Jane Austen's Brother Who Died in Burma

Portrait of Charles Austen, illustration by Kenneth Wong

On October 6, 1852, Rear-Admiral Charles J. Austen, the 73-year-old naval Commander-in-Chief of East India, was sailing up the Irrawaddy River in its steam sloop Pluto, its bow turned toward Pyay and the famous Shwe Sandaw Pagoda, where Buddha's sacred hair relic was supposedly enshrined.

Behind him lay Rangoon and the gold-washed Shwe Dagon Pagoda, already captured by the British forces on the eve of the second Anglo-Burmese war. Beyond Pyay and much further upriver was Mandalay, the seat of power for the Burmese Empire.

The Pluto was on a reconnaissance mission. Some of the ships escorting it had lagged behind, fending off the Burmese resistance at Danubyu. An experienced seaman, Austen must have known the longer the Pluto sailed alone in hostile waters, the more vulnerable its position was. He must have been scanning the muddy waters of the Irrawaddy, hoping for his contingent to catch up.

Eventually he spotted two steamers to his relief. He then sat down to write a letter to his wife, and went to bed. The next morning, Austen died of the cholera that had been stalking him for the past two-three weeks.

Those were the final moments of Charles Austen, the younger brother of the English novelist Jane Austen. He died in Burma, by an island identified in some English naval histories as Shouk Shay Khune and in the Burmese records as Gaung Say Kyune (the Head-Cleansing Island).

The Burma Connection

In Inroads into Burma: A Travellers' Anthology, in the introduction to an eyewitness account of the storming of Shwe Dagon during the Second Anglo-Burmese War, is the following parenthetical remark by the editor.

On 6 April 1852, Admiral Charles Austen (Jane Austen's brother) assembled his steamships to bombard the shores of the Rangoon River, and Lieutenant-General Henry Godwin's troops went into action. (Oxford U. Press, Oxford, 1977, P. 199).

Jane Austen's Regency romances, populated with plucky heroines and wooded estates, seem a world apart from the cannon-battered forts and cholera-ravaged camps of colonial Burma. But Charles Austen, born four years after Jane Austen, provided the unlikely link.

A fuller picture of Charles Austen emerges in Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers by J. H. Hubback and E. C. Hubback (Ballantine & Co. Ltd. London, 1906). Like his older brother Francis Austen, Charles went to the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth. His military career spanned across the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, reaching its pinnacle and conclusion in East India. 

One of his early adventures occurred while he was serving aboard HMS Endymion, recorded in Sailor Brothers as follows:

On the occasion of the capture of the Scipio, Lieutenant Charles Austen specially distinguished himself. The encounter took place in a violent gale, but, in spite of wind and weather, he put off in a boat with only four men, and boarded the vessel, which had just surrendered. The Scipio was a fine craft of 18 guns, manned by 140 men. (P. 91)

In 1809, aboard the St. Alban, Charles was on a voyage to China, transporting some East Indiamen (East India Company's employees). His meticulous records from the trip to Penang reveal his early contacts with Burma:

Timber fit for naval purposes may be procured at several places in the neighborhood, particularly Pegu and Rangoon on the coast of Aracan ... (Sailor Brothers, P. 216)

In 1846, Charles was promoted to become Rear-Admiral, and in 1850, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the East India Station. By then, war was brewing once more in Rangoon.

Watercolor by Lieutenant Joseph Moore of Her Majesty’s 89th Regiment, British Army, showing the scene upon the terrace of Shwe Dagon Pagoda, in Rangoon, Burma, around 1826. http://www.wdl.org/en/item/9213

The Fuse is Lit

According to Sailor Brothers, "Lord Dalhousie, as Governor-General at Calcutta, had taken steps to protect British traders from the extractions of the Burmese officials at Rangoon by sending a Commission of Inquiry, with power to demand reparation. The Commissioner (Commodore Lambert) decided to treat only with the King of Ava, who consented, in January 1852, to remove the Governor from Rangoon. This action did not, however, prove effectual in settling the grievances, and Commodore Lambert declared the Burmese coast in a state of blockade; his vessel was fired upon, and he retaliated by destroying a stockade on the river-bank, and some Burmese war-boats." (PP. 278-279). 

