884, thanks to the successful lobbying of businessman Henry Shelton Sanford at Leopold's request, President Chester A. Arthur of the United States decided that the cessions claimed by Leopold from the local leaders were lawful and recognized the International Association of the Congo's claim on the region, becoming the first country to do so. In 1884, the US Secretary of State said, "The Government of the United States announces its sympathy with and approval of the humane and benevolent purposes of the International Association of the Congo."

Berlin Conference
In November 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference to submit the Congo question to international control and to finalize the colonial partitioning of the African continent. Most major powers (including Austria-Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States) attended the Berlin Conference, and drafted an international code governing the way that European countries should behave as they acquired African territory. The conference officially recognized the International Congo Association, and specified that it should have no connection with Belgium (beyond a personal union), or any other country, but would be under the personal control of King Leopold.

It drew specific boundaries and specified that all nations should have access to do business in the Congo with no tariffs. The slave trade would be suppressed. In 1885, Leopold emerged triumphant. France was given 666,000 km2 on the north bank (the modern Congo-Brazzaville and Central African Republic), Portugal 909,000 km2 to the south (modern Angola), and Leopold's personal organization received the balance: 2,344,000 km2, with about 30 million people. However, it still remained for these territories to be occupied under the conference's "Principle of Effective Occupation".

International recognition
Following the United States' recognition of Leopold's colony, other Western powers deliberated on the news. Portugal flirted with the French at first, but the British offered to support Portugal's claim to the entire Congo in return for a free trade agreement and to spite their French rivals. Britain was uneasy at French expansion and had a technical claim on the Congo via Lieutenant Cameron's 1873 expedition from Zanzibar to bring home Livingstone's body, but was reluctant to take on yet another expensive, unproductive colony. Bismarck of Germany had vast new holdings in southwest Africa, and had no plans for the Congo, but was happy to see rivals Britain and France excluded from the colony.

In 1885, Leopold's efforts to establish Belgian influence in the Congo Basin were awarded with the État Indépendant du Congo (CFS, Congo Free State). By a resolution passed in the Belgian Parliament, Leopold became roi souverain, sovereign king, of the newly formed CFS, over which he enjoyed nearly absolute control. The CFS (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo), a country of over two million square kilometres, became Leopold's personal property, the Domaine Privé. Eventually, the Congo Free State was recognized as a neutral independent sovereignty by various European and North American states.

Government
Leopold used the title 'Sovereign of the Congo Free State' as ruler of the Congo Free State. He appointed the heads of the three departments of state: interior, foreign affairs and finances. Each was headed by an administrator-general (administrateur-général), later a secretary-general (secrétaire-général), who was obligated to enact the policies of the sovereign or else resign. Below the secretaries-general were a series of bureaucrats of decreasing rank: directors general (directeurs généraux), directors (directeurs), chefs de divisions (division chiefs) and chefs de bureaux (bureau chiefs). The departments were headquartered in Brussels.

Finance was in charge of accounting for income and expenditure and tracking the public debt. Besides diplomacy, foreign affairs was in charge of shipping, education, religion and commerce. The department of the interior was responsible for defence, police, public health and public works. It was also charged with overseeing the exploitation of the Congo's natural resources and plantations. In 1904, the secretary-general of the interior set up a propaganda office, the Bureau central de la presse ("Central Press Bureau"), in Frankfurt under the auspices of the Comité pour la représentation des intérêts coloniaux en Afrique (in German, Komitee zur Wahrung der kolonialen Interessen in Afrika, "Committee for the Representation of Colonial Interests in Africa").

The oversight of all the departments was nominally in the hands of the Governor-General (Gouverneur général), but this office was at times more honorary than real. When the governor-general was in Belgium he was represented in the Congo by a vice governor-general (vice-gouverneur général), who was nominally equal in rank to a secretary-general but in fact was beneath them in power and influence. A Comité consultatif (consultative committee) made up of civil servants was set up in 1887 to assist the governor-general, but he was not obliged to consult it. The vice governor-general on the ground had a state secretary through whom he communicated with his district officers.

The Free State had an independent judiciary headed by a minister of justice at Boma. The minister was equal in rank to the vice governor-general and initially answered to the governor-general, but was eventually made responsible to the sovereign alone. There was a supreme court composed of three judges, which heard appeals, and below it a high court of one judge. These sat at Boma. In addition to these, there were district courts and public prosecutors (procureurs d'état). Justice, however, was slow and the system ill-suited to a frontier society.

Leopold's rule
Leopold no longer needed the façade of the association, and replaced it with an appointed cabinet of Belgians who would do his bidding. To the temporary new capital of Boma, he sent a governor-general and a chief of police. The vast Congo Basin was split up into 14 administrative districts, each district into zones, each zone into sectors, and each sector into posts. From the district commissioners down to post level, every appointed head was European. However, with little financial means the Free State mainly relied on local elites to rule and tax the vast and hard-to-reach Congolese interior.

In the Free State, Leopold exercised total personal control without much delegation to subordinates. African chiefs played an important role in the administration by implementing government orders within their communities. Throughout much of its existence, however, Free State presence in the territory that it claimed was patchy, with its few officials concentrated in a number of small and widely dispersed "stations" which controlled only small amounts of hinterland. In 1900, there were just 3,000 Europeans in the Congo, of whom only half were Belgian. The colony was perpetually short of administrative staff and officials, who numbered between 700 and 1,500 during the period.

Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the CFS terres domaniales (state-owned land). Leopold further decreed that merchants should limit their commercial operations in rubber trade with the natives. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves.

Four main problems presented themselves over the next few years.
 * 1) Leopold II ran up huge debts to finance his colonial endeavour and risked losing his colony to Belgium.
 * 2) Much of the Free State was unmapped jungle, which offered little fiscal and commercial return.
 * 3) Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (part of modern South Africa), was expanding his British South Africa Company's charter lands from the south and threatened to occupy Katanga (southern Congo) by exploiting the "Principle of Effectivity" loophole in the Berlin Treaty. In this he was supported by Harry Johnston, the British Commissioner for Central Africa, who was London's representative in the region.
 * 4) The Congolese interior was ruled by Arab Zanzibari slavers and sultans, powerful kings and warlords who had to be coerced or defeated by use of force. For example, the slaving gangs of Zanzibar trader Tippu Tip had a strong presence in the eastern part of the territory in the modern-day Maniema, Tanganyika and Ituri regions. They were linked to the Swahili coast via Uganda and Tanzania and had established independent slave states.

Early economics and concessions

Leopold could not meet the costs of running the Congo Free State. Desperately, he set in motion a system to maximize revenue. The first change was the introduction of the concept of terres vacantes, "vacant" land, which was any land that did not contain a habitation or a cultivated garden plot. All of this land (i.e., most of the country) was therefore deemed to belong to the state. Servants of the state (namely any men in Leopold's employ) were encouraged to exploit it.

Shortly after the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference (1889–1890), Leopold issued a new decree mandating that Africans in a large part of the Free State could sell their harvested products (mostly ivory and rubber) only to the state. This law extended an earlier decree declaring that all "unoccupied" land belonged to the state. Any ivory or rubber collected from the state-owned land, the reasoning went, must belong to the state, thus creating a de facto state-controlled monopoly. Therefore, a large share of the local population could sell only to the state, which could set prices and thereby control the income the Congolese could receive for their work. For local elites, however, this system presented new opportunities, as the Free State and concession companies paid them with guns to tax their subjects in kind.

Trading companies began to lose out to the Free State government, which not only paid no taxes but also collected all the potential income. These companies were outraged by the restrictions on free trade, which the Berlin Act had so carefully protected years before. Their protests against the violation of free trade prompted Leopold to take another, less obvious tack to make money.

