Squadron
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Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained up the east coast of Africa through the mid-1800s, even after the Civil War ended it in the United States. Further undermining the British Empire was the fact that many of the vessels involved in the trade were themselves British ships.
The Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron to patrol Africa’s coast. Following what began as a simple policing action, this is the story of four Royal Naval officers who witnessed how rampant the slave trade remained and made it their personal mission to end it. When the disruption in trade ships started to step on toes within the wealthy merchant class, the campaign was cancelled. However, in the end a coalition of naval officers and abolitionists forced the British government’s hand into eradicating the slave trade entirely.
Squadron grew from historian John Broich’s passion to hunt down firsthand accounts of this untold story. Through research from archives throughout the UK, Broich tells a tale of defiance in the face of political corruption, while delivering thrills in the tradition of high seas heroism. If it weren’t a true story, Squadron would be right at home alongside Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series.
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2017 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-4683-1400-7
‘The worst of men is the seller of men.’
MUHAMMAD
Map 1: The Indian Ocean
Map 2: The East Coast of Africa
Map 3: Madagascar
Cut-away profile and aerial view of the Amazon-class sloop
CONTENTS
Copyright
List of illustrations
Glossary of historical figures
Glossary of mid-nineteenth-century Royal Navy ranks
Introduction: The Arabian Sea, May 1869
PART I. ‘SET A SQUADRON IN THE FIELD’
1 ‘On the brow o’ the sea’: Meara, Heath, Sulivan and Colomb before their convergence
2 ‘The valiant of this warlike isle’: The commodore’s resolution and the journey of the Daphne
3 ‘His bark is stoutly timber’d’: Commodore Heath declares his intent and the Amazons prepare for their campaign
4 ‘The imminent deadly breach’: Daphne hunts and draws first blood
5 ‘In her prophetic fury sew’d the work’: The spiders spin their web, unaware of their own vulnerability
6 ‘With all his might’: Edward Meara between the choices of justice and the law
7 ‘If it prove lawful prize’: The grinding work of inspecting traders, and the question of prize money
8 ‘Of moving accidents by flood and field’: Dryad and Daphne continue the hunt, meeting success and near disaster
9 ‘Destiny unshunnable, like death’: The courtroom on the Dryad and the battle in Zanzibar harbour
10 ‘Most disastrous chances’: The daring of the Kroomen, the success of the spider’s web tactic, and the cost in lives
PART II. ‘A DANGEROUS SEA’
11 ‘Too true an evil’: Forces array against the squadron while Daphne approaches the realm of a slaver king
12 ‘The wind hath spoke aloud at land’: As word of the squadron’s ‘zealotry’ spreads, so does alarm in official circles
13 ‘Swell his sail with thine own powerful breath’: Sulivan, Meara and Heath work to expose hypocrisy, and Daphne tries to outrun a curse
14 ‘Stand upon the foaming shore’: Philip Colomb tries to win the release of hundreds of kidnapped Mozambicans
15 ‘Traitors ensteep’d to clog the guiltless keel’: The squadron sails into political trouble
16 ‘Vouch with me, heaven’: Sulivan tests the depths of hypocrisy while Colomb examines the fate of the African refugees
17 ‘False as water’: Dark days for Meara and Sulivan at Zanzibar, while Colomb wins a joyless victory in Madagascar
PART III. ‘SOLD TO SLAVERY, OF MY REDEMPTION THENCE’
18 ‘The desperate tempest’: The political storm breaks over the squadron
19 ‘After every tempest come such calms’: News of their work precedes the captains to Britain, to good effect
20 ‘May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!’: The last effort to compel Zanzibar
21 ‘Here is my journey’s end’: A return that marks the beginning of the end
Note on sources and methods
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Map 1: The Indian Ocean
Map 2: The East Coast of Africa
Map 3: Madagascar
An Amazon class frigate
Leopold Heath, photographed at the end of his career, after having been made Rear Admiral, 1871
George Sulivan
Sketch of Dryad drying her sails in the harbour of Zanzibar
Photo of former kidnapees on board Daphne, 1868
Tippu Tip
A sketch of a dhow, probably by Zanzibar Consul John Kirk, c. 1872
One of the Amazons attempting a rescue and depicting the slaver running aground
Drawing by Midshipman Frank Fauwell, “Section of a dhow showing the manner of stowing slaves on board,” in his log for HMS Forte, 1869
Emaciated child refugees from slavery on board HMS Daphne. Photograph by George Sulivan, 1868
Dryad (Colomb’s ship) making a capture
