Squadron

by John Broich

  Sketch of Dryad drying her sails in the harbour of Zanzibar

  Daphne was one of the new Amazon class, and she and her sisters were the largest commander’s commands in the Royal Navy. The great line-of-battle ships were hard ironclads, but the new Amazons wore no armour, though they hid iron deck beams, upright stanchions, and other iron reinforcements. Nor did the Amazons show long rows of gun ports: four only for them. But they were powerful guns, persuasive, with carriages set on tracks to pivot.

  The new class was created as an answer to the CSS Alabama. In 1862, the rebellious southern states of America had purchased a fast yet hard-hitting ship from a Liverpool shipbuilder. The Alabama proceeded to wreak havoc on United States shipping throughout the world. The Admiralty imagined what ships like the Alabama chasing down British trade might do in a future war, so they set out to match her. Alabama had eight guns, including two heavy long-range guns on pivoting carriages like the Amazons. And she was quick, up to thirteen knots under sail and steam, while the Amazons could make twelve.

  The role of the Amazons was to match the pace and striking-power of an Alabama, but also to put an end to arguments before they got too heated and settle things from a distance. The Amazons could be sent into the harbour of this bloody pirate or that rebellious chief, then – pridefully, deliberately – level a fort, explode a magazine, or ruin city walls. The Amazons embodied a rather insistent style of diplomacy.

  It was not the Amazons’ style to brawl at close quarters, but they possessed one experimental weapon meant to be delivered as directly as possible: a ram. Daphne’s gently curved ram evoked the rams of ancient Greek triremes: metal-reinforced, sweeping forward at the waterline. The Greeks painted theirs like sea monsters; not so the Royal Navy. The thinking was that in a fleet action in which ironclads were hammering each other ineffectually, a fast ram-bowed ship might be sent in under full steam to charge the enemy. The 1862 US Civil War ‘Battle of Hampton Roads’ between the iron Monitor of the North and Merrimac of the South seemed to provide an illustration: the two had exchanged hammer blows to no avail for three hours. Many ironclads lay precariously low in the water, and ramming them, some thought, might bear them down. The low, heavy Monitor was indeed eventually fated to sink in heavy seas. Reinforcing the enthusiasm for rams, meanwhile, was the 1866 Battle of Lissa in which the Austrians successfully used the tactic against the Italians.

  On a bright June day Sulivan went aboard Daphne, finding her mostly empty. No crew, no one to whom he could read his commission, per ancient tradition. About an hour later the master hurried on board. He would take most responsibility in navigating her and had good experience of piloting a gun vessel in Chinese waters. The next afternoon came Sulivan’s first lieutenant, aged twenty-four, a man who had flitted quickly from ship to ship in his career. He had never run a ship like Daphne and it remained to be seen whether he could handle it.

  It took weeks to assemble the ship’s complement. Twelve men from the recently broken-up old Cambridge; seventeen from Indus, guard ship of Plymouth harbour; twenty-four men from the antique French prize, Canopus. A great many of these were receiving-ship men, raw recruits. A contingent of marines joined from the Plymouth division. They had just returned from Ireland where they had been hunting a phantom Fenian uprising – supposedly stoked up by American Civil War veterans – that never materalised.

  Sulivan and his lieutenants not only had to make one crew of the men and boys, but transmute many a landsman into a sailor. Hammocks were issued, the crew was drilled at fire stations, new sails bent and stowed, and rifles, pistols and swords counted and locked away. They hoisted aboard their new boats, painted white. They fitted one of these boats with a six-pound gun, and carefully filled the Daphne’s magazines with shot, shell, and – in its fire-proof room – powder. They heaped ton after ton of coal in the many chutes that dotted the ship’s weather deck. They fitted a new capstan for raising the anchor.