A decree in 1892 divided the terres vacantes into a domainal system that privatized extraction rights over rubber for the state in certain private domains, allowing Leopold to grant vast concessions to private companies. In other areas, private companies could continue to trade but were highly restricted and taxed. The domainal system enforced an in-kind tax on the Free State's Congolese subjects. As essential intermediaries, local rulers forced their men, women and children to collect rubber, ivory and foodstuffs. Depending on the power of local rulers, the Free State paid prices below the rising market prices. In October 1892, Leopold granted concessions to a number of companies. Each company was given a large amount of land in the Congo Free State on which to collect rubber and ivory for sale in Europe. These companies were allowed to detain Africans who did not work hard enough, to police their vast areas as they saw fit and to take all the products of the forest for themselves. In return for their concessions, these companies paid an annual dividend to the Free State. At the height of the rubber boom, from 1901 until 1906, these dividends also filled the royal coffers.

The Free Trade Zone in the Congo was open to entrepreneurs of any European nation, who were allowed to buy 10- and 15-year monopoly leases on anything of value: ivory from a district or the rubber concession, for example. The other zone—almost two-thirds of the Congo—became the Domaine Privé, the exclusive private property of the state.

In 1893, Leopold excised the most readily accessible 259,000 km2 portion of the Free Trade Zone and declared it to be the Domaine de la Couronne, literally, "fief of the crown". Rubber revenue went directly to Leopold who paid the Free State for the high costs of exploitation. The same rules applied as in the Domaine Privé. In 1896 global demand for rubber soared. From that year onwards, the Congolese rubber sector started to generate vast sums of money at an immense cost for the local population.

Scramble for Katanga
Early in Leopold's rule, the second problem—the British South Africa Company's expansion into the southern Congo Basin—was addressed. The distant Yeke Kingdom, in Katanga on the upper Lualaba River, had signed no treaties, was known to be rich in copper and thought to have much gold from its slave-trading activities. Its powerful mwami (King), Msiri, had already rejected a treaty brought by Alfred Sharpe on behalf of Cecil Rhodes. In 1891 a Free State expedition extracted a letter from Msiri agreeing to their agents coming to Katanga and later that year Leopold II sent the well-armed Stairs Expedition, led by the Canadian mercenary William Grant Stairs, to take possession of Katanga one way or another.

Msiri tried to play the Free State off against Rhodes and when negotiations bogged down, Stairs flew the Free State flag anyway and gave Msiri an ultimatum. Instead, Msiri decamped to another stockade. Stairs sent a force to capture him but Msiri stood his ground, whereupon Captain Omer Bodson shot Msiri dead and was fatally wounded in the resulting fight. The expedition cut off Msiri's head and put it on a pole, as he had often done to his enemies. This was to impress upon the locals that Msiri's rule had really ended, after which the successor chief recognized by Stairs signed the treaty.

War with Arab slavers
In the short term, the third problem, that of the African and Arab slavers like Zanzibari/Swahili strongman Tippu Tip (actually Ḥamad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jumʿah ibn Rajab ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al Murjabī, but much better known by his nickname) was temporarily solved.

Initially the authority of the Congo Free State was relatively weak in the eastern regions of the Congo. In early 1887, Henry Morton Stanley had therefore proposed that Tippu Tip be made governor (wali) of the Stanley Falls District. Both Leopold II and Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar agreed and on 24 February 1887, Tippu Tip accepted.

In the longer term this alliance was indefensible at home and abroad. Leopold II was heavily criticized by the European public opinion for his dealings with Tippu Tip. In Belgium, the Belgian Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1888, mainly by Catholic intellectuals led by Count Hippolyte d'Ursel, aimed at abolishing the Arab slave trade. Furthermore, Tippu Tip and Leopold were commercial rivals. Every person that Tippu Tip hunted down and put into chattel slavery and every pound of ivory he exported to Zanzibar was a loss to Leopold II. This, and Leopold's humanitarian pledges to the Berlin Conference to end slavery, meant war was inevitable.

Open warfare broke out in late November 1892. Both sides fought by proxy, arming and leading the populations of the upper Congo forests in conflict. By early 1894 the Zanzibari/Swahili slavers were defeated in the eastern Congo region and the Congo Arab war came to an end.

The Lado Enclave

In 1894, King Leopold II signed a treaty with the United Kingdom which conceded a strip of land on the Free State's eastern border in exchange for the Lado Enclave, which provided access to the navigable Nile and extended the Free State's sphere of influence northward into Sudan. After rubber profits soared in 1895, Leopold ordered the organization of an expedition into the Lado Enclave, which had been overrun by Mahdist rebels since the outbreak of the Mahdist War in 1881. The expedition was composed of two columns: the first, under Belgian war hero Baron Dhanis, consisted of a sizeable force, numbering around three-thousand, and was to strike north through the jungle and attack the rebels at their base at Rejaf. The second, a much smaller force of only eight-hundred, was led by Louis-Napoléon Chaltin and took the main road towards Rejaf. Both expeditions set out in December 1896.

Although Leopold II had initially planned for the expedition to carry on much farther than the Lado Enclave, hoping indeed to take Fashoda and then Khartoum, Dhanis' column mutinied in February 1897, resulting in the death of several Belgian officers and the loss of his entire force. Nonetheless, Chaltin continued his advance, and on 17 February 1897, his outnumbered forces defeated the rebels in the Battle of Rejaf, securing the Lado Enclave as a Belgian territory until Leopold's death in 1909. Leopold's conquest of the Lado Enclave met with approval from the British government, at least initially, which welcomed any aid in their ongoing war with Mahdist Sudan. But frequent raids outside of Lado territory by Belgian Congolese forces based in Rejaf caused alarm and suspicion among British and French officials wary of Leopold's imperial ambitions. In 1910, following the Belgian annexation of the Congo Free State as the Belgian Congo in 1908 and the death of the Belgian King in December 1909, British authorities reclaimed the Lado Enclave as per the Anglo-Congolese treaty signed in 1894, and added the territory to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Economy during Leopold's rule
While the war against African powers was ending, the quest for income was increasing, fuelled by the aire policy. By 1890, Leopold was facing considerable financial difficulty. District officials' salaries were reduced to a bare minimum, and made up with a commission payment based on the profit that their area returned to Leopold. After widespread criticism, this "primes system" was substituted for the allocation de retraite in which a large part of the payment was granted, at the end of the service, only to those territorial agents and magistrates whose conduct was judged "satisfactory" by their superiors. This meant in practice that nothing changed. Congolese communities in the Domaine Privé were not merely forbidden by law to sell items to anyone but the state; they were required to provide state officials with set quotas of rubber and ivory at a fixed, government-mandated price and to provide food to the local post.

In direct violation of his promises of free trade within the CFS under the terms of the Berlin Treaty, not only had the state become a commercial entity directly or indirectly trading within its dominion, but also, Leopold had been slowly monopolizing a considerable amount of the ivory and rubber trade by imposing export duties on the resources traded by other merchants within the CFS. In terms of infrastructure, Leopold's regime began construction of the railway that ran from the coast to the capital of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). The railway, now known as the Matadi–Kinshasa Railway, was completed in 1898.

By the final decade of the 19th century, John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of inflatable, rubber bicycle tubes and the growing usage of the automobile dramatically increased global demand for rubber. To monopolize the resources of the entire Congo Free State, Leopold issued three decrees in 1891 and 1892 that reduced the native population to serfs. Collectively, these forced the natives to deliver all ivory and rubber, harvested or found, to state officers thus nearly completing Leopold's monopoly of the ivory and rubber trade. The rubber came from wild vines in the jungle, unlike the rubber from Brazil (Hevea brasiliensis), which was tapped from trees. To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, the Congolese workers would slash them and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a painful manner, as it took off the worker's hair with it.

The Force Publique (FP), Leopold's private army, was used to enforce the rubber quotas. Early on, the FP was used primarily to campaign against the Arab slave trade in the Upper Congo, protect Leopold's economic interests, and suppress the frequent uprisings within the state. The Force Publique's officer corps included only white Europeans (Belgian regular soldiers and mercenaries from other countries). On arriving in the Congo, the army included men from Zanzibar, West Africa, and eventually from the Congo itself. In addition, Leopold had been actually encouraging the slave trade among Arabs in the Upper Congo in return for slaves to fill the ranks of the FP. During the 1890s, the FP's primary role was to exploit the natives as corvée labourers to promote the rubber trade.

Many of the black soldiers were from far-off peoples of the Upper Congo, while others had been kidnapped in raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte—a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide—the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, slaughtered families of rebels, and flogged and raped Congolese people with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives. One refugee from these horrors described the process: "We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved ... When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away."