Burmese historian Maung Htin Aung offers a different view: 

How peaceful Dalhousie's intentions were could be guessed by the fact that Lambert was instructed to take with him a squadron of well-armed frigates ... The Burmese king showed diplomacy and restraint; he agreed to recall the governor of Rangoon and to pay the compensation to the aggrieved captains ... The crisis seemed to have passed, but when the new governor of Rangoon arrived Lambert publicly insulted the governor by sending a delegation consisting of some of his officers and a local missionary to proceed on horseback right to the governor's door ...

The governor naturally refused to see the delegation ... Lambert seized a ship belonging to the king ... As Lambert sailed out to the harbor with the king's ship as prize, the Burmese shore batteries fired on the British squadron, which returned the fire with its superior guns, destroying all the Burmese batteries and Burmese ships and setting the foreshore aflame. (A History of Burma (Columbia University Press, New York, London, 1967, P. 226).

Final Mission

On April 3, 1852, "accompanied by two ships and the necessary troops, [Charles] was on his way to Martaban, which they attacked and captured on the 5th. The place was held by 5,000 men; but after a bombardment of an hour and a half, it was taken by storm with small loss ... On the 10th began a general combined movement on Rangoon, which fell on the 14th, the Rattler taking a leading part in attacking the outlying stockades. The large stockade round the town and the pagoda was carried at the point of the bayonet. The navy suffered but little loss from the enemy; but cholera set in, and the Admiral fell ill," according to Sailor Brothers (P. 279).

Charles then left for Culcutta to be nursed back to health. When he recovered, he returned to duty, arriving back in Rangoon on the Hastings. 

"On October 6, his last notes at Prome are as follows: 'Received a report that two steamers had been seen at anchor some miles below, wrote this and a letter to my wife, and read the lessons of the day.' On the following morning he died. The Burmese leader was also killed during the assault, which took place at Donabyu not long afterwards, and his army then retreated," records Sailor Brothers (P. 281).

The Unidentified Defender

It's unclear who the Burmese leader killed at Danubyu (Donabyu) was. According to Burmese historian Thant Myint Oo's Lost Footstep blog, Burmese defense at the time was led by Maung Gyi, Lord of Dabayin, son of the legendary Burmese general Maha Bandula, who fell in Danubyu in 1825 during the first Anglo-Burmese war.

Maung Gyi, however, did not die. In the biographical notes accompanying his watercolor portrait, the painter Colesworthy Grant (1813-1880) says, "Under the prestige of his father's name, and not from any display of military talent or disposition in himself, Moung-ghee was appointed General of the Burmese army sent against the British at commencement of the last war; when expectations of the wonders which he was to have accomplished being disappointed, or dissatisfaction in some way occasioned, he was recalled to the capital; but fully knowing this was but the prelude to the loss of his head, Moung-ghee very wisely came over to the British, by whom he was, and continues to be, kindly treated." 

The desperation of the Burmese defenders and the ruthless measures deemed necessary to repel the British advances are recorded in ကုန်းဘောင်ဆက်မဟာရာဇဝင်တော်ကြီး (တတိယတွဲ) The Great History of the Konbong Dynasty, Vol. 3, by ဦးမောင်မောင်တင် U Maung Maung Tin (တက္ကသိုလ်များ သမိုင်းသုတေသနဦးစီးဌာန University Historical Research Dpt., Yangon, 2004):

