by John Broich
The Royal Navy knew about the trade, and in fits and starts roused itself to police it in the mid-1800s. But the imperial sub-capital of Bombay, charged with policing the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean, took little notice. Very few ships were ever appointed to fight the trade, and the news-reading public in Britain heard little about it. There was a brief spark of interest when David Livingstone published some affecting depictions of the murder and starvation caused by slavers on the East African mainland in 1866, but it seemed not to take hold. The abolitionists, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, knew of the Indian Ocean trade and tried to focus attention on it, but they struggled to sustain interest.
That changed when an officer took over the Royal Navy squadron at Bombay and re-energised and re-focused its anti-slaver efforts. This, however, called down the wrath of his superiors and civilian overseers on himself and his squadron. In the end, something happened to call the attention of the British public to the issue and forced the British empire to either admit to a complicity in the trade or take decisive action against it.2
Leopold Heath, George Sulivan, Edward Meara and Philip Colomb are names lost to time outside a small handful of scholarly mentions. But in a gruelling year-and-a-half campaign at sea they hastened the end of the slave trade along Africa and Arabia’s coasts as no one had before. Theirs is a dramatic story of success and despair, cat-and-mouse intrigues and desperate races. But besides the action at sea, it is a story as much about these very characters themselves, allowing us to watch four men’s different reactions to the human catastrophe with which they come face to face. They were not just any bystanders: they were individuals who had at their command the potential power to annihilate the perpetrators. When presented with this opportunity – and they were – would they remain dispassionate? Stick to Admiralty instructions that strictly limited their actions? Or cross the line into the renegadism of which some ultimately accuse them?
They represented an empire which sometimes practised blatant expansionism and avarice – typified by the Opium Wars which the Royal Navy fought and whose brutish settlements it enforced. They represented an empire that sometimes embodied wilful inequality and racial superiority, as displayed in appalling responses to the Irish potato famine and other famines in India. Yet they represented, too, an empire that spent vast treasure and sacrificed generations of sons policing the slave trade from West Africa from 1807 to 1860, prompted by figures like William Wilberforce and a religious movement that pushed for justice.
In their individual personalities the four officers embodied these divergent things: in Sulivan an evangelical sense of equality and justice like that of Wilberforce; in Colomb a faith in white racial superiority and a belief in the overriding importance of the role of market forces in ending the trade; in Heath a frustration with limits imposed on Royal Navy power and independence; in Meara a rather black-and-white view of right and wrong and the conviction that he was the right judge thereof. Of course, as complicated humans, the four were never as consistent as these thumbnail sketches suggest; their attitudes were challenged and inconsistent.
In their personal and professional backgrounds, as veterans of Crimean and Chinese actions and Arctic adventures, the commodore and captains personified much about the make-up of the Royal Navy of Victoria’s heyday. Two had brutal experience of what was involved in the dogged effort to rid the west coast of Africa of the slave trade, a hallmark of service among those who enlisted in the early and mid-1800s.
That effort to check the trade in the enslaved was perhaps the most expensive humanitarian campaign the world has known. It lasted over half a century, consuming hundreds of thousands of pounds a year – about 0.3–1.3% of Great Britain’s annual national expenditure in direct costs alone. And the African blockade cost the lives of about one in ten to twenty of a rough average of 2,000 sailors on the patrol each year. Yet it diverted around 150,000 people bound for slavery in the New World from the Middle Passage.
