Squadron

by John Broich

  On Phoenix’s mission with Colomb was Lieutenant Edward Spencer Meara. Sometimes Colomb would relieve Meara from his watch in the wet, 40-degree subarctic air. It was not the last time Colomb would lend Meara a hand. In the subtropical waters off East Africa Colomb would one day try to extricate Meara from a tangle.6

  Three of the captains in this story were veterans of the fight against slavers; the fourth, Philip Colomb, was not. But he had a reputation as a tactical thinker. It was a distinction Leopold Heath knew well; as commodore, Heath had an idea about how to utilise Colomb’s tactician’s brain in his anti-slavery campaign.

  HMS Defence, English Channel, July 1863

  Advance the clock nine years to 1863, and Lieutenant Philip Colomb could be found on the weather deck of the colossal ironclad Defence in the English Channel. The lieutenant had just fifteen minutes to teach two signalmen how to use a machine they had never seen before. The device before them was on trial on this July day. It looked something like an organ grinder’s machine, a kind of hurdy-gurdy with a barrel organ cylinder and crank. A long arm extended upwards from this and at the top was a lantern with a shutter covering it.

  It was a signalling machine, and Colomb quickly showed the two men how to input a number into it. The number corresponded to a phrase – the sorts of phrases flags had communicated between Royal Navy ships for centuries – Enemy in sight. Cease firing. Require assistance. Colomb showed the men how they might also input Morse code into the machine. Then he cranked the wheel. Whatever the rate of cranking, the machine lifted and lowered the shade atop the lantern with perfect regularity. Short-long, long-short-short-short, long-short-long-short. Flags had served the Royal Navy for centuries, but at night they had never much served at all.

  The road to this day and this trial had been long. The Admiralty was a famously conservative place and the word ‘innovation’ constituted an invective. Colomb’s machine was not welcomed, even called foolish, and he met many closed doors. He demonstrated it many times, but trials he thought were successes they called failures. Though just a lieutenant, Colomb wrote appeals to challenge these judgments, to ask for new trials. He wrote letters to those who opposed him, appealing to their reason. He came close to impertinence, but stayed just short of the line. But his was a forced, tenuous humility. He believed what was reasonable was right. Might, in the form of a rear admiral’s pennant, did not make right – reason did.

  He might have been betrayed by a face that tended to suggest smugness. His eyebrows arched naturally, imperiously. He had the long nose common in his family and it could give the impression that he was looking down it. If his face did not suggest smugness, it suggested that he knew something amusing, maybe about you.

  He was well-bred, but Lieutenant Colomb suffered from being the third son in a family that had a better name than estate. To develop his machine and keep promoting it, he had to sign away significant rights to any future earnings that it might make from selling it to the navy. He had little money. A year before, Colomb had won an important supporter. He was a captain who had seen the Russians put flashing signal lights to good – or ill – use at the Crimea. This man had made a name for himself as a capable organiser when he took responsibility for landings near Sebastopol. He was Captain Leopold Heath. Perhaps Heath’s endorsement had helped Colomb get this latest trial.

  Colomb quickly finished his tutorial to the signalmen, then the trial began. The rear admiral of the Channel fleet stood by. A distant ship received and responded to the signal with ease; it was a clear success. By the end of 1863 the Channel fleet had adopted the system, and Philip Colomb was promoted to commander.7

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘THE VALIANT OF THIS WARLIKE ISLE’

  The commodore’s resolution and the journey of the Daphne

  WHY DID MEARA, Heath, Sulivan and Colomb launch their unprecedented attack on the East African slave trade from 1868? First and foremost, because Leopold Heath as the squadron’s commodore determined to do it. Heath’s Royal Navy superiors and political overseers gave him no special order to do this. Policing piracy and slavery in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea was one item in his station’s portfolio of roles. But he smashed precedent in the focus and scale of power he committed to fighting the slave trade.