They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, cut off the hands of Congolese natives, including children. The human hands were collected as trophies on the orders of their officers to show that bullets had not been wasted. Officers were concerned that their subordinates might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, so they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent. These mutilations also served to further terrorize the Congolese into submission. This was all contrary to the promises of uplift made at the Berlin Conference which had recognized the Congo Free State.

Mutilation
Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool: "All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters."

One junior officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross". After seeing a Congolese person killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service. In Forbath's words: "The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected."

In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, to save ammunition soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment according to some historians.

Cannibalism

Cannibalism was widespread in parts of the Free State area when the State was established, and the colonial administration seems to have done little to suppress it, sometimes rather tolerating it among its own auxiliary troops and allies. During the Congo Arab war, there were reports of widespread cannibalization of the bodies of defeated combatants by the Batetela allies of the Belgian commander Francis Dhanis. According to Dhanis's medical officer, Captain Sidney Langford Hinde, the conquest of Nyangwe was followed by "days of cannibal feasting" during which hundreds were eaten, with only their heads being kept as mementos. During this time, Gongo Lutete, the leader of the Batetela, "hid himself in his quarters, appalled by the sight of thousands of men smoking human hands and human chops on their camp fires, enough to feed his army for many days."

Soon after, Nyangwe's surviving population rose in a rebellion, during whose brutal suppression a thousand rioters were killed by the new government. One young Belgian officer wrote home: "Happily Gongo's men ... ate them up [in a few hours]. It's horrible but exceedingly useful and hygienic.... I should have been horrified at the idea in Europe! but it seems quite natural to me here. Don't show this letter to anyone indiscreet". Hinde too commented approvingly on the thoroughness with which the cannibals "disposed of all the dead, leaving nothing even for the jackals, and thus sav[ing] us, no doubt, from many an epidemic."

When sending out "punitive expeditions" against villages unwilling or unable to fulfil the government's exorbitant rubber quota, Free State officials repeatedly turned a blind eye both to arbitrary killings of those considered guilty as well as to the "cannibal feast[s]" celebrated by native soldiers that sometimes followed. In various cases they even handed captives, including infants and old women, over to their soldiers or local allies, implicitly or even explicitly allowing them to kill and eat them. Particularly infamous were groups of Songye fighters "known as Zappo Zaps after the sound of their rifles" and employed by the Free State to enforce its tax policies: "Whenever a village failed to produce enough rubber, these men would attack, raping and eating their victims before cutting off their hands" (to prove the success of their operations).

Generally, most Free State officials seem to have had little interest in stopping cannibal customs. One of them, Guy Burrows, wrote that when he was stationed near the Mongala River, he and his colleagues "were well aware that scores of slaves were being sold to supply meat to the people on the other side of the river", but that (to his regret) neither the State nor the private companies active in the area did anything to suppress this deadly trade "in slaves for the shambles", instead wholly focussing on the profitable rubber extraction.

Similarly, a German missionary reported an open trade in male and female slaves intended for consumption near the mouth of the Aruwimi River. Twice a week, new victims delivered by dugout canoe were "bound to poles [in the river], with their ankles dislocated, and sticking up to their heads in the water. After four days their flesh was tender for the kitchen and they were slaughtered." The Free State finally stepped in to suppress this operation and execute the responsible trader, but only in 1906, more than 20 years after its foundation. Even afterwards, slaves were still offered fairly openly for eating, with the sellers of slave children pointing out the value of "their meat" when trying to negotiate a good price.

Another time, while stationed in Riba-Riba (today Lokandu) in the eastern Maniema region, Burrows rescued a young slave boy from becoming the "pièce de résistance" of a banquet planned by his master. The latter not only freely admitted the plan, but failed to see anything wrong with it. It turned out that the local corporal had been aware of the planned banquet too, but had not considered it worthy of mention because "the same thing had often occurred in the neighbouring villages, and the white men at the post had never bothered about it." Indeed, "some European officers" working for the Free State themselves "developed a taste for human flesh", according to Forbath.

Death toll
A reduction of the population of the Congo is noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of Leopold's control with the beginning of Belgian state rule in 1908, but estimates of the death toll vary considerably. Estimates of some contemporary observers suggest that the population decreased by half during this period. According to Edmund D. Morel, the Congo Free State counted "20 million souls". Hence, Mark Twain mentioned the number of ten million deaths. According to Irish diplomat Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births, and disease. Sleeping sickness was also a major cause of fatality at the time. Opponents of Leopold's rule stated, however, that the administration itself was to be considered responsible for the spreading of the epidemic.

In the absence of a census providing even an initial idea of the size of population of the region at the inception of the Congo Free State (the first was taken in 1924), it is impossible to quantify population changes in the period. Despite this, Forbath in 1977 claimed the loss was at least five million. Adam Hochschild and Jan Vansina use the number 10 million. Hochschild cites several recent independent lines of investigation, by anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, that examine local sources (police records, religious records, oral traditions, genealogies, personal diaries), which generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State period. Since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in 1924 put the population at about 10 million, these various approaches suggest a rough estimate of a total of 10 million dead.

However, Jan Vansina returned to the issue of quantifying the total population decline, and revised his earlier position, criticizing Hochschild for extrapolating the 50% death toll from the rubber provinces to the entirety of the Congo. He concluded that the Kuba population (one of the Congolese populations) was rising during the first two decades of Leopold II's rule, and declined by 25 per cent from 1900 to 1919, mainly due to sickness. Others argued a decrease of 20 per cent over the first forty years of colonial rule (up to the census of 1924). According to the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem 13 million died, although he later changed the number down to 10 million after the publication of Leopolds Ghost. To put these population changes in context, sourced references state that in 1900 Africa as a whole had between 90 million and 133 million people.

More recent extensive demographic research agrees with Vansina in his criticism of Hochschild's 10 million claim. The current estimate for the population in 1885 is stated at around most likely 11.5 million. The first head count of the population after Leopolds reign put the population at 10 or 10.3 million, which is a population decrease of around 1.2 or 1.5 million people. The causes of the decline were multifactorial and included lower fertility, disease, famine, armed violence and mass emigration. However, no verifiable complete records exist. Louis and Stengers state that population figures at the start of Leopold's control are only "wild guesses", while calling E. D. Morel's attempt and others at coming to a figure for population losses "but figments of the imagination". However, authors that point out the lack of reliable demographic data are questioned by others calling the former minimalists and agnosticists, proving that these questions remain the object of heated debate.

International criticism
Leopold ran up high debts with his Congo investments before the beginning of the worldwide rubber boom in the 1890s. Prices increased throughout the decade as industries discovered new uses for rubber in tires, hoses, tubing, insulation for telegraph and telephone cables and wiring. By the late-1890s, wild rubber had far surpassed ivory as the main source of revenue from the Congo Free State. The peak year was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.

However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies started facing competition from rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As plantations were begun in other tropical regions around the world, the global price of rubber started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labour in the Congo in order to lower production costs. Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement was eating away at profit margins, along with the toll taken by the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods. As competition from other areas of rubber cultivation mounted, Leopold's private rule was left increasingly vulnerable to international scrutiny.

Missionaries carefully documented and exposed atrocities committed. Eye-witness reports from missionaries portrayed actions by the State that broke laws set by the European nations. As rumours circulated Leopold attempted to discredit them, even creating a Commission for the Protection of the Natives. In January 1908, William Henry Sheppard published a report on colonial abuses in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) newsletter, and both he and William Morrison were sued for libel against the Kasai Rubber Company (Compagnie de Kasai), a prominent Belgian rubber contractor in the area. When the case went to court in September 1909, the two missionaries had support from the CRA, American Progressives, and their lawyer Emile Vandervelde. The judge acquitted Sheppard (Morrison had been acquitted earlier on a technicality) on the premise that his editorial had not named the major company, but smaller charter companies instead. However, it is likely that the case was decided in favour of Sheppard as a result of international politics; the U.S., socially in support of the missionaries, had questioned the validity of King Leopold II's rule over the Congo.