The crew of the Nymphe boarding a dhow in Zanzibar
Penny Illustrated Paper, November 1868
The Illustrated London News, February 1869
HMS London in Zanzibar Harbour, 1881
GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL FIGURES
Philip Colomb
Commander, Royal Navy; captain of HMS Dryad
Leopold Heath
Captain, Royal Navy; commodore of the East Indies Station, Bombay
Edward Meara
Commander, Royal Navy; captain of HMS Nymphe
George Sulivan
Commander (later Captain), Royal Navy; captain of HMS Daphne
Minor figures
Henry Churchill
British consul, Zanzibar
Sir Henry Bartle Frere
Diplomat, head of the British mission to Zanzibar 1872
Dr John Kirk
Acting British consul, Zanzibar
David Livingstone
Missionary explorer in East Africa
Conolly Pakenham
British consul, Madagascar
Colonel Lewis Pelly
Former British consul at Zanzibar, diplomat in charge of Persian Gulf matters, based in Persia
Ranavalona II
Queen of Madagascar and eventual Anglican convert
Henry Rothery<
br />
Lawyer in the ecclesiastical and Admiralty court in London; legal advisor to the Treasury on slave trade matters
Majid bin Said
Sultan of Zanzibar 1856–1870
Barghash bin Said
Brother of Majid and Sultan of Zanzibar 1870–1888
GLOSSARY OF MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROYAL NAVY RANKS
Flag, commissioned, and subordinate officers in order from highest to lowest rank:
Admiral, Vice Admiral, Rear Admiral
Commodore (a rank that a captain holds while leading a squadron or on a special task)
(Post-)Captain
Commander (called ‘Captain’ when leading a ship)
Lieutenant
Master
Chaplain
Surgeon
Paymaster
Sub-Lieutenant (formerly Mate)
Midshipman
Warrant officers. Order does not necessarily denote rank hierarchy because these and other non-commissioned officers often reported directly to the captain, lieutenant, or other officers.
Gunner
Boatswain/Bosun
Carpenter
Chief Engineer
Assistant Engineer
Petty officers. Order does not necessarily denote rank hierarchy.
Master-at-Arms
Captain of the Forecastle and captains of various sail positions
Captain’s Coxswain
Quartermaster
Ship’s Corporal
Sailmaker
Ropemaker
Caulker
Blacksmith
Leading Stoker
Cooper
Armourer
Head Krooman
Leading rates and seamen. Order does not necessarily denote rank hierarchy.
Leading Seaman
Shipwright
Able Seaman
Captain’s Steward
Captain’s Cook
Ward/Gun Room Steward
Ward/Gun Room Cook
Ordinary Seaman
Barber Krooman
Boy 1st Class, Boy 2nd Class
INTRODUCTION
THE ARABIAN SEA, MAY 1869
EIGHTY MEN, women and children were squeezed in a space forty feet long and not twenty-five wide. They were in the dark, under a bamboo deck, in airless heat – bent, crouched, huddled. Limbs welded stiff, they could not have stood even had the deck above their heads miraculously disappeared. The meagre hull moved north along the coast. Above it was dawn. But dark, always, under the deck.
In that dark was Kiada, born near the shores of the great lake Nyasa. Over a year before, war came to her village and her brother was killed. She and another brother were seized by men who made them walk uncountable miles far across hills and forests until they came to the edge of a sea, even greater than Nyasa whose shores stretched beyond seeing. She was held in a town on the edge of the sea for a year. There she was made to pound rice, removing the chaff. For some reason she was then placed on a ship to cross the water and it soon sailed the short distance to the island of Zanzibar about fifty miles from the East African coast, the island itself only sixty miles long. Then men displayed her in the slave market there. She had been purchased and packed in this dhow many days ago. She was now twelve years old.
Aminha was sixteen years old and a year before had been at home with her parents. She was abducted, forced to the coast, then transported to Zanzibar where she was made a labourer, carrying loads around the island. But even amid fear and captivity she found some consolation – a husband, another one of her master’s slaves. She loved him, but not long ago she had become desperately sick, beyond the help of her husband. Her master was alarmed, not that she was suffering but because he seemed about to lose his investment. He decided to cut his losses, selling her out of his estate and away from her husband forever.
The boy Bakaat was born at the coastal town of Kilwa to enslaved parents. He had been kidnapped from his father one year ago when he was eleven years old and sold into slavery at Zanzibar.
Mabluk, the same age, was from the country around Lake Nyasa. He had been held on Zanzibar for two years. Before that, he had been given to slavers by his own brother. The two were starving, eating grass in desperation, and when an opportunity came, his brother sent him with a slaver hoping that Mabluk, at least, would get food. The boy was held by an Indian trader in Zanzibar before being sold and stowed in this ship.