  A speed trial of the new engine took place a month after Sulivan took her in hand. On the baptismal day Daphne demanded a blood sacrifice. In the rush of work to get the maximum speed out of the ship a bag of coals came crashing down on the head of stoker Dick Osborne. He never rose again. It was far from the last sacrifice Daphne would demand.4

  HMS Daphne, West Africa, September 1867

  After some adjustments to her machinery and rigging, Daphne parted in late summer from England for Africa. Thus, on a bright, warm September mid-morning, Daphne was sailing eastward just above the equator to Sierra Leone with topsails and topgallants high above on iron masts that approached 100 feet. The wind was light, and Daphne was reaching for all she could. She should raise the crouching-lion hill above Freetown in a few hours. George Sulivan ordered the men mustered as he wanted to read the Articles of War before anchoring in the harbour. The Articles were a warning and ward, and every port had its lures. He read:

  All persons in or belonging to His Majesty’s ships or vessels of war, being guilty of profane oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness, uncleanness, or other scandalous actions, in derogation of God’s honour, and corruption of good manners, shall incur such punishment as a court martial shall think fit to impose, and as the nature and degree of their offence shall deserve.

  By noon they had sighted the hills and cape. The officer of the watch shortened sail, the leadsman cast his lead-weighted line to sound out the bottom, and a few hours later Daphne lay at single anchor in the deep water of Freetown harbour. Her captain meant to keep Daphne in port as briefly as possible, but there was much to do in that time. There were well over 100 tons of coal to be dumped in the pitch-black vaults down below, damp sails to be loosed to dry against mouldering, and all the other tasks and business after a long passage.

  Most important, Sulivan would complete his complement: he needed Kroomen. Sulivan was in luck. An old and trusted shipmate from the Pantaloon, John Bull, was in the Kroo-Town section of Freetown. Bull had spent years doing hard service on Africa’s east coast. Sulivan made Bull Head Krooman, responsible for bringing on seven more Kroomen. They came on board bringing their log canoe. Then Daphne’s Amazonian sister Nymphe glided into Freetown harbour shortly after Daphne to take on the usual contingent of Kroomen. After just three days, Daphne steamed out of the harbour against the wind and bucking the current. Next, to lonely Ascension Island, then Cape Town, and around the Cape for East Africa.

  A day beyond the Cape the wind rose and rose. After long hours with Sulivan refusing to leave the watch, a sail tore away in a gust and he ordered braces adjusted to reinforce the straining yards. The waves were contrary and growing and Daphne started rolling on the heaving sea. Some hours before dawn an extraordinary sea threw itself high over the bulwarks and bashed the ship’s boats. There was an explosion of masts, yards, blocks, stanchions and oars. Two steel boathooks went flying as if to murder. The long cutter was flung from its high place on its davits but saved from the sea by the scrambling men. Sulivan commanded the struggle to right the chaos. Finally, still before sunrise, he relinquished the watch and withdrew to his cabin.

  More restless hours passed with the cross-seas constantly shoving Daphne until a titanic wave hurled itself onto her. It hammered the ship so forcefully that securely latched iron ports on the bulwarks blew open. The water tore nettings that enclosed railings from their places. The upper deck was a sea that gushed down hatchways to the decks below until it covered them. In his cabin under the poop deck Sulivan was unaware of the deluge – in fact none of the officers were fully aware of what had happened. After a couple of minutes Gardner, the first lieutenant, came up the companionway and managed to reach Sulivan’s door. He told the captain of water sloshing around the deck below. Should he batten down?

  Something was wrong. The sub-lieutenant, Richard Orton, was stationed up on the iron conning bridge that spanned the ship port to starboard above the bulwarks. From there, Orton should have raised the alarm when water started pouring in the ports and hatchways, but there had been silen
ce. Just then the bosun’s mate who had been on deck came hurrying aft. Man overboard. The force of the monstrous wave, the blind swing of a reeling titan, had hurled Orton from high on the bridge and the sea took him in.

  Alarms and a rush of orders; the wheel yanked around; Daphne’s head straining to come about as close to the wind as possible. Someone sighted Orton already half a mile astern. It had taken too long to raise the alarm. Still, Orton swam, strong, at twenty-one-years old. The men flung life-buoys.

  Daphne managed to slow, at least, the rate at which Orton was drawing away from her. Sulivan ordered the fires built in the cold boilers below, but it would be at least two hours before he could call for power from them. Orton, Sulivan measured, had a matter of minutes in such waves. Sulivan had saved several sailors from drowning in his time, but diving into such seas was self-murder. First one man, then another, asked – begged, even – to be allowed to lower a boat and pull for Orton. But Sulivan knew that lowering a boat in such wind and seas meant losing both a boat and that boat’s crew. If you men won’t consider your death, Sulivan thought, then I must. Sulivan knew that Orton was a capable swimmer, but there was no hope, regardless. He must sink, thought Sulivan.