Sheppard's documented cases of cruelty or violence were in direct violation of the Berlin Act of 1885, which gave Leopold II control over the Congo as long as he "care[d] for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help[ed] in suppressing slavery." However, historians have noted that he and other missionaries have traditionally received little recognition for their contributions and reports.

Congo Reform Association

Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899 as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine, inspired by his service as a captain on a steamer on the Congo 12 years before, sparked an organized international opposition to Leopold's exploitational activities. In 1900, Edmund Dene Morel, a part-time journalist and head of trade with Congo for the Liverpool shipping firm Elder Dempster, noticed that ships that brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo only ever returned there loaded with guns and ammunition for the Force Publique. Morel became a journalist and then a publisher, attempting to discredit Leopold's regime. In 1902, Morel retired from his position at Elder Dempster to focus on campaigning. He founded his own magazine, The West African Mail, and conducted speaking tours in Britain.

Increasing public outcry over the atrocities in the CFS moved the British government to launch an official investigation. In 1903, Morel and those who agreed with him in the House of Commons succeeded in passing a resolution calling on the British government to conduct an inquiry into alleged violations of the Berlin Agreement. Roger Casement, then the British Consul at Boma (at the mouth of the Congo River), was sent to the Congo Free State to investigate. Reporting back to the Foreign Office in 1900, Casement wrote: "The root of the evil lies in the fact that the government of the Congo is above all a commercial trust, that everything else is orientated towards commercial gain ..."

E. D. Morel was introduced to Roger Casement by their mutual friend Herbert Ward just before the publication of Casement's 1904 detailed eyewitness report—known as the Casement Report—in 1904 and realized that he had found the ally he had sought. Casement convinced Morel to establish an organization for dealing specifically with the Congo question, the Congo Reform Association. With Casement's and Dr. Guinness's assistance, he set up and ran the Congo Reform Association, which worked to end Leopold's control of the Congo Free State. Branches of the association were established as far away as the United States. The Congo Reform movement's members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell.

The mass deaths in the Congo Free State became a cause célèbre in the last years of the 19th century. The Congo reform movement led a vigorous international movement against the maltreatment of the Congolese population. The British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement. The Belgian Parliament, pushed by Emile Vandervelde and other critics of the king's Congolese policy, forced Leopold to set up an independent commission of inquiry, and despite the king's efforts, in 1905 it confirmed Casement's report.

One of the main ways Britain was involved in ending Leopold's rule in the Congo, was by making Belgium, as a whole, more aware of the brutality present in the Congo. E. D. Morel was one of the key British activists for a Congo free from Belgian rule. Once the US became aware of the occurrences in the Congo, Morel began the Congo Reform Association. One of the methods Morel used to make the world more aware of the atrocities in the Congo during Leopold's rule was through the press. Articles were published in both magazines and newspapers in order to make the people of these powerful countries, such as the US and Great Britain, more aware of what truly was being done in this part of Africa. With this newfound unwanted publicity, the Belgian government was pressured in assuming control of the Congo from Leopold.

Individuals such as George Washington Williams also had a significant impact on the Congo Free State propaganda war. In his famous letter, "An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Léopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo", sent on 18 July 1890, Williams described in great detail the crimes committed against the residents of the Congo and their overall mistreatment. This letter was a key factor in the propaganda struggle over conditions in the Congo.

Belgian annexation of the Congo Free State as the Belgian Congo

Leopold II offered to reform his Congo Free State regime, but international opinion supported an end to the king's rule, and no nation was willing to accept this responsibility. Belgium was the obvious European candidate to annex the Congo Free State. For two years, it debated the question and held new elections on the issue.

Yielding to international pressure, the parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its administration on 15 November 1908, as the colony of the Belgian Congo. The governance of the Belgian Congo was outlined in the 1908 Colonial Charter. Despite being effectively removed from power, the international scrutiny was no major loss to Leopold II—who died in Brussels on 17 December 1909—or to the concessionary companies in the Congo. By then Southeast Asia and Latin America had become lower-cost producers of rubber. Along with the effects of resource depletion in the Congo, international commodity prices had fallen to a level that rendered Congolese extraction unprofitable. Just prior to releasing sovereignty over the CFS, Leopold had all evidence of his activities in the CFS destroyed, including the archives of the departments of finance and of the interior. Leopold II lost the absolute power he had had there, but the population now had a Belgian colonial regime, which had become heavily paternalistic, with church, state, and private companies all instructed to oversee the welfare of the inhabitants.

Legacy
The Order of the Crown, originally created in 1897, rewarded heroic deeds and service achieved while serving in the Congo Free State. The Order was made a decoration of the Belgian state with the abolition of the Congo Free State in 1908 and is still awarded today.

Between 1886 and 1908 the Free State issued a number of postage stamps. These typically showed scenes of wildlife, landscapes, and natives.

Coins were minted from 1887 to 1908, using the Belgian standard. They ranged from a copper 1 Centime through a silver 5 Francs. The lower values showed a star on the obverse and were holed, the higher ones had a bust of Leopold II.

Genocide question
In the aftermath of the 1998 publication of King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, where he had written "the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions", but "it was not strictly speaking a genocide", The Guardian reported that the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels would finance an investigation into some of the claims made by Hochschild. An investigatory panel announced in 2002, likely to be headed by Professor Jean-Luc Vellut, was scheduled to report its findings in 2004. Robert G. Weisbord stated in the 2003 Journal of Genocide Research that attempting to eliminate a portion of the population is enough to qualify as genocide under the UN convention. In the case of the Congo Free State, the unbearable conditions would qualify as a genocide.

In the aftermath of the report, an exhibition was held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa entitled The Memory of Congo. Critics, including Hochschild, claimed that there were "distortions and evasions" in the exhibition and stated: "The exhibit deals with this question in a wall panel misleadingly headed 'Genocide in the Congo?' This is a red herring, for no reputable historian of the Congo has made charges of genocide; a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is different."

An early day motion presented to the British Parliament in 2006 described "the tragedy of King Leopold's regime" as genocide and called for an apology from the Belgian government. It received the signature of 48 members of parliament.

Additional primary sources

 * ; also via HathiTrust.
 * Casement, Roger. Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the Congo Free State. Reprinted in full in Ó Síocháin, Séamas and Michael O'Sullivan, eds. (2004). The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary. University College Dublin Press. ISBN 1-900621-99-1.
 * The Congo Report of Commission of Inquiry (1906). New York.
 * Johnston, Harry (1908). George Grenfell and the Congo. 2 vols. London.
 * The reports of the Congo Reform Association, particularly the Memorial on the Present Phase of the Congo Question (1912). London.
 * Stanley, Henry Morton (1885). The Congo and the Founding of the Congo Free State. London.

title: Congo Free State


text:
John Tavener

Sir John Kenneth Tavener (28 January 1944 – 12 November 2013) was an English composer, known for his extensive output of choral religious works. Among his best known works are The Lamb (1982), The Protecting Veil (1988), and Song for Athene (1993).

Tavener first came to prominence with his cantata The Whale, premiered in 1968. Then aged 24, he was described by The Guardian as "the musical discovery of the year", while The Times said he was "among the very best creative talents of his generation". During his career he became one of the best known and popular composers of his generation, most particularly for The Protecting Veil, which as recorded by cellist Steven Isserlis became a best-selling album, and Song for Athene which was sung at the funeral of Princess Diana. The Lamb featured in the soundtrack for Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty. Tavener wrote the composition A New Beginning to commemorate the Millennium celebrations on New Year's Eve, 1999, during the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. Tavener was knighted in 2000 for his services to music and won an Ivor Novello Award, and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Sarum College in 2001.

Early life and education
Tavener was born on 28 January 1944 in Wembley, London. His parents ran a family building firm and his father was also an organist at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Frognal, Hampstead. At the age of 12, Tavener was taken to Glyndebourne to hear Mozart's The Magic Flute, a work he loved for the rest of his life. That same year he heard Stravinsky's most recent work, Canticum Sacrum, which he later described as "the piece that woke me up and made me want to be a composer".

