EUROPE DIVIDES

Although colonial competition and trade rivalries certainly flourished, the opening years of the twentieth century saw Europe at least relatively at peace compared with previous centuries. The ruling dynasties of the major European powers were united by a common lineage, Empress Queen Victoria, grandmother of both the German Kaiser and the Russian Czar and mother of Edward VII, the future king of Great Britain. Victoria's death in 1901 prefaced a new era as most of Europe slid towards the first of two cataclysmic wars, plunging the world into global conflict, with the colonies of each power rallying to their respective causes.

The new century began with a remarkable episode in maritime history involving two black seafarers. In 1902 the crews of British merchant ships, as multicultural and multiracial as ever, were as yet undivided: French, Dutch, German, Chinese, African and black seamen of the wider Diaspora served alongside each other. In October of that year, the British ship Veronica, a three-masted barque, began a voyage from the Gulf of Mexico to Montevideo with a multinational crew of 12 men. Antoine V. Bellande, an ancestor of the American family historian Ray Bellande, was the pilot put aboard the Veronica at Biloxi, Mississippi, at the outset of the journey. He claimed that three of her German crewmen had become upset with their Anglo-Saxon shipmates, a grim harbinger of the coming conflict between the great nations of Europe. Resentment of their officers led two of the Germans, Gustav Rau and Otto Monsson, and Willem Schmidt, a Dutchman, to murder Captain Shaw and other crew members, before setting the ship afire while off the north-east coast of Brazil on 20 December 1902.

The conspirators had planned to pick off the officers and crew one by one during a night watch. Harry Flohr, a 16-year-old German national, was given no choice as to whether or not he joined his fellow countrymen. He was chosen to kill Paddy Doran, the crewman on night watch, but could not do it at the critical moment. Rau took the task upon himself, felling Doran with two blows of a belaying pin from behind after engaging him in conversation. Not quite dead, Doran was stowed away in a deck locker and later thrown overboard.