The effort grew out of a sense of British complicity in the trade before 1808, along with evangelical humanitarianism in Britain, but it also aimed at other countries’ trades. It hunted American slavers – a US law barred its ships and sailors from the trade in 1808 – and Portuguese, Swedish, French and Spanish slavers as each country banned the trade over the next couple of decades. Even after the traffic in kidnap victims to the US and other American countries was outlawed, adventurers continued to run the blockade, tempted by prices that skyrocketed after the bans. And just because the trade was outlawed did not mean that countries like the US had the will or military power to enforce the bans. Even in Britain the will to police the illegal trade was difficult for abolitionists to sustain in the face of high costs in treasure, sweat and blood.3
One group of slaver fighters deserves special mention here as a community of men almost entirely lost to history except among a small group of scholars. Their service exemplified something profound. West African sailors served in the British suppression squadron from its earliest years in a crucial role. Called ‘Kroomen’ after the Kru coast east of what is today southeast Liberia, these African men – many descended from the enslaved and some of them former slaves – had a reputation for sobriety, courage and experience – often they were far more experienced and far more sober than the British sailors and even officers with whom they sailed. And, many captains believed, Kroomen’s constitutions protected them from the malarial miasmas that plagued this part of the world. Their strength was renowned, as was their skill at using a canoe, which they seemed to be able to pilot in any kind of sea. They usually brought their own distinctive canoes on board with them, using them for bearing messages, running quickly ashore, or saving men who had fallen overboard. Some were tattooed with a broad blue-black arrow from hairline to nose, and many wore tattoos of former ships, a kind of history on the skin that grew over the years. Veteran Kroomen knew the landscape, could withstand the promised physical and mental trials, and understood the challenge; every ship on the Bombay station carried them. The Kroomen had a saying, ‘An Englishman goes to the Devil, a Krooman goes with him.’
When a Royal Navy ship arrived in Sierra Leone to take its place in the anti-slavery squadron its captain typically made his way to Kru Town to take on a complement, usually offering pay equal to that of an ordinary seaman. He would seek out an experienced ‘Head Krooman’ responsible for bringing on half a dozen or more Kroomen. The Head Krooman would vouch for the others, instruct them, and intercede between them and their officers. This avoided problems: the Kroomen were often extremely practised sailors, sharing a well-earned sense of professional pride; but a novice seaman or even officer might treat a Krooman with ignorance and abuse. Having the Head Krooman responsible for correcting his own division helped avoid such instances. The alternative, and it happened, was for an ignorant teenage midshipman or bosun to curse or strike a Krooman vastly his superior in merit – and then for all of the Kroomen to disappear at the next port.
When a young Leopold Heath led a bloody raid under the guns of Lagos, a Krooman was shot down not far from him on the beach. And when a young midshipman, Edward Meara, boarded a boat and pulled up a wide African river to attack slavers, Kroomen boarded too. As this story will show, the service of the Kroomen in Commodore Heath’s East African campaign was critical. The Royal Navy’s fight against slavers was not simply a story of white men trying to save black men. African men like King Kosoko and his minions were slavers; African men like the Kroomen hunted them.4
PART I
‘Set a squadron in the field’
CHAPTER 1
‘ON THE BROW O’ THE SEA’
Meara, Heath, Sulivan and Colomb before their convergence
THIS STORY BEGINS when the men who eventually changed everything on the east coast of Africa were learning their trade as slaver-fighters on the west coast amid anguish and devastation.
Edward Meara’s childhood was as genteel as his years at sea were violent. H
e was born into wealth on a leaf-green estate but as a third son was unlikely to inherit. For boys in such a position this left two typical career paths: church or military. The Royal Navy was largely officered by well-born men, for there was a centuries-old belief that they possessed a special aptitude for command and that sailors preferred to sail under high-born officers.
Two things from Edward Meara’s past combined to shape his actions in the fight against slavery on the east coast when he joined the squadron to captain the Nymphe. One was a kind of impatience and high-handedness that might have been bred of privilege; perhaps a sense, too, that his station and welfare were secured by fortune and not by the good opinion of the Admiralty. The other was a history of dealing directly and violently with slavers earlier in his career. Both seemed to contribute to brute action. In the coming months, it would become clear that he also simply had an uncomplicated view of the just way to respond to the slave trade.