Tavener became a music scholar at Highgate School (where a fellow pupil was John Rutter). The school choir was often employed by the BBC in works requiring boys' voices, so Tavener gained choral experience singing in Mahler's Third Symphony and Orff's Carmina Burana. He started to compose at Highgate, and also became a sufficiently proficient pianist to perform the second and third movements of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and, in 1961 with the National Youth Orchestra, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2. He also became organist and choirmaster in 1961 at St John's Presbyterian Church, Kensington (now St Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church), a post he held for 14 years.

Tavener entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1962, where his tutors included Sir Lennox Berkeley. During his studies there he decided to give up the piano and devote himself to composition.

The Whale and early operas
Tavener first came to prominence in 1968 with his dramatic cantata The Whale, based on the Old Testament story of Jonah. It was premièred at the London Sinfonietta's début concert, which was also the opening concert of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Tavener's younger brother, Roger, was then doing some building work on Ringo Starr's home and, gaining the musician's interest, persuaded the Beatles to have The Whale recorded by Apple Records and released in 1970. The following year Tavener began teaching at Trinity College of Music, London. Other works by Tavener released by Apple included his A Celtic Requiem, which impressed Benjamin Britten enough to persuade Covent Garden to commission an opera from Tavener. The ultimate result, to a libretto by playwright Gerard McLarnon, was Thérèse: when staged in 1979 the opera was thought too static to be a successful drama.

Tavener had also been deeply affected by his brief 1974 marriage to the Greek dancer Victoria Maragopoulou. His chamber opera A Gentle Spirit (1977), with a libretto by McLarnon based on a story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, concerns a pawnbroker whose marriage fails to the extent that his wife commits suicide. It has been deemed "far superior to Thérèse, with the internal drama more suited to the stage". Significantly, it also touched on Russian Orthodoxy, to which McLarnon had been a convert for several years.

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity
Tavener converted to the Orthodox Church in 1977. Orthodox theology and liturgical traditions became a major influence on his work. He was particularly drawn to its mysticism, studying and setting to music the writings of Church Fathers and completing a setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the principal eucharistic liturgy of the Orthodox Church: this was Tavener's first directly Orthodox-inspired music.

Later career
Tavener's subsequent explorations of Russian and Greek culture resulted in Akhmatova Requiem: this failed to enjoy success either at its Edinburgh Festival premiere in 1981, or at its Proms' performance the following week where many of the audience left before it finished. Of more lasting success was Tavener's short unaccompanied four-part choral setting of William Blake's poem "The Lamb", written one afternoon in 1982 for his nephew Simon's third birthday. This simple homophonic piece is usually performed as a Christmas carol. Later prominent works include The Akathist of Thanksgiving of 1987, written in celebration of the millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church; The Protecting Veil, first performed by cellist Steven Isserlis and the London Symphony Orchestra at the 1989 Proms; and Song for Athene (1993). The two choral works were settings of texts by Mother Thekla, a Russian Orthodox abbess who was Tavener's long-time spiritual adviser until her death in 2011. Song for Athene in particular gained worldwide exposure when performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Tavener's Fall and Resurrection, first performed in 2000, used instruments such as ram's horn, Ney flute and kaval. It was dedicated to the then Prince of Wales, with whom Tavener formed a lasting friendship. His work Ikon of Eros (2003) was commissioned for violinist Jorja Fleezanis, then concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, with vocal soloists and the Minnesota Chorale and recorded at the Cathedral of St. Paul, conducted by Paul Goodwin. Also in 2003 Tavener composed the exceptionally large work The Veil of the Temple (which was premièred at the Temple Church, London), based on texts from a number of religions. Identified by Tavener as "the supreme achievement of my life", it is set for four choirs, several orchestras and soloists and lasts at least seven hours. Prayer of the Heart, written for and performed by Björk, was premiered in 2004. In 2007 Tavener composed The Beautiful Names, a setting of the 99 names of God in the Muslim tradition, sung in Arabic.

It had been reported, particularly in the British press, that Tavener left Orthodox Christianity to explore a number of other different religious traditions, including Hinduism and Islam, and became a follower of the Traditionalist philosopher Frithjof Schuon. In an interview with The New York Times, conducted by British music journalist Michael White, Tavener said: "I reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church, and I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages." The interviewer also reported at the time that he "hasn't abandoned Orthodoxy. He remains devotedly Christian." Speaking on the BBC Four television programme Sacred Music in 2010, Tavener described himself as "essentially Orthodox". He reiterated both his desire to explore the musical traditions of other religions, and his adherence to the Orthodox Christian faith, on Start the Week, recorded only days before his death and broadcast on 11 November 2013.

In 2020 Sir David Pountney, former artistic director of the Welsh National Opera, announced that Tavener's final opera, Krishna (which was completed in 2005 but had remained in manuscript form) would be staged by Grange Park Opera in 2024. Pountney himself will be directing the production.

Personal life
In 1974 he married the Greek dancer Victoria Maragopoulou, but it only lasted eight months. In 1991 he married Maryanna Schaefer with whom he had three children, Theodora, Sofia and Orlando. He had considerable health problems throughout his life. He had a stroke in his thirties, heart surgery and the removal of a tumour in his forties, and had two successive heart attacks which left him frail. He was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome in 1990. Lady Tavener broadcast a charity appeal on BBC Radio 4 in October 2008 on behalf of the Marfan Trust.

Tavener had an interest in classic cars, owning an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a Jaguar XJ6 and a white Bentley Mulsanne Turbo. He was also noted for wearing a white suit.

Death and legacy
Tavener died, aged 69, on 12 November 2013 at his home in Child Okeford, Dorset. Among those in the music world who paid tribute were composers John Rutter and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, cellist Steven Isserlis, Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, oboist Nicholas Daniel, Roger Wright (controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms), and soprano Patricia Rozario. A tribute was also received from Charles, Prince of Wales. Tavener's funeral was held at Winchester Cathedral on 28 November 2013. The service was conducted in the Orthodox rite and was presided over by Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira, representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the most senior Orthodox bishop in the UK. About 700 mourners attended.

Rutter describes Tavener as having the "very rare gift" of being able to "bring an audience to a deep silence." According to Isserlis: "He had his own voice. He wasn't writing to be popular – he was writing the music he had to write."

Musical style
While Tavener's earliest music was influenced by Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen – often invoking the sound world of Stravinsky, in particular Canticum Sacrum, and the ecstatic quality found in various works by Messiaen – his later music became more sparse, using wide registral space and was usually diatonically tonal. Tavener recognised Arvo Pärt as "a kindred spirit" and shared with him a common religious tradition and a fondness for textural transparency.

Career highlights

 * 1968 – The Whale premiered by the London Sinfonietta and subsequently recorded on the Beatles' Apple label.
 * 1971 – A Celtic Requiem recorded by Apple.
 * 1973 – Thérèse, the story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, commissioned by the Royal Opera, London.
 * 1989 – premiere of The Protecting Veil at the Proms in London.
 * 2000 – premiere of Fall and Resurrection in St Paul's Cathedral, London (4 January 2000).
 * 2000 – knighthood in the Millennium Honours List.
 * 2001 – soundtrack of Werner Herzog's short documentary Pilgrimage composed.
 * 2003 – premiere of the all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple by the Holst Singers and the Choir of the Temple Church at the Temple Church, London.
 * 2005 – premiere of Laila (Amu), Tavener's first dance collaboration, with Random Dance company and Wayne McGregor's choreography.
 * 2006 – contributed Fragments of a Prayer to the Alfonso Cuarón film Children of Men.
 * 2007 – premiere of The Beautiful Names by the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra at Westminster Cathedral. The work, sung in Arabic, is a setting of the 99 names of Allah found in the Qur'an. Awarded honorary degree by the University of Winchester.
 * 2008 – premiere of the anthem sung in St Paul's Cathedral in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.
 * March 2009 – premiere of Tu ne sais pas for mezzo-soprano, timpani and strings. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and Katherine Pracht singing texts drawn from poems by French poet Jean Biès (one of the work's dedicatees) and from Islamic and Hindu sources.
 * 2011 – excerpts of Funeral Canticle from the album Eternity's Sunrise by the Academy of Ancient Music were used multiple times in Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life.
 * April 2013 – premiere of Tolstoy's Creed and Three Hymns of George Herbert by The City Choir of Washington at the Washington National Cathedral.
 * 7 July 2013 – premiere of Love Duet from The Play of Krishna, If Ye Love Me and The Death of Ivan Ilyich during an all-Tavener concert given as part of the Manchester International Festival.
 * 2013 – The Lamb included in the critically acclaimed soundtrack to Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty (Italy's official selection for the 2013 Academy Awards), which subsequently won.