  As Heath was resolving in his mind to launch his campaign in 1868, he was unwittingly sailing into a whirlwind of contending forces and philosophies swirling around the question of slavery, race, economic dogma and the role of government. The commodore formed his decision in the context of a culture that predominantly deemed slavery repugnant on many grounds; expressing support for the institution itself was no longer a publicly acceptable stance, as it had been when parliament had debated the question of eliminating it throughout the empire in the 1820s and early 1830s. An 1833 Act eliminated the status of slavery in the empire from 1834 (1835 on Mauritius and later in other East India Company territory). Of course, it had taken a ruinous war in the USA to settle the question of the validity of slavery there. Meanwhile, in many states and kingdoms across the globe, slavery remained after America’s Civil War: in Brazil, China, Cuba, Madagascar, the Portuguese colonies, many parts of West and East Africa, Persia and Gulf principalities, Zanzibar and its East African footholds, and elsewhere.

  But if the basic consensus against slavery in Britain was certain in 1868, what to do about slavery and the trade outside the empire was not at all. There were all kinds of opinions about the extent and limits of British action, about what actions exactly to take. The same abolitionist groups that won success in the empire worked to focus attention on the East African trade in the 1850s and 1860s, but they often failed. And working against their arguments for action were powerful currents in British politics pushing for fewer international commitments and less government spending – including on the Royal Navy.

  Related to this were those who believed that free trade – a watchword of the age – would eventually end the slave trade on Africa’s east coast. In their vision, British and Indian merchants would spread throughout African ports and, by trading for raw resources other than black ivory, slowly but surely re-orient African markets away from trading in the enslaved.

  Among others, the influential Scottish missionary David Livingstone encouraged this solution. An agent of the London Missionary Society, directed to convert the natives around a small outpost in East Africa as a young man, Livingstone decided that he could better spread Christianity and abolish slavery by being an explorer. By exploring, he could encourage the trade that ultimately, he believed, would meet his goals. In the 1850s and 1860s he became a household name as a pioneer and adventurer. The British public lost contact with him in the late 1860s and he was feared dead. When reliable news reached Leopold Heath at Zanzibar that he was alive in 1869, and when Henry Stanley subsequently sought him out in 1871, it helped refocus attention on East Africa and the slave trade there. Newspapers printed new tales from Livingstone describing the warfare, famine and depopulation that went hand-in-hand with slave trading. But Livingstone and his allies still looked to Christianity and commerce for an eventual solution.

  Related to arguments against actively pushing for emancipation and in favour of the power of market forces were popular ideas about race. These held that ‘the negroes’ were lazy, naturally servile, and possessed no innate desire for freedom. If you gave them freedom, they would only use it to refuse to work. Forcing freedom on such people, the argument went, was hardly good for the African at all. In the Caribbean, after parliament abolished the institution, formerly enslaved people were forced to be unpaid ‘apprentices’ for a further four years on the theory that an imagined black race was innately apathetic and needed to be taught habits of work once the slave-driver disappeared.

  This was a line of race thinking represented on Heath’s squadron by Philip Colomb, but these opinions were not shared by all. Others, like George Sulivan, rejected such theories, thinking in terms common from Wilberforce to Harriet Beecher Stowe: that Af
ricans were more like Europeans than not, and were as worthy of freedom as any European. Public ideas of race and slavery were mixed: Dickens could write about Africans being little superior to animals, yet write, ‘still they must be free’. Anthony Trollope could write that ‘God for his own purposes … has created men of inferior and superior race’ while nevertheless arguing in 1860 that ‘if we can assist in driving slavery from the earth, in God’s name let us still be doing’. On the other hand, some pointed to the recent American Civil War as the bloody price of ‘human-equality fanaticism’ and ‘abolition mania’. Yet others criticised the tremendous national expense of suppressing other countries’ slave-trading at the behest of naïve abolitionists.

