Speed had spoken lightly of a quick trip to Alexandria, but with that pack of dilatory dagoes tacking to and fro and putting about between the heel of Italy and Crete, we must have covered all of two thousand miles, and half the time allotted me to reach Napier had gone before we sighted Egypt. It’s a sand-blown dunghill at any time, but I was dam’ glad to see it after that dead bore of a voyage – and no dreary haul across the desert in prospect either. The camel journey was a penance I’d endured in the past, but now it was rails all the way from Alex to Suez, by way of Cairo, and what had once taken days of arse-burning discomfort was now a journey of eight hours, thanks to our engineers who’d won the concession in the teeth of frantic French opposition. They were hellish jealous of their great canal, which was then within a year of completion, with gangs of thousands of the unfortunate fellaheen being mercilessly flogged on the last lap, for it was built with slave labour in all but name.9
We didn’t linger in Alexandria; Egypt’s the last place you want to carry a cargo of valuables, so I made a quick sortie to the Hôtel de l’Europe for a bath and a civilised breakfast while the Marine sergeant drummed up the local donkey drivers to carry the boxes to the station, and then we were rattling away, four hours to Cairo, another four on the express to Suez, and before bed-time I’d presented myself to the port captain and was dining in the Navy mess. Abyssinia was on every lip, and when it was understood that the celebrated Flashy was bringing Napier his war-chest,10 it was heave and ho with a vengeance. A steam sloop commanded by a cheerful infant named Ballantyne with a sun-peeled nose and a shock of fair hair bleached almost white by the sun was placed at my disposal, his tars hoisted the strong-boxes aboard and stowed them below, the Jollies were crammed into the tiny focsle, and as the sun came up next morning we were thrashing down the Gulf of Suez to the Red Sea proper, having been in and out of Egypt in twenty-four hours, which is a day longer than you’d care to spend there.
The Suez gulf isn’t more than ten miles across at its narrowest point, and Ballantyne, who was as full of gas and high spirits as a twenty-year-old with an independent command can be, informed me that this was where the Children of Israel had made their famous crossing in the Exodus, “but it’s all balls and Banbury about the sea being parted and Pharaoh’s army being drowned, you know. There are places where you can walk from Egypt to the Sinai at low tide, and an old Gyppo nigger told me it wasn’t Pharaoh who was chasing ’em, either, but a lot of rascally Bedouin Arabs, and after Moses had got over at low water, the tide came in and the buddoos were drowned and serve ’em right. And there wasn’t a blessed chariot to be seen when the tide went out, so there!”11
His bosun said beggin’ his pardon, sir, but that was blasphemy, and they fell to arguing while the tars grinned and chaffed and my Bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t used to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bringing their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football team of which they were captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the young cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend – and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment. Young Ballantyne couldn’t follow orders, because he hadn’t any beyond a roving commission; his crew were all older than he was, but he must live with ’em and mess with ’em, share their hardships and dangers as one of ’em, and make them like and trust him because he was what he was, so that when he said “Go!” they’d obey, even unto death.
I’d never have done for the Navy. You may fool soldiers by holding aloof and looking martial, but Jack would have seen through me before we’d crossed the bar. That’s the hellish thing about life aboard ship – there’s nowhere to hide either your carcase or your nature.
We had a taste of Ballantyne’s the second day out, just after we’d passed the Ras Mohammed point at the foot of Sinai, and the hand in the bows spotted a low, ugly-looking craft with a great lateen sail which sheered away at sight of us, running for a little cluster of islands near the Egyptian shore.
“Slaver, pound to a penny!” yells our young Nelson. “Bosun, clear away the gun. Tomkins, open the arms chest! Sir Harry, I’d be obliged if your fellows would take station two either side, ready to fire if need be. Tally-ho!” And he seized the wheel while his engineer thundered his motor and our little sloop fairly flew over the water. Ballantyne’s dozen tars were diving below deck and emerging with pieces and cutlasses, and I directed my sergeant to place his fellows at the rail as requested, and shocked his military soul by countermanding his order to them to put on their hats and coats. You shoot straighter in shirt-sleeves when there’s an African sun blazing down on you.