Works
Song of the Angel 2 November 1994. To Yehudi Menuhin and to Edna Michell, composed for the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations.

 * Setting of the Credo (1961)
 * Genesis (1962)
 * Three Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1962; song cycle)
 * The Cappemakers (1964; one-act opera)
 * Cain and Abel (1965; cantata)
 * The Whale (1965–66; soloists, speaker, SATB choir, children's choir, orchestra)
 * In alium (1968)
 * A Celtic Requiem (1969; soprano solo, SATB choir, children's choir, ensemble)
 * In memoriam Igor Stravinsky (1971)
 * Responsorium in Memory of Annon Lee Silver (1971)
 * Últimos ritos (1972)
 * Canciones españolas (1972)
 * Requiem for Father Malachy (1973)
 * Thérèse (1973–76; opera)
 * Canticle of the Mother of God (1976)
 * Liturgy of St John Chrysostom (1977)
 * A Gentle Spirit (1977; chamber opera)
 * Kyklike Kinesis (1977)
 * The Immurement of Antigone (1978)
 * Palintropos (1978)
 * Akhmatova: Requiem (1979–80)
 * Sappho: Lyrical Fragments (1980; song cycle)
 * Funeral Ikos (1981)
 * The Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete (1981)
 * Trisagion (1981; brass ensemble)
 * Mandelion (1981; organ)
 * The Lamb (1982)
 * Towards the Son (1982)
 * To a Child Dancing in the Wind (1983)
 * Ikon of Light (1984; choir, string trio)
 * Vigil Service (1984)
 * Sixteen Haiku of Seferis (1984)
 * A Mini Song Cycle for Gina (1984)

 * Love bade me welcome (1985)
 * Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (1986)
 * Eis thanaton (1986; cantata)
 * Akathist of Thanksgiving (1986–87)
 * The Protecting Veil (1987; cello, strings)
 * The Tyger (1987)
 * Resurrection (1989)
 * The Hidden Treasure (1989)
 * Psalm 121 (1989)
 * Thunder Entered Her (1990; SATB choir, handbells and organ)
 * The Repentant Thief (1990; clarinet, strings)
 * Mary of Egypt (opera; 1991)
 * The Last Sleep of the Virgin (1991)
 * The Apocalypse (1993)
 * Song for Athene (1993; SATB choir)
 * Theophany (1993; orchestra)
 * Diodia (1995; orchestra)
 * Funeral Canticle (1996; orchestra)
 * Prayer for the healing of the sick (1998)
 * A New Beginning (1999)
 * Fall and Resurrection (2000)
 * Lamentations and Praises (2001; 12 male voices, string quartet, flute, bass trombone, percussion)
 * Mother and Child (2002)
 * Elizabeth Full Of Grace (2002)
 * The Veil of the Temple (2003; soprano, SATB choir, boys' choir, ensemble)
 * Schuon Lieder (2003; song cycle for soprano, ensemble)
 * Laila (2004; music for dance; soprano, tenor, orchestra)
 * Krishna (2005; unproduced opera)
 * Sollemnitas in Conceptione Immaculata Beatae Mariae Virginis (2006; mass)
 * The Beautiful Names (2007)
 * Requiem (2008; cello, soloists, chorus, orchestra)
 * Towards Silence (2009; 4 string quartets, Tibetan temple bowl)
 * They are all gone into the world of light (2011)
 * The Death of Ivan Ilyich (2012; monodrama)
 * Missa Wellensis (2013; choir)

Selected recordings

 * The Whale, Apple Records
 * The Protecting Veil, Virgin 561849-2
 * Schuon Lieder, Black Box BBM1101
 * The Veil of the Temple, RCA 82876661542
 * Songs of the Sky, Signum Records SIGCD149
 * "Tavener: Choral Works," Hyperion CDA67475
 * Missa Wellensis, Signum Records SIGCD442
 * Palintropos, A Flock Ascending AFACD001

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: John Tavener


text: Talk:Biodiesel

title: Talk:Biodiesel


text:
Maurice Bowra

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, (8 April 1898 – 4 July 1971) was an English classical scholar, literary critic and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

Birth and boyhood
Bowra was born in Jiujiang, China, to English parents. His father, Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra (1869–1947), who worked for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, had been born in Ningbo, and his paternal grandfather, Edward Charles Bowra, had also worked for the Chinese Customs, after serving in the Ever Victorious Army under "Chinese Gordon". Soon after Bowra's birth his father was transferred to the treaty port of Niuzhuang, and the family lived there for the first five years of Bowra's life, except during the Boxer Rebellion, in the summer of 1900, when Bowra was evacuated to Japan along with his mother, his elder brother, Edward, and other women and children of the European community.

The family returned to Britain in 1903, travelling via Japan and the United States, and settled in the Kent countryside. Bowra later said he had been fluent in Mandarin, but forgot the language after settling in Britain. Bowra's parents went back to China in February 1905, leaving their children in the care of their paternal grandmother, who, having been widowed, lived with her second husband, a clergyman, in Putney. During this time the boys received tuition from Ella Dell, sister of the writer Ethel M. Dell. The boys also attended a preparatory school in Putney, where Maurice came first in all classes except arithmetic. During his time at this school Bowra began his classical education with lessons from Cecil Botting, a master at St Paul's School and father of the writer Antonia White.

In 1909 the Bowra brothers journeyed across Europe and Russia by train to visit their parents in Mukden. They also visited the site of the Battle of Mukden and encountered Lord Kitchener. Their return journey, which they made in the company of their father, took them through Hong Kong, Colombo, Suez, Naples and Algiers.

Cheltenham College
Bowra boarded at Cheltenham College from April 1910. He did not enjoy such features of the school as outdoor games or the OTC, but he won a scholarship in the internal exams held in June 1911. It became clear that he had a particular aptitude for classics, for which the school laid a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin. During his final two years, in the sixth form, Bowra became bored with his school work, acquired sufficient French to read Verlaine and Baudelaire, studied a bilingual edition of Dante's Divina Commedia, and began to learn German. Bowra maintained a connection with the school in later life, being instrumental in the appointment of Cecil Day-Lewis as a master there and serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.

World War I
By 1916 Bowra's father was Chief Secretary of the Chinese Customs and resided in Beijing in a household with thirty servants. In January that year Bowra's mother came to England to visit her sons, who were both about to see active service in the Army. In May Bowra departed with his mother for China, travelling through Norway, Sweden and Russia. In Beijing he visited the Great Wall of China and the Ming Tombs, and witnessed the funeral of Yuan Shikai.

Bowra departed from Beijing in September and on his way home spent three weeks in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as a guest of Robert Wilton. During this time he attained a working knowledge of Russian and attended operas in which Feodor Chaliapin performed.

After his return to Britain he began training with the OTC in Oxford before being called up and sent to the Royal Army Cadet School in March 1917. He served in the Royal Field Artillery on active service in France from September 1917. He saw action at Passchendaele and Cambrai, and in 1918 he participated in the resistance to the Ludendorff Offensive and the Allied counter-offensive. During this time he continued to read widely, including both contemporary poets and Greek and Latin authors.

Bowra was left with a lifelong hatred of war and military strategists, and seldom mentioned the war afterwards. He later told Cyril Connolly, "Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was far worse: inconceivably bloody – nobody who wasn't there can imagine what it was like." Anthony Powell wrote that Bowra's wartime experiences "played a profound part in his thoughts and inner life", and records that when a cruise ship they were travelling on held a ceremony to place a wreath in the sea as it passed the Dardanelles Bowra was so affected that he retired to his cabin. Following the Second World War he was accommodating to returning servicemen who wished to study at Oxford, telling one applicant who was worried about his deficiency in Latin, "No matter, war service counts as Latin."