  With regard to the east coast slave trade, about which public and official Britain knew less than the west coast trade, some argued in the 1860s that expense should be spared because there, as opposed to the West Indies or Americas, ‘slavery was of a domestic character’. One MP said, ‘We have already done enough, and having carried out a great measure of justice at a cost of £20,000,000 … I think we should abandon the Quixotic idea of constituting ourselves the knights-errant of the sea at a time when non-intervention was the order of the day.’

  As Heath was resolving in his mind to launch his campaign, he was unwittingly sailing into a storm of contending political forces. There was a slavery suppression bureaucracy in London, including corners of the Foreign Office, Treasury and Admiralty. Further, there was the government of India, the consular and diplomatic framework throughout the Indian Ocean and Arabia, and Downing Street. All of these Heath threatened to disrupt with his sudden departure from the status quo.1

  Annesley Bay, Red Sea, January 1868

  To find Leopold Heath in the moments when he decided to launch his campaign against the slave trade, advance the calendar seventeen years from the time when a younger Heath retreated from the slave fortress of Lagos through smoke and blood, past years fighting the Russians in the Black Sea, patrolling the English Channel, and teaching gunnery, and go to Annesley Bay in Abyssinia (today’s Eritrea and Ethiopia), north-east Africa, in 1868.

  Commodore Heath had charge of a massive landing. He stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Octavia, his broad blue pennant flying above on the mizzenmast. On board was Sir Robert Napier, a lieutenant general of long experience in Indian campaigning. Napier had a sweeping moustache and a permanent squint as if etched by the Indian sun. Heath was thickly built without being fat, and had penetrating eyes set in a straight line. Napier wore bright red, Heath dark blue. Standing on deck, Heath and the other officers could see white tents on a plain reflecting the intense sun, the advance force. There were some red coats moving about and an English flag flying. A wharf was under construction.

  Annesley Bay opened onto the Red Sea at the north. Coral islands at the mouth tamped down waves blown by the perennial northern winds. The easy seas would aid Heath in his unloading. But the coral islands, narrow opening of the bay and shallow waters presented a challenge.

  The British government had determined to remove the king of Abyssinia, and it was Heath’s duty, being in charge of the Royal Navy’s Indian Ocean fleet, to put the men on the ground who would remove that king. Heath was to move over ten thousand men, thousands of horses and mules, hundreds of guns, and uncounted tons of material from Bombay to the Red Sea. He had personal charge of over two hundred ships, including a hospital ship and a factory ship. He had eleven captains to direct, had responsibility for mail communications, and, most critically, was responsible for creating water for the entire operation through some of his ships’ steam distillation systems. He carried material for building a railway. He even had twenty elephants to transport.

  First, to deliver the general who would shepherd war. It was early evening and the Octavia’s crew, ordered to line the yards, scrambled up and stood high above the deck. The commodore’s barge came to the side and Sir Robert descended in state. The barge pulling away, Octavia’s guns fired a salute of fifteen blasts multiplied by echoes; from shore, the smaller sound of the field guns firing a receiving salute echoed back. Napier was welcomed by an honour guard on the new wharf. This done, Heath could begin the work of delivering war to Africa with his usual efficiency.

  When Heath was a far younger officer he had organised a landing under the enemy guns of Sevastopol during the Crimean campaign. He had spoken up in a meeting of vastly superior officers and convinced them to follow his proposals for landing thousands of men and guns under the eyes of the Russians. When the moment for the attempt arrived, Heath himself was ordered to take command of one half of the beachhead. He went ashore and from there carefully directed landings at his section. Thousands of men guided, massive guns transferred from the element of water to earth, steam tugs working quickly but successfully, and all in heavy waves. Meanwhile, the Russians who were encamped not far from the landing site withdrew. The success helped make Heath’s career. It also represented everything that the disastrous Lagos attack was not: it embodied order, control and execution of a sound plan. And it was this visible order, Heath believed, that had kept the Russians from attempting anything.2

  Commodore Leopold Heath was in his element again. Follow the most direct route between order and execution. Turn debris into constituent parts of a coherent whole. He understood his orders, knew to whom he was responsible, and had the ships and officers he needed to complete his work. And he succeeded: he commanded the birth of a port city in a salt marsh, orchestrated port operations on a daily basis, and directed the tasks of his station squadron.