But they didn’t get the chance, for the slavers reached a rocky island ahead of us and abandoned ship, taking their human cargo with them. We were still half a mile off and powerless to interfere as a dozen or so white-robed Arabs and upwards of a hundred naked niggers, men, women, and children, were tumbling ashore and up into the rocks; we could hear their squeals and the crack of the courbashes as the slavers lashed them on, the leader of the gang turning to jeer and gesture obscenely as we hove to a pistol-shot off shore. Ballantyne danced with rage and shook his fist.
“You disgusting bastards, I’ll larn you!” yells he, his voice fairly cracking. “Bosun, stand by the gun – no, belay that! Marines, take aim at that son-of-a-bitch – no, dammit, belay that too!” For the slavers’ leader had snatched up one of the infants as a shield, and his rascals followed suit or mingled with the panic-stricken slaves so that we daren’t fire.
“Oh, you cads!” bawls Ballantyne. “Oh, you cowardly rotters! You shan’t escape us! Run her in, bosun! Stand by with your cutlasses, you men! We’ll settle your hash, you beastly black villains! They can’t outrun us with the slaves! Pistols, Tomkins, and load two for me! And two for Sir Harry – and a cutlass! We’ll run ’em to earth in a jiffy, sir, what? Ha-ha!”
He was such a happy little blood-spiller, just bursting to be at the enemy, that I hated to spoil his fun, but I was shot if I was going to be plunged into a cut-and-thrust brawl with those desperate brutes – and I had the perfect excuse for overriding him. I bellowed an order to the engineer to hold on, and cut short Ballantyne’s falsetto protest.
“Sorry, my lad, it’s no go! We’re carrying an army’s treasury, and it ain’t to be risked for a gaggle of slaves!”
“But we can cut ’em up in no time, and rescue the poor souls!” cries he. “We’ve done it before, you know! Bosun’ll tell you –”
“Well, you ain’t doing it today,” says I, and he was hitting Top C until the bosun shook his head and said I was right, beggin’ your pardon, sir, can’t risk the dollars no-how. Ballantyne looked as though he would cry, but made the best of it like a good ’un.
“Quite right, Sir Harry, I wasn’t thinkin’! Forgive me – dam’ thoughtless! I say, though, we can sink the beggars’ boat! That’ll spoil their filthy trade for them! Bosun, man the gun!”
“Wot abaht the slaves, sir?” says bosun. “Them black devils is liable to cut their throats aht o’ spite if we sink her.”
Ballantyne weighed this for a good two seconds, frowning judicially like Buggins Major undecided whether to thrash Juggins Minor or set him a hundred lines of Virgil. Then he snapped: “No. If we don’t scupper ’em those poor creatures will be sold like cattle. They cannot be worse off if they and those fiends are left stranded. And by gum there’ll be one less hell-ship runnin’ black ivory!”
Bosun touched his hat, but pointed out that their six-pounder would take all day to smash the slaver’s timbers. “Then burn the bugger!” cries Ballantyne, and two men were sent in the gig to set her ablaze with bundles of tow. Sh
e went up like a November bonfire, while the slavers screamed helplessly from the hillside. Then we stood off, Ballantyne scowling and vowing vengeance.
“It’s too bad!” says he. “The white-livered ruffians always take to the nearest shore, but we’ve chased ’em and brought off the slaves two or three times, ’cos they never make a fight of it, the chicken-hearted scoundrels!” He stared back at the shore and the blazing vessel. “Aye, they’re well up in the rocks, the beasts – and you must be careful, you know. Chum of mine, Jack Legerwood, chased one gang too far, just a couple of months ago. They caught him, made an awful mess of him, poor old chap. Gad, if I could only lay hands on them!”