Undergraduate years
In 1919 Bowra took up a scholarship he had won to New College, Oxford. He took a first class in Honour Moderations in 1920 and a first class, with formal congratulations, in Literae Humaniores in 1922. Bowra was very sociable as an undergraduate, and his circle included Cyril Radcliffe (with whom he shared lodgings), Roy Harrod, Robert Boothby, L. P. Hartley, Lord David Cecil, J. B. S. Haldane and Christopher Hollis. He also became a friend of Dadie Rylands. The teachers who influenced him included Gilbert Murray and Alic Smith. The treatment he received from one of his tutors in philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph, was said by Isaiah Berlin to have "undermined his faith in his own intellectual capacity".

Academic career
In 1922 Bowra was elected a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, with the support of the Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray, and appointed Dean of Wadham shortly afterwards. When Murray vacated his chair in 1936 Bowra and others believed that Bowra himself was most likely to succeed him, but Murray recommended E. R. Dodds as his successor, rejecting Bowra because of "a certain lack of quality, precision and reality in his scholarship as a whole". Some believed that the real reason was a whispering campaign over Bowra's "real or imagined homosexuality".

Bowra became a Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1937. In 1938 the Wardenship of Wadham fell vacant and Bowra, still the Dean, was elected to the post, keeping it until 1970 (when he was succeeded by Stuart Hampshire). Bowra was supported in the election by his colleague Frederick Lindemann. Lindemann had initially opposed Bowra's election as a fellow of Wadham, proposing that a scientist should be preferred, but had warmed to Bowra because of his vociferous opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany and the policy of appeasement. The election was held on 5 October 1938, and coincided with the Oxford by-election campaign, in which Bowra lent his support to the anti-appeasement candidate, Sandy Lindsay.

During the Second World War Bowra served in the Oxford Home Guard and was not offered any war work. When Berlin canvassed to find Bowra a position the file was sent back to him stamped "unreliable".

Bowra was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1946 to 1951. He wrote of the election for the post that "The campaign was very enjoyable and C. S. Lewis was outmanoeuvred so completely that he even failed in the end to be nominated, and I walked over without opposition. Very gratifying to a vain man like myself."

Bowra spent the academic year 1948–49 at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry and gave the 1955 Andrew Lang lecture. He delivered the 1957 Earl Grey Lecture in Newcastle on "The Meaning of a Heroic Age" and the 1963 Taylorian Lecture on "Poetry and the First World War". In 1966 he gave the Romanes Lecture.

Bowra was at Harvard when the post of vice-chancellor fell unexpectedly vacant in 1948, on the sudden accidental death of William Stallybrass. When the most senior head of house, J. R. H. Weaver, declined the post, Bowra could have succeeded to it, but he chose to stay in the United States and Dean Lowe filled the post until 1951, when Bowra served his three-year term. As chair of the Hebdomadal Council he dealt with the business of meetings that customarily occupied a whole afternoon in as little as fifteen minutes. When T. S. R. Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959 Bowra returned to chair the committee and privately remarked that "jokes about his beaux yeux are not thought funny".

Bowra was President of the British Academy from 1958 to 1962. His tenure was marked by two achievements: he chaired the committee that produced the Report on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes from HM Treasury; and he helped to establish the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran.

In his long career as an Oxford don Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is said to have been modelled on Bowra. Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell and Kenneth Clark knew Bowra quite well when they were undergraduates. Clark called Bowra "the strongest influence in my life". Waugh marked his friend's election as Warden of Wadham by presenting him with a monkey-puzzle tree for his garden.

John Betjeman recorded his appreciation of Bowra in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, in which he evokes an evening spent dining with Bowra in a passage that concludes: "I wandered back to Magdalen, certain then,/ As now, that Maurice Bowra’s company / Taught me far more than all my tutors did."

Though he was not in any sense religious, Bowra signed the petition (in favour of the Tridentine Catholic Mass) that became informally known as the Agatha Christie indult and regularly attended the Church of England services in his college's chapel.

Verse
Bowra had learned the value of verse during the First World War. Cyril Connolly wrote that Bowra "saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes who fought back and tried to give life a meaning". Bowra was an important champion of Boris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

However, Bowra was never able to fulfil his wish to be accepted as a serious poet himself. His output consisted of "sharp satires, in verse, on his friends (and sharper still on his enemies)". His friend and literary executor, John Sparrow, once commented that Bowra had cut himself off from posterity "as his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable". This was set half-right by the publication in 2005 of New Bats in Old Belfries, a collection of satires on friends and enemies written between the 1920s and the 1960s. Bowra wrote a satire on John Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented by Princess Margaret with the Duff Cooper Prize on 18 December 1958. The judges on that occasion were Lord David Cecil, Harold Nicolson and Bowra himself as chairman. Duff Cooper's widow Lady Diana Cooper observed that "Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words." (Philip Ziegler, Diana Cooper: The Biography of Lady Diana Cooper, Hamish Hamilton 1981, p. 310.)

Green with lust and sick with shyness,

Let me lick your lacquered toes.

Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness,

Put your finger up my nose,

Pin my teeth upon your dress,

Plant my head with watercress.

Only you can make me happy.

Tuck me tight beneath your arm.

Wrap me in a woollen nappy;

Let me wet it till it's warm.

In a plush and plated pram

Wheel me round St James's, Ma'am.

Let your sleek and soft galoshes

Slide and slither on my skin.

Swaddle me in mackintoshes

Till I lose my sense of sin.

Lightly plant your plimsolled heel

Where my privy parts congeal.

The Telegraph, echoing Cecil Day-Lewis on the man himself, warned that the book, like strychnine, was best taken in small doses.

Two poems on Patrick Leigh Fermor were omitted from the book, in deference to their subject's wishes, but were published after his death in the Wadham Gazette in December 2011.

Sexuality
Bowra was homosexual. As an undergraduate in Oxford in the 1920s, Bowra was known to cruise for sex. He used the term "the Homintern" and privately referred to his leading position in it, also calling it "the Immoral Front" or "the 69th International".

Retirement and death
Bowra retired in 1970, but continued to live in rooms in the college that had been granted to him in exchange for a house he owned. He became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1971 and his cremated remains were buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

Honours
In addition to his Oxford degrees, Bowra received honorary doctorates from the universities of Dublin, Hull, Wales, Harvard, Columbia, St Andrews, Paris and Aix.

Bowra was knighted in 1951 and was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1971. He was also a Commandeur  of the Légion d'honneur in France, a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of the Phoenix in Greece and a recipient of the order "Pour le Mérite" in West Germany.

In 1992 Wadham College named its new Bowra Building in his honour.

Quotations

 * "Buggers can't be choosers" (explaining his engagement, later called off, to a "plain" woman, poet and Somerville alumna Audrey Beecham, niece of the conductor)
 * "I am a man more dined against than dining" (parodying King Lear's "more sinned against than sinning")
 * "Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between Evensong and cocktails" or was "useful for filling that awkward time between tea and cocktails"
 * "Splendid couple—slept with both of them" (on hearing of the engagement of a well-known literary pair)
 * "Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times" (about Isaiah Berlin)
 * "I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face" (allegedly after being observed bathing naked at Parson's Pleasure and covering his face rather than his privates)
 * "Where there's death, there's hope."
 * When asked by an undergraduate for help with translating a passage by Apollinaire, whom Bowra had met whilst in France during the First World War: "Can’t help you. Pity. Slept with him once—should have asked him then."

title: Maurice Bowra


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USS Kearsarge (BB-5)

USS Kearsarge (BB-5), was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the United States Navy and lead ship of her class of battleships. She was named after the sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge (1861), famous for sinking the CSS Alabama, and was the only United States Navy battleship not named after a state.

Her keel was laid down by the Newport News Shipbuilding Company of Virginia, on 30 June 1896. She was launched on 24 March 1898, sponsored by Mrs. Elizabeth Winslow (née Maynard), the wife of Rear Admiral Herbert Winslow, and commissioned on 20 February 1900.