  After the force was landed, but still with many responsibilities as temporary governor of the newfound harbour, Heath turned his mind to the problem of the slave trade. Before he had departed Bombay he had already collected the records and opinions of past officers and officials on the subject of fighting the trade. Old treaties made with earlier rulers of Zanzibar and Madagascar gave the Royal Navy the authority to stop slaves from being carried across the Indian Ocean. That is, while the British could not force those rulers to halt the institution of slavery in their lands, they had made it illegal for slaves from the Zanzibar market to be borne abroad beyond Zanzibari territory and for captives to be brought from the African mainland to Madagascar. But the promise of extremely high returns on investment meant smugglers pierced the blockade north and south along the coast, sped by monsoon winds, and headed to Madagascar and sugar islands nearby.

  His letters to his Admiralty superiors make it clear that Heath took for granted that fighting the slave trade was the ‘undoubted duty of England’. He made clear his deep frustration with the failure of half-hearted routine that had resulted in failure on the east coast. Yet he had no more than a half-dozen ships on his small station to perform every duty demanded by London and Calcutta in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and western Indian Ocean from Bombay to the Cape. He could not possibly stop every fleeting dhow running the blockade in every direction. In previous years efforts had been haphazard and unsustained – a state of things unacceptable to the man.

  He began thinking, planning. If his assignment in charge of the East Indies station were a typical length, he would have no more than a few years to correct a generation of official apathy and incoherence. He had on Octavia a young officer who was a slaver-hunter of some experience. William Maxwell had served on HMS Lyra in Zanzibar waters and Heath interviewed him. The two spoke as they explored the sage and dust hinterlands near Annesley Bay on horseback, sometimes hearing jackals’ calls.

  Heath began to envisage a kind of trap laid for the slavers running up the east coast for destinations in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Once the campaign in Abyssinia was over he would be able to test it. Finally, six months after landing, the army marched back victorious from the Abyssinian interior to another naval salute at Annesley Bay. Not long after, Octavia left the Red Sea for the Indian Ocean and the commodore’s new undertaking.3

  HMS Daphne, Plymouth, June 1867

  At stea
my Annesley Bay Leopold Heath had with him another navy officer with experience of hunting slavers on the east coast of Africa: George Sulivan. And Commander Sulivan captained a new ship that held special promise for executing the kinds of tactics that were revolving in Heath’s mind. (Heath and others had pleaded with the Admiralty for better, faster ships for this squadron.) A year before this Sulivan had been in his ancestral country of Cornwall, where he one day found his heart’s desire in the post.

  It was June 1867 when, after a few months on land on half-pay, George Sulivan received a letter from the Admiralty, a light-blue paper coveted by every commander. It was a new commission. He was to get a brand new sloop ready for sea, and was hereby required and directed to cause the utmost dispatch to be used. He was ordered to take her to Bombay, the Royal Navy’s East Indies station, but there was a world of work to be done first.

  So to Plymouth and to the dockyard on its west side, Devonport, with its rows of workshops and sheds, pools and slips; the great sorted stacks of timber; the long ropery, forges, and over all of it coal smoke. There he first saw Daphne: black, much larger than his previous ship Pantaloon, longer and higher in the water, a bit under 190 feet long and 36 feet broad at mid-ship. She was bluff and brawny at the waterline like a larger man-of-war, and would force her way through the water rather than cutting it as had the sleeker Pantaloon. She had three raking masts, and when they were properly rigged they would be adorned with some square and some triangular sails. This was known as being ‘barque-rigged’. She would thus wear some square sails for being pushed before the wind, and some triangular for being pulled forward by a wind cutting across her or even somewhat in her face. It was a kind of compromise rig. Beneath the waterline she concealed a massive engine and boilers to drive a fifteen-foot screw when the wind failed.