You know my opinion of heroics, and I’d not break sweat myself to save a parcel of handless niggers being sold into slavery – which is probably no worse than the lives they’ve been living in some desert pesthole, and may well be a blessed change for the females who find a billet in some randy bashaw’s hareem. I mentioned this to Ballantyne, and he blushed crimson and exclaimed: “I say!” A true-blue Arnoldian paladin, he was, pure of heart and full of Christian zeal to cherish the weak and have a grand time cutting up the ungodly.
But I ain’t mocking him, much, and I’ve a sight more use for him and his like than for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip-service to delivering the heathen from error’s chain by preaching and giving their ha’pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a thought for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilisation and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn’t wish for your worst enemy. I’ve even heard ’em maligned like my old shipmate Brookeb for taking a high hand and shooting first and hammering slavers and pirates and brigands like the wrath of God. Censure’s so easy at a distance, but I’ve seen them on the frontiers, schoolboys with the down still on their cheeks doing a man’s work and getting a seedeboy’s pay12 and damn-all thanks and more often than not a bullet for their twenty-first birthday – why, I’d just seen one, too young to vote, weighing a hundred black lives in the balance, and deciding, in a couple of seconds, the kind of fearful question his reverend seniors at home would have shied a mile from.
I think he was right, by the way, and I speak from experience, having shirked responsibility too often to count. But the Ballantynes and Legerwoods didn’t, and if the slave trade has been swept off the face of the seas, it hasn’t really been the work of reformers and statesmen with lofty ideals in London and Paris and Washington, but because a long-forgotten host of fairly feckless young Britons did it for fun. And you may tell the historians I said so.
It’s about a thousand miles from Sinai to the Abyssinian port of Zoola, and I supposed our frisky little steamer would cover it in no time, but it didn’t. Halfway the boiler sprang a leak, and it was the grace of God that we were off Jedda at the time, for in those days it was the only place worth a dam on the whole benighted Red Sea coast, being the port where the Muslim pilgrims disembark for Mecca, which lies a couple of days’ march inland. Consequently the place is aswarm with them, arriving and departing in every kind of boat from Chinese junks and ancient steamers to feluccas and coracles. We had a consul there, and the Navy were always on hand; they used the place as a rendezvous, with a supply depot and smithy where our engineer was able to get his kettle mended.
There’s a place called El Golea in the deep Sahara which they say is the hottest spot on earth, but I’ll put my money on Jedda – or anywhere else on the Red Sea for that matter. We sweltered for days, and the bosun won a bet from the marines by frying an egg on the deck. The waterfront was a bedlam of boats, and the town itself was choked with a vast milling horde of pilgrims who turned it into a human ant-heap, with the heat and stench rising from it in choking waves which I’ll swear were visible above the famous white walls. I lay gasping under an awning trying to ignore the deafening din of a million niggers shouting and wailing as I leafed through an old copy of Punch in which there was a rhyme about Britons in chains in Abyssinia, and a cartoon of Emperor Theodore as a thick-lipped sambo – well wide of the mark, as I was to discover.
Punch didn’t think much of our expedition, and had a fine old grouse about War Office muddle, and the cost to the middle classes which they said should be defrayed by nabbing Theodore and exhibiting him in a cage at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly at a shilling a time.13
If I was impatient of delay, Ballantyne was fit to burst; there were a couple of sloops like ours about to weigh anchor for some place down the Arabian coast where our native spies had word of a great cargo of slaves coming from the African shore, and our young hero was like a baby denied its bottle.
“More than a thousand slaves bound for El Confound-it,c and we’re stuck in this beastly hole! Of all the luck! We’ll never be fit in time!”
“Oh, I dunno,” says our informant, another sprightly juvenile, modishly clad in jellaba, brass-buttoned jacket, and pirate head-scarf. “Slavers mayn’t show for a week yet, and Confound-it ain’t far across from Zoola. Tell your engineer you’ll stop his grog if he don’t get a move on, why don’t you?”