Between 1903 and 1907 Kearsarge served in the North Atlantic Fleet, and from 1907 to 1909 she sailed as part of the Great White Fleet. In 1909 she was decommissioned for modernization, which was finished in 1911. In 1915 she served in the Atlantic, and between 1916 and 1919 she served as a training ship. She was converted into a crane ship in 1920, renamed Crane Ship No. 1 in 1941, and sold for scrap in 1955.

Design
The Kearsarge-class battleships were designed to be used for coastal defense. They had a displacement of 11540 ST, an overall length of 375 ft, a beam of 72 ft and a draft of 23 ft. The two 3-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines and five Scotch boilers, connected to two propeller shafts, produced a total of 11674 ihp, and gave a maximum speed of 16.816 kn. Kearsarge was manned by 40 officers and 514 enlisted men, a total of 554 crew.

Kearsarge had two double turrets, with two 13 in/35 caliber guns and two 8 in/40 caliber guns each, stacked in two levels. The guns and turret armor were designed by the Bureau of Ordnance, while the turret itself was designed by the Bureau of Construction and Repair. This caused the guns to be mounted far back in the turret, making the ports very large. Admiral William Sims claimed that as a result, a shell fired into the port could reach the magazines below, disabling the guns. In addition to these guns, Kearsarge carried fourteen 5 in/40 caliber guns, twenty 6-pounder (57 mm) guns, eight 1-pounder (37 mm) guns, four .30 in machine guns, and four 18 in torpedo tubes. Kearsarge had a very low freeboard, which resulted in her guns becoming unusable in bad weather.

The ship's waterline armor belt was 5 - 16.5 in thick and the main gun turrets were protected by 15 - 17 in of armor, while the secondary turrets had 6 - 11 in of armor. The barbettes were 12.5 - 15 in thick, while the conning tower had 10 in of armor. The armor was made of harveyized steel.

Kearsarge carried 16 smaller boats. A 40 ft steam cutter, with a capacity of 60 men, together with a 33 ft steam cutter, were used for general carrying from and to port, and could tow the other boats if needed. Two 33-foot launches, each capable of carrying 64 men, were the "working boats". There were ten 30 ft boats: four cutters, each with a capacity of 45 men, the Admiral's barge, two whaleboats (which served as lifeboats), and the Captain's gig. Four smaller boats completed Kearsarge's small fleet: two 20 ft dinghies and two 18 ft catamarans.

Construction
Kearsarge was authorized on 2 March 1895, the contract for her construction was awarded on 2 January 1896, and the keel of the vessel was laid down on 30 June 1896 by Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company in Virginia. The total cost was US$5,043,591.68. She was soon named after the American Civil War sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge (1861), and was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named by act of Congress. She was the only US battleship not named after a state. She was christened on 24 March 1898 (the same day as her sister ship, Kentucky) by Mrs. Elizabeth Winslow (née Maynard), the wife of Captain Herbert Winslow, daughter-in-law of Captain John Ancrum Winslow, the commander of the original Kearsarge. She was commissioned on 20 February 1900, under the command of Captain William M. Folger.

Early career
As flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron, Kearsarge sailed along the Atlantic seaboard and the Caribbean Sea. In May 1901 Captain Bowman H. McCalla assumed command of Kearsarge, although by May 1902 the ship was being commanded by Captain Joseph Newton Hemphill. Reassigned as flagship of the European Squadron, she sailed from Sandy Hook on 3 June 1903, on her way to Kiel, Germany. She was visited by Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany on 25 June, and by the Prince of Wales – who would later become King George V of the United Kingdom – on 13 July.

Kearsarge returned to Bar Harbor, Maine, on 26 July, and resumed her position as flagship. On 1 December the ship sailed from New York for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she was present as the United States took formal possession of the Guantanamo Naval Reservation on 10 December. On 26 March 1904 Captain Raymond P. Rodgers assumed command of the ship. Following maneuvers in the Caribbean Sea, Kearsarge left with the North Atlantic Squadron for Lisbon, Portugal, where she met King Carlos I of Portugal on 11 June 1904. Independence Day was celebrated in Phaleron Bay, Greece, with King George I of Greece and his son and daughter-in-law, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. The squadron visited Corfu, Trieste, and Fiume before returning to Newport, Rhode Island, on 29 August 1904.

On 31 March 1905, USS Maine (BB-10) replaced Kearsarge as flagship of the North Atlantic Fleet, although she remained with the fleet. Captain Herbert Winslow took command of the ship during December. On 13 April 1906, while participating in an exercise off Cape Cruz, Cuba, the gunpowder in a 13-inch gun ignited accidentally, killing two officers and eight men.

Great White Fleet

Attached to the Fourth Division of the Second Squadron, and under command of Captain Hamilton Hutchins, she sailed on 16 December 1907 with the Great White Fleet. The fleet left from Hampton Roads, passed by Trinidad and Rio de Janeiro, and then passed through the Straits of Magellan. From there she passed by the west coast of South America, visiting Punta Arenas and Valparaíso, Chile, Callao, Peru, and Magdalena Bay, Mexico. The fleet reached San Diego on 14 April 1908 and moved on to San Francisco on 6 May. Two months later the warships sailed for Honolulu, Hawaii, and from there to Auckland, New Zealand, arriving 9 August. The fleet made Sydney, Australia, on 20 August, and after a week sailed for Melbourne.

Kearsarge departed Albany, Western Australia, on 18 September for ports in the Philippine Islands, Japan, China, and Ceylon before transiting the Suez Canal. The fleet split at Port Said, with Kearsarge leaving on 10 January 1909 for Malta, and arriving in Algiers on 24 January, before reforming with the fleet at Gibraltar on 1 February. She returned to Hampton Roads on 22 February, and was inspected by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

World War I

As with most of the Great White Fleet ships, Kearsarge was modernized on her return. She was decommissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 4 September 1909, and the modernization was completed in 1911, at a cost of US$675,000. The ship received cage masts, new water-tube boilers, and another four 5-inch guns. The 1-pounder guns were removed, as were sixteen of the 6-pounders. She was recommissioned on 23 June 1915, and operated along the Atlantic coast. On 17 September she left Philadelphia to land a detachment of US Marines at Veracruz, Mexico, remaining there from 28 September 1915 to 5 January 1916. She then carried the Marines to New Orleans, Louisiana, before joining the Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Philadelphia on 4 February. Until the United States joined World War I, she trained naval militia from Massachusetts and Maine. During the war she was used to train Armed Guard crews and naval engineers during cruises along the Atlantic seaboard. On 18 August 1918 Kearsarge rescued 26 survivors of the Norwegian barque Nordhav which had been sunk by SMU U-117, bringing them to Boston.

Inter-war period

Between 29 May and 29 August 1919, Kearsarge trained United States Naval Academy midshipmen in the Caribbean. Kearsarge sailed from Annapolis, Maryland to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she decommissioned on either 10 May or 18 May 1920.

Kearsarge was converted into a crane ship, and was given hull classification symbol IX-16 on 17 July 1920, but it was changed to AB-1 on 5 August. Her turrets, superstructure, and armor were removed, and were replaced by a large revolving crane with a lifting capacity of 250 tons (230 tonnes), as well as 10 ft blisters, which improved her stability. The crane ship was utilized often over the next 20 years, including the raising of USS Squalus (SS-192) in 1939.

World War II
On 6 November 1941, Kearsarge was renamed Crane Ship No. 1, allowing her name to be given to USS Hornet (CV-12), and later to USS Kearsarge (CV-33). She continued her service, however, handling guns, turrets, armor, and other heavy lifts for vessels such as USS Indiana (BB-58), USS Alabama (BB-60), USS Savannah (CL-42), USS Chicago (CA-29), and USS Pennsylvania (BB-38).

She was transferred to the San Francisco Naval Shipyard in 1945, where she participated in the construction of Hornet and USS Boxer (CV-21) and the re-construction of USS Saratoga (CV-3). One of her last projects was performing heavy lifts during the reassembly of another crane vessel, YD-171 (ex-Schwimmkran nr. 1) on Terminal Island. In 1948 she left the West Coast for the Boston Naval Shipyard. On 22 June 1955 her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register, and she was sold for scrap on 9 August.

title: USS Kearsarge (BB-5)