  Soon the youth was lost to sight. After an hour in the cold darkness, far longer than the boy had life, Sulivan gave the order to abandon the fight against wind and waves. Resume course. The order given, despair – a sorrow he could never after put into words – took him. He turned and left the deck.5

  HMS Daphne, Mahé Island, Seychelles, August 1868

  HMS Daphne arrived at the East Indies Station in Bombay just in time to join the massive flotilla for Annesley Bay. After some repairs, she took a factory ship, a floating workshop, in tow. She took her position in the amassed fleet and sailed west. For months she took her turn as guard ship and ran errands to and from Aden on the bottom of the Arabian peninsula up to Suez where the canal was being built, up and down the Red Sea. She carried messages, shipped pay, bore passengers. Whatever the flagship Octavia signalled, Daphne jumped to do.

  After the troops marched back from the interior of Abyssinia, the commodore released Daphne from the Red Sea. Now she was gliding between the islands of the Seychelles, drawn on by a steady light wind under bright blue skies interspersed with cloud. It was midday, with a southerly wind, 75 degrees, and seas the same temperature. This was a reprieve from far hotter days at berth in Annesley Bay. There, unsteady, weakly winds faintly gasped as weed grew on Daphne’s belly.

  The passage had not been easy. The day she set out from the Red Sea, seaman George Young fell from a main yard. Icarus’s neck was probably saved when he glanced off the Kroomen’s canoe hung in its place, so that he splashed into the sea instead of crunching onto the oak deck. They got Young out of the waves alive. Weeks later in the crossing, Daphne cracked the same main yard when she was surprised by a rogue blast of wind. Meanwhile, the sick-room list grew to twenty.

  Soon Sulivan hoped to raise Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles chain. A healthy island, Sulivan thought, which can’t be said of any other part of most islands in this sea or the African coast. At two o’clock the lookout raised the island and the officer of the watch gave orders. The Daphne’s crew trimmed sails, set the tall, trapezial gaff mainsail, and cast the lead and line as the sandy beach began to rise under her keel. With equatorial evening falling, the sloop approached her anchoring place off the marked approach to the port. There lay Commodore Heath’s flagship, the long Octavia. Orders to fire a rocket and burn a blazing pyrotechnic light, furl sails, and drop anchor. Night fell fully with a few passing showers meandering across the Indian Ocean.

  The morning’s sun showed a variety of green on the island. Here and there a brown cliff broke through the cover. A peak of several thousand feet rose beyond the little port, green to the top. Sulivan paid his duty to the commodore on board the flagship and reported on the passage. He made a point of telling the commodore how young Midshipman Stuart and Head Krooman Bull had worked together to save George Young from drowning after he glanced off a canoe. And he had to ask the commodore for a new main topsail yard out of Octavia’s spares, though a great yard was a precious thing half an ocean away from the nearest dockyard store. The request was granted.

  There was work to do, but Sulivan also wanted to give his men leave since they would not be in such a green, benign place for a long while. So one watch went ashore while the other took on water, coaled, and rattled down yards. Then they switched. Boats were repaired, the ship cleaned, the new yard hauled up and fitted. Four days of leave, and the sick-room began to empty.

  After a week, before they were to part, Octavia signalled Sulivan to dinner. The commodore’s orders were ready. Sulivan was to patrol the African coast, Madagascar, and the south-west Indian Ocean islands. First he was to call on the British consul in Madagascar to show the flag and learn what slave trading was going on there. Heath would sail directly to Zanzibar to speak to the sultan and visit the slave market.6

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘HIS BARK IS STOUTLY TIMBER’D’

  Commodore Heath declares his intent and the Amazons prepare for their campaign

  ZANZIBAR WAS THE CAPITAL of an East African coastal empire, the Zanzibari sultans originally from Oman on the Arabian peninsula far to the north. The Europeans were not the only ones who colonised and meddled in Africa in the modern period. Neither were European empires the only ones to grow fat feeding on the blood of African slavery. Zanzibar was the centre of an extensive slave trade, and the sultanate’s main source of wealth was the tax it collected on imported human merchandise. Traders brought as many as 20,000 Africans to the island each year, both to replace the dead on Zanzibar’s plantations and for re-export beyond the island.