အောက်ကြောင်းချီ တပ်တော်တွင် ချီတက်တိုက်ခိုက် ထမ်းရွက်စေသည့် ရွေးလက်ယာဗိုလ် ငရစ်၊ လက်ယာကြောင်းဗိုလ် ငရှမ်းအို၊ နတ်စု လက်ဝဲဗိုလ် ငရွှေငုံတို့ကိုလည်း အစုအငန်း စားကျေးမြို့ရွာ ပေးတော်မူပြီးလျှင် ချုပ်ကြီးအုပ်ကြီး အရာနှင့် သူကောင်းပြုတော်မူသည့်သူဖြစ်လျက် စွန့်စွန့်စားစား မထမ်းမရွက် အကြိမ်ကြိမ် ဆုတ်ခွာကြောင်းကို ရွှေနားတော်ကြားတော်မှု၍ အောက်ကြောင်းချီဗိုလ်မှုး ကျောက်ပန်းတောင်းမြို့စား ဝန်ကြီးက အမိန့်တော်နှင့် တပ်ဦးတွင် အဆုံးစီရင်ရ၏။ (P. 89)

When [the king] heard that right-ywae general Nga Yit, right-line general Nga Shan Oh, and left-natsu general Nga Shwe Ngone from the lower-march army, inspite of being awarded town and village domains and raised to honored administrative positions, were repeatedly in retreat without taking risk in their duty, he had them executed before the army, by the order of the lower-march general and Lord of Kyauk Badaung. (P. 89)

(Ywae, natsu, and other terms denote units and subdivisions of the Konbong Era Burmese military system.)

Rest in Trincomalee

The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, Volume 6, identifies Rear-Admiral Austen's place of death as "off the island of Shouk Shay Khune" (William Laird Clowes et. al., Samson, Low, Marston & Company, London, 1901, P. 380). မြန်မာ့စစ်မှတ်တမ်းများနှင့် သေနင်္ဂဗျူဟာများ The Burmese War Records and Strategies by ဦးစိန်လွင်လေး U Sein Lwin Lay, lists the place as "ခေါင်းဆေးကျွန်း Gaung Say Kyune (Head-Cleansing Island)" (ရန်အောင်စာပေ Yanaung Sarpay, 2009, P. 156).

Charles Austen (1779-1852) outlived his novelist-sister Jane Austen (1775-1817) by 35 years. His gravestone in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, according to the Maritime Memorial page, reads:

Sacred to the memory of his Excellency C.J. Austen Esq. Companion of the Most Hon. Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and commander in chief of H.M. Naval Force in the East India and China station. Died off Prome 7 Oct 1852 while in command of the naval expedition on the Irrawaddy against Burmese forces aged 73 years'

Note: My sincere gratitude to Ko Zaw Min Oo, a fellow history buff and bibliophile, who provided corroborating Burmese sources to verify the location of Austen's death.

Further Readings

Inroads Into Burma: A Travellers' Anthology, compiled and edited by Gerry Abbot (Oxford University Press, Oxford, Singapore, New York, 1977)
Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers: being the Adventures of Sir Francis Austen, Admiral of the Fleet and Rear-Admiral Charles Austen, John Henry Hubback, Edith Charlotte Hubback (Ballantine & Co. Ltd., London, 1906)
A History of Burma, Maung Htin Aung (Columbia University Press, New York, London, 1967)
မြန်မာ့စစ်မှတ်တမ်းများနှင့် သေနင်္ဂဗျူဟာများ The Burmese War Records and Strategies, ဦးစိန်လွင်လေး U Sein Lwin Lay (ရန်အောင်စာပေ Yanaung Sarpay, Yangon, 2009)
ကုန်းဘောင်ဆက်မဟာရာဇဝင်တော်ကြီး (တတိယတွဲ) The Great History of the Konbong Dynasty, Vol. 3, ဦးမောင်မောင်တင် U Maung Maung Tin (တက္ကသိုလ်များ သမိုင်းသုတေသနဦးစီးဌာန University Historical Research Dpt., Yangon, 2004)