His story starts in County Waterford, Ireland, in the 1830s. On the banks of the wide Suir River below Waterford, not two miles from the sea, stood the genteel Georgian estate, May Park. Its master, George Meara, was the factotum of the young nobleman, Lord Waterford. For his patron, Meara did the rough work of politics and business above which Lord Waterford was supposed to stand. When tenants needed evicting, enticements needed paying, even documents destroying, loyal George Meara did the job. When he was not playing the flinty right-hand man, George Meara played the squire. He hunted foxes and mused over the right quality of salt to make the best Waterford butter, while his gardener grew famous strawberries. He married a Viscount’s daughter and ascended in the rank of gentlemen.
Children began quickly to appear in the nursery of the fine house with its splendid views. First twin boys, followed by a girl. Then, in 1831, another boy baptised Edward Spencer Meara. Then, a year later, another girl. The baby girl’s delivery was the last great effort of her mother, who died shortly after giving birth.
The first-born of the twin boys would be heir to May Park, running the farms, the garden, the tree nursery and the staff. The path for the other boys was the same as for many other gentlemen’s second and third sons. The elder, William, would have a commission in the army, and Edward, after some schooling in England, would enter the brig Heroine as a midshipman at the age of eighteen. While his older brother George was being groomed, attending balls, moving in great circles, Edward was serving in the West African anti-slavery squadron and making war.1
January 1850, HMS Heroine, south of Sierra Leone, West Africa
In January 1850, Midshipman Edward Spencer Meara was on the Heroine lying off the coast of West Africa. The brig carried six guns, spanned ninety-five feet, and carried seventy souls. She was captained by Commander John Marsh, charged with hunting slave ships: American, Brazilian, Cuban and Portuguese. She lay at single anchor off the mouth of the steaming Gallinas River, a place dotted with islands, the sorts of places slavers hid their pens. They had filled slave stockades there not long ago, but in recent years the British had convinced more and more rulers on this coast to forswear dealing in slaves, including the countries bordering the Gallinas and Solyman Rivers, slow waterways that snaked deep into the African hinterland. For the rulers that expelled the foreign slave traders this meant less war-making, and the British promised to replace lost income through greater trade with Britain.
Piecemeal, in fits and starts, the traffic here was slowing. But now there was trouble, rumours of war. A people in the region, the Zaro, refused to free their slaves and give up the trade, and word had it that they meant to make war on those who submitted to the British. In this they were encouraged and helped by American and European slave traders. The Heroine was watching the shore intensely.
The long sentry duty was wearing. Supplies had recently run short and the New Year passed with the spirit room empty. A midshipman had answered the captain shortly; a young ship’s boy had died in the night. But in this still, soupy water they could not bury him in the normal way, by gently sliding him from a plank or table into the sea. The morning after his death they laid him in the dinghy, rowed a considerable distance from the ship, and only then consigned his mortal remains, wrapped in sailcloth, to the deep. Far from home, far now even from his shipmates, he sunk alone.
Then one hazy afternoon a boat pulled away from the shore, in it a man who had been stationed on shore as lookout. He came up the side with a letter for Captain Marsh. He brought certain news of war: the Zaro had indeed descended on the lands that had quit the slave-trade.
The next morning the drum beat to muster, then Edward Meara boarded the Heroine’s sailed pinnace, a small gun fitted onto it and manned by the coxswain and a few of his crew. Finally, Captain Marsh boarded behind them. As the little flotilla prepared to depart the Heroine’s side, the first lieutenant appeared, quietly steaming to be missing the action – perhaps the best chance for promotion he would ever know.
The Heroine fired a gun to alert the lookout on shore that they were coming, and the men pulled, and the pulling was hard. There was a steady north-east wind almost directly in their faces, and sandy shoals near the river’s mouth hindered even the shallow-bottomed pinnace. Finally on shore, they found the lookout and interpreter. He in turn took Captain Marsh and his men to a war council with several princes of the coast and river lands, where they learned that the Zaro had seized the town of Juring, a place about six hours up the river by canoe. So John Marsh and the princes drew up plans for driving the Zaro out of these lands. Plans laid, Marsh had a signal sent to the Heroine: he wanted his marines. They and a small group of trusted sailors arrived on the beach by that evening and the collected men made camp for the night.