  Its harbour was a busy entrepôt, a place where cargoes were loaded, off-loaded, resold, reloaded and reshipped. Ivory flowed to Zanzibar from the mainland, and it was re-exported to Bombay or London or Marseille. Copal, hardened tree resin used in making varnish, was dug on the east coast, imported to Zanzibar, and re-exported to Europe and the US. An Omani pioneer introduced clove trees to Zanzibar and its neighbouring island, Pemba, in the early 1800s. By 1868, the two islands produced almost 4,000 tons of cloves per year. (Clove harvesting was intensive work, since gathering the stem with the bud from the end of the branch risked breaking the branch; stems then had to be separated from the bud before the bud was dried. This process was repeated several times over two annual seasons.) Cloves were sold to Bombay and London and throughout the world. This created a wealthy plantation class, and that in its turn created a hunger for another critical import, enslaved East Africans. Abductees came from the East African hinterland often carrying ivory tusks on their backs, and often in a state of semi-starvation after experiencing war in their homelands and a brutal forced march to the sea.

  Zanzibar and Pemba’s large clove operations had slave labour forces of 2,000 or more. To feed and clothe these thousands, cotton flowed inward from the US and India, rice and other food supplies from around the Indian Ocean from many nations and principalities. The cotton cloth sometimes served to purchase more war-slaves in the interior. It was a tidy circular trade.

  Treaties made between the Zanzibari sultanate and the British Crown prohibited the sale of slaves to any Christian, banned the long-distance slave trade, required that traders be licensed by the sultan, and limited the slaving season to some degree. The trade could only be carried on within a roughly 500-mile stretch of coast and must not pass eastward to into the heart of the Indian Ocean. But based on many years of observation, Heath and others in the Royal Navy suspected many thousands of the enslaved were being taken to ports well beyond the treaty limits.

  The treaties empowered the Royal Navy to enforce these limitations at sea, but the station charged with stopping the forbidden long-distance trade – Bombay’s East Indies station – was overstretched. It had only a handful of ships to devote to the East African coast and Arabian Sea and a long list of dut
ies. Occasionally an officer would arrive among the squadron who focused on slaver-hunting and won some successes. But the squadron had a reputation for being comprised of some of the most worn-out ships in the navy. Frequently it could devote no ships at all to the mission, with worn vessels in dry-dock or pressing duties calling ships elsewhere.

  HMS Pantaloon, Zanzibar harbour, July 1866

  A scene from George Sulivan’s previous commission just prior to receiving the Daphne captures the compromised position of the British in Zanzibar – a position in which they could do nothing about the trafficking in humans occurring right before them.

  HMS Pantaloon was in Zanzibar harbour and her captain was in his cabin, a space not ten feet at its widest and not five feet high. It held a small square table, a little stove, and small cabinets fitted into every possible place. There was a knock at the cabin door and the ship’s interpreter, Jumah, entered, slipping off his sandals.

  ‘My master,’ he said, ‘suppose you come on deck? I show you something.’

  Sulivan followed up the ladder-way outside his cabin door and across the threshold of brightness onto the quarterdeck. There was activity all around the ship. Pantaloon was being tended to after hardworking weeks in the Indian Ocean and quarters were being whitewashed. And still the mizzen topsail needed repairing and booms and masts needed scraping and painting.

  Ships and boats crowded the harbour of Zanzibar, the island capital of Sultan Majid bin Said, who ruled a coastal empire from the spot. French and German merchant ships often visited his port; American and English ships too, carrying away ivory from the mainland and cloves from Zanzibar’s plantations. Outnumbering these were smaller ships, dhows, the workhorses of the East African coast. Familiar throughout the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, they were low in the water and narrow, but high in the stern, usually with one or two leaning masts and sweeping triangular sails. They embodied speed – not power or permanence, but haste.