A dam’ silly suggestion, since the surest way to make a British workman take his time is to threaten him, especially if you call him a Port Mahon baboon into the bargain, and it was all of another ten days, a week later than Speed had reckoned, before we were steaming down Annesley Bay, the gulf on which Zoola lies. And d’you know, only now, with my first glimpse of the Abyssinian shore, did it come home to me that apart from the sketch I’d been given by Speed, and a few scraps I’d picked up from Ballantyne and the boys at Jedda, I knew nothing about the country or people or why we were going to war with them, really. I’d left Trieste in the deuce of a hurry, quite elated at escaping the consequences of my evil conduct and the novelty of the commission I’d been given, and here I was, with the job almost done, and wondering for the first time what the dickens it was all about.
And since you, honest reader, know no more than I did myself as we threaded our way through the vast fleet assembled in Annesley Bay and were engulfed in Zoola’s two most charming attractions, borne by the land breeze – a fine powdery dust that hung over us in a cloud, and the most appalling stench – it seems a proper time to tell you of things which I had yet to learn, about Abyssinia and the casus belli that had brought Napier and his army all the way from India to this mysterious coast.
To begin with, you must understand that the Abyssinians are like no other Africans, being some kind of Semitic folk who came from Arabia in the far-off time, handsome, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but civilised beyond any in the continent bar the Egyptians, with whom they shared a fierce mutual hatred, partly because the Gyppoes were forever carrying off their beautiful women and boys as slaves, partly because the Abs (as I call ’em for convenience) are devout and violently militant Christians, and can’t abide Muslims – or Roman Catholics. Very orthodox, they are, having been Christian long before we were, and of fairly primitive doctrine – I’ve seen church paintings (admission one dollar) of a Byzantinish-looking St George slaying the dragon while Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens look on in admiration, and a depiction of the Last Supper with places laid for fourteen.
And their Christianity don’t run to morality, not far at least. They lie and deceive with a will, drink to excess, slaughter each other for amusement, and the women couple like stoats. The corollary to their adage that “a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband” is that there are dam’ few crowned heads in Abyssinia, and hear, hear! say I, for ’twould be a cruel shame to have all that splendid married pulchritude going to waste.
They don’t look at all negroid; indeed, the Ab females fit my notion of Cleopatra with their straight noses, chiselled lips, almond eyes, saucy shapes, and in many cases skins no darker than an Italian’s. They know how to preen, too, the Shoho women of the north in shell-embroidered black cloaks over tight leather tunics from bosom to thigh, jolly fetching, and the Galla girls of the south, reckoned the handsomest of all, their perfect faces framed by elaborate
oiled braids plaited from crown to shoulder. Some go naked to the waist, with little aprons made of thongs, and by gad they can stand the exposure. But if they’re fair, they’re fierce; one I knew was such a peach that the slavers who’d taken her expected a record price, but were disappointed when she discouraged the buyers by juggling a throwing-knife during the bidding, and they had to give her away.
In the men, the Egyptian look is enhanced by their white cotton robes, and their laziness, for they’re the idlest folk alive except when fighting, which they are much of the time, for everyone’s a warrior and goes armed. They don’t seem to know what fear is; the younger nobles have a curious custom of waiting at river fords to challenge travellers to single combat – and how they came by that Arthurian custom must be an interesting story.
Their houses aren’t much better than large huts, thatched and simply furnished, although they have occasional castle-like buildings on hill-tops; their towns are large walled villages with what seem to be permanent fairs and markets, and even their cities (if you can call ’em that) are no more than a collection of houses on top of a massive precipitous height called an amba. Magdala, the goal of Napier’s expedition, was like that; you don’t need battlements when you have sheer rock walls below you.14
So there you have the Abs, a pretty rum lot, first brought to our notice in the 1770s by a Scotch eccentric whom nobody believed – mind you, he was pretty rum himself, fooling about with the Barbary corsairs, seeking the source of the Nile, and finally breaking his neck while helping a lady downstairs, which shows that even the most seasoned mad adventurers can’t be too careful.15
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