At sunrise, Edward Meara and the war party departed. Red-coated marines, blue-coated officers and able-seamen in a fleet of boats, several leaders of the countries lying on the Gallinas and Solyman in their own long war canoes. Around them, their men-at-arms in more canoes. Midshipman Meara was in the pinnace, and his men pulled more easily now against the slow, wide rivers. Shortly after the sun began its descent in the sky the company reached the town of Juring. All was quiet and unmoving as the sailors and marines got out of the boats. They explored, finding the stockade walls undefended. There was evidence that goods and supplies and people had been borne away. The Zaro, it seemed, had heard of the boats’ approach well before they had arrived.
Commander Marsh called a council and the princes gathered around to plan their next move. Then there was a noise and a man appeared from the edge of the town, running towards them. Quickly it was apparent that he was no threat and he yielded himself. He was, he explained, a slave escaped from the Zaro. Those people, he said, had taken another town three miles upriver called Siman, and he had heard them discussing their next target, yet another town above that one.
The company acted quickly, re-boarding and pulling fast for Siman. They were not too late this time. The boats were greeted by musket-fire coming from a stockade fort close by the river. Not only musket fire: the enemy had a small gun of their own. The captain’s coxswain and gig’s crew began working the pinnace’s gun while Midshipman Meara and Lieutenant Corneck coordinated the pinnace’s crew. Meanwhile the marines returned the stockade’s fire and the defenders started falling. One. Several. Five. But none of the Royal Navy sailors or allied West Africans had been struck down. In time, smoke poured from the stockade. Then smoke and licking flame appeared in the town behind it.
The Zaro men inside began to abandon the burning fort, many moving for cover in the scrub along the river. Still the pinnace’s small gun fired on. Now the men loaded it with grapeshot and spattered the river’s edge with iron balls. Again it was loaded with the cluster of iron grapes; again came the shower of metal and dust. Now the sailors loaded it with a tin case packed with smaller musket balls; again the blast. Round after round after round. On top of that, hundreds upon hundreds of musket and pistol shots. Lead and iron sowed – death and dying reaped – along the river bank.
Finally, enemy fire was silenced, the Zaro fighters obliterated. John Marsh and his men did not bother to count the enemy dead on that riverside. Their purpose was achieved. The captain, fearing miasma, wanted to get his men away from the dead and from the river, and so ordered his boats to return.
On the way back down to the coast the fleet stopped at a village of one of the African allies for a ceremonial meal of victory and thanksgiving, but they did not stay long. The Royal Navy men re-boarded, descended to the coast, and made camp on the beach above the waves. And Midshipman Meara – who would receive a commendation from his commodore for his role in the attack – was back on the Heroine the next afternoon.2
HMS Niger, November 1851, off Lagos, slave coast of West Africa
Less than a year after Edward Meara’s first immersion in the sweat and blood of the slave trade fight on the west coast of Africa, the Royal Navy struck at that coast’s most powerful slaver king. But the action was a debacle, improvised on the run, with marines and sailors storming a beach and fortified town in the face of iron and lead. Leading the charge up the beach was Commander Leopold Heath. The confused nightmare that he lived that day may have instilled in him his powerful inclination towards careful planning and tactics. The cost of extemporisation that day was paid in men’s lives.
The son of a wealthy judge, the thirty-four-year-old Heath was broad-shouldered and large-fisted, but the impression of brawn was moderated by the roundness of his face. He looked precisely like the keeper of a pub in a suspect part of a town, with shoulders and hands that could shift barrels with ease, or pummel the unruly. His face might be genial so long as the clientele behaved; otherwise it might become coldly fierce with only a slight shift. Heath had risen quickly, and his first command was a plum commission for a new commander. She would have been suitable for a post-captain’s command, with fourteen guns throwing 32-pound shot, a great twelve-foot screw that could drive her at ten knots, a crew of 160, and only a few years old when Commander Leopold Heath had led her from Portsmouth.