Masumamhe was terribly hungry. Fifteen years old, she had been seized in a raid on her village three years ago. Men marched her overland to a port and then shipped her across the short passage to Zanzibar, where she was made to collect coconuts. Then, in the middle of the day, while she was carrying her load, unknown men had seized her, taken her to a house and hidden her away. There were around ten others captive there and they were kept like this for many weeks. Finally the men took her out at night and packed her away in this shallow hold.
Masuk was abducted when there was war in the lands around his village. He had been just a child then. He was sixteen now, a long-time servant of a merchant in Zanzibar. Then, for some reason – he never learned why – he was taken to the slave market and sold. That had been some months ago. Then one day he learned that he was to be carried from the island on a ship to some unknown port. But when the time approached he was told that the ship had been seized and burned by foreigners. Nevertheless, after a time he was crowded into this small ship.
In the dark there were eighty men, women and children bound for a destiny unknown other than that it was a future as property – brute labour, farm work, war-making, house servant, sexual property.
The small ship moved north along the coast. Then came a noise like thunder, but not thunder – as loud as thunder, but sudden, then gone. Something was happening.1
If a country has the military power to stop an obvious evil, should it take direct action? If a foreign military murders its country’s minority children with nerve gas, tortures them to death? If nationalist revolutionaries create rape and torture camps, commit ethnic cleansing? If a powerful country that discovers such evils has the physical might to stop them, must it stop them in order to be ‘good’? Does it have, in other words, an ethical imperative? Otherwise, should it be condemned by history for having sat on its hands?
Or should the powerful country refrain from military force? Act through diplomatic channels or through market forces to employ the carrot or stick? For perhaps acting with deadly force is itself an evil, compounds destruction and pain, leads to unforeseeable consequences and imperial extension. And what begins as humanitarian intervention might degenerate into quagmire. But such diplomatic or economic approaches are often slower, indirect, or incomplete. Meanwhile, evil acts fast and ruthlessly. So it is arguable that those favouring this approach leave children to torment and death while waiting for juntas to buckle under pressure or for revolutionaries to become capitalists.
This is the story of four men for whom these were not mere ruminations, but questions that they had to answer on a daily basis, four Royal Navy officers who, in their ships, had the power to level towns. In their cannon, rifles, marines and sailors they had the power to kill, sink, burn and terrorise. Theirs was a military power unrivalled in history, let alone in their own time. And these men were faced with absolute evil – the slave trade. They looked upon slave ships full of children, their bodies cadaverous; they saw ships full of women being smuggled to a life of sexual slavery; and they saw men being carried with their sons to slave markets at which they would be separated forever – fathers whose essential purpose and meaning, their ability even to attempt to protect their children, was stripped from them.
This is the story of four men who, faced with evil, capable of murdering the murderers at a command, struggled to walk the line between direct justice and civilised restraint, having to choose between the most basic eternal law and the law of modern governments. On one side was a bloody instinct righteously to destroy the perpetrators; on the o
ther side were their orders, which discouraged violence if possible and required adjudication. Those dispassionate edicts emanated from a government and culture wedded to the idea that the good influences of the international marketplace, of free trade, would stop such evils – eventually, given enough time. But how long did Kiada, Aminha, Bakaat and the others have?
In the late 1860s, when this story begins, the British public had reason to be proud of their country’s efforts against the slave trade. Abolitionists were a powerful political force from the late 1700s. Subjects of the British empire were banned from participating in the trade in the first years of the 1800s, and in the early 1830s parliament declared an end to the institution of slavery itself throughout the empire (in some places it was phased out over six years). To enforce their fight against slavery, the British entered into treaties with the kingdoms of Africa’s west coast. They won the right to police those waters for slave traders to the Americas. For many decades the parents of Britain sent their sons to that feverish coast to struggle and die in what most trusted was a righteous effort.
By the late 1860s the British had reason to be proud, but also to believe the matter closed. By the mid-1850s the squadron hunting slavers off West Africa was reporting fewer and fewer of them. A series of South American countries abolished slavery in the same decade, and then the United States nearly tore themselves apart over the issue in the early 1860s, with the North and Emancipation winning.
But the matter was not closed with the wind-down of the Atlantic trade or the end of the American Civil War, for there was a far less publicised trade in the Indian Ocean. There were still slave ships bearing hundreds of captives packed on pestilent slave decks, vast territories decimated by slave raiders and the wars they sparked. Slavers, many from the Arabian Sea coasts and Persian Gulf, carried African abductees to clove, coconut, millet and sugar plantations throughout the Indian Ocean, to the white-walled towns of the Persian Gulf to act as house slaves, or to Madagascar to be made soldiers or sexual property.