by John Broich
Among all these was the 11-gun sloop HMS Pantaloon. Her three masts, slightly leaning or raked, stood well above the dhows in the harbour. She was far longer, too, at 150 feet, with a distinctive keel that stretched far diagonally aft over the water behind her. The dhows that moved in its shadow had crews of thirty at the very most, usually far less, while the Pantaloon had 130. But though it dwarfed the dhows, though its guns threw 32-pound iron shot, though a steam engine and boilers burned at its heart, the Pantaloon was impotent in this harbour.
The interpreter Jumah pointed out a particularly large dhow coasting into the harbour. Sulivan could easily see that it was crammed with Africans from the mainland, kidnapped, bound for Zanzibar’s busy slave market. It was a sight with which he was familiar.
The Pantaloon’s captain, Commander George Sulivan, was a slight man. It was as if his years sailing tropical waters had steamed away some of his mass and this gave him an ascetic air. But his face was broad, mouth wide, and eyes set at a distance. The open eyes looked fit for a pastor, incongruous for a veteran of around twenty years, witness to a long record of inhumanity and violence.
‘What’s the use, Jumah? We can’t take her here.’
The large dhow passed under the Pantaloon’s stern, showing a crowd of men, women and children on its bamboo deck. It was packed so tightly that only the raised poop deck was visible. The dhow’s captain and chief hands looked up at Sulivan and Jumah. They called to them, laughing.
‘What does he say, Jumah?’
‘Why you not come and take us?’ Jumah translated. ‘Are you afraid?’
Jumah shouted back a challenge in Arabic. The dhow’s captain replied.
‘I got lots of slaves on board,’ Jumah translated, ‘tell the captain to come and see.’
More laughter, and the large slaver coasted to a rest. Just a pistol-shot away, marked Sulivan. In an hour it would be emptied. An agent, quite possibly one of the Indian traders who owned a significant share of the business on the island, would force the captives to the market to be groomed for resale in the near future. If this were any other sea and one ship attacked another and kidnapped its people, reflected Sulivan, we would declare them pirates, seize them, and hang the kidnappers. But here, now, Sulivan and Pantaloon were powerless.
Though the official stance of the British government was that slavery was an abomination, and while the institution was outlawed in the empire, this was not the British empire. The oak under Sulivan’s feet was, but Zanzibar was not. The British had a treaty with the sultan of Zanzibar permitting the Royal Navy to arrest his subjects and seize their ships when involved in the distant overseas slave trade – the trade bound well beyond these waters. But the British only won the treaty by agreeing to overlook the trade between Zanzibar and the African coast to the west. There, middlemen took receipt of people kidnapped in the interior and then sold them to slave traders on the coast who bore them to a number of Indian Ocean markets, often the market in Zanzibar. From there, the Africans were sent to the clove plantations on and near this island, or set to other labour in town or on farms, or made sexual chattels. This activity was perfectly legal according to the letter of the treaty. The Pantaloon could not touch this slave ship.1
HMS Octavia, Zanzibar, August 1868
Now, in summer 1868, Heath’s flagship Octavia sailed into Zanzibar harbour with booming salutes. Heath sent his humble appeal to the sultan of Zanzibar, Majid bin Said, and was soon approaching his seafront palace, Beit al-Sahel, a whitewashed two-storey building, forty yards wide, with a broad, shady portico. It was red-roofed, with green shutters over windows set very high. A platform of nine cannon stood before it. Amid the palace compound were a family mosque, tomb and large stables. Neighbouring the whole was the small crenellated fort which housed the sultan’s men-at-arms. Not an army, really, but a household guard comprised of some slaves and some Baluchi mercenaries – men from a famously fierce land. But the sultan’s power did not lie in the fort, it resided in the customs house next to it. There the sultan extracted taxes from every ship that arrived at this famous Indian Ocean crossroads. These included – most importantly – licensed slave ships. Close by the customs house were the British, French and American consulates.
Approaching the palace with Leopold Heath was the British consul to the kingdom, Henry Churchill, only forty years old but a veteran of diplomatic posts in Persia, Syria and Algiers, Churchill was a scholar, sometime archaeologist, onetime denizen of a Russian dungeon. He had dark eyes and hair and the Romantic look of the previous age.
Heath and Churchill entered the palace and were guided to the long and open reception hall, with dark wooden beams that spanned the ceiling. Beneath their feet was a chequered floor of black and white marble. Ornament in the hall went little further; it had the elegance of measure and discipline. Then there was the sultan, a man of thirty or thirty-five with a very slight build that conveyed austerity. He had a short, carefully kept beard and moustaches. His forehead was broad and smooth. He had a gentle bearing, but his eyes revealed intense energy.
The sultan greeted Heath with courtesy. Then the long hall emptied of retainers. Speaking through the multilingual Churchill, Heath told the sultan why he was there.
The commodore informed the sultan that he was turning his full attention to putting down the slave trade, devoting both his mind and his men-of-war to the problem. Heath was tactful, not threatening or blustering. And he told the sultan that he had no special assignment from Her Majesty’s Government, nor did he bear a proposal from London for a new treaty. He was committing himself on his own account to better fight the outlaws who violated the existing treaty. Heath left unspoken his awareness that the sultan’s power depended in part on slave soldiers, on slave-worked plantations, and on the taxes gleaned from slave imports. The sultan’s merchant subjects were powerful, independent-minded, and made rich on the blood of slavery. Even if the sultan had wanted it, an end to slavery would gravely risk his own head. Heath could not hope to stop the trade completely if the British empire itself condoned it here.
So, he told the sultan, he wanted to find a way for his captains to distinguish quickly between an authorised trader and the smugglers who ran the blockade for distant ports. These men, Heath told the sultan, operate under cover of the legal trade, thus perpetuating the Indian Ocean slave trade. Unless changes were made, there would be no chance of putting it down. After listening to Heath’s proposals with courtesy, Majid bin Said asked that the commodore kindly draft his concerns and proposals in writing. Heath and Churchill took their leave.
Leopold Heath did submit his concerns in writing, but he never heard back from the sultan’s court. When he did not, Heath felt, as he wrote to his superiors, that ‘the ground is clear for other arrangements’ and ‘more earnest efforts’.2
HMS Dryad, Portsmouth, August 1868
Heath could not have been surprised by the lack of response from a ruler whose riches and position depended on the continuation of the traffic in abductees. And now he was free to try his new strategy for choking the trade. Heath had sent Sulivan to gather information in Madagascar, patrol the East African coast, then begin a trial of Heath’s new tactics. It only remained for the other two captains Heath would commit to this mission to arrive in the Indian Ocean.
Commander Philip Colomb was almost on his way. He stood on the docks in Portsmouth harbour flanked by friends, fellow officers in the service. They congratulated him on his appointment to the great new sloop Dryad, then patrolling in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. But Colomb was preoccupied with how to survive the voyage to Alexandria, the overland passage across northern Egypt, and the trip via Pacific and Orient (P&O) Lines down the length of the Red Sea. Once he reached the British port of Aden at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula, and his new command, his days would be filled with problems to be solved, solutions to be tested. But until then he would be a mere passenger under the command of a civilian captain. Several weeks he would be stowed in the Damascus,
subject to the banalities of imposed companions: effusive Frenchmen, inquisitive Americans and God knew what else. Confined and, worst of all to a man like Colomb, wasting time.
Colomb and his comrades set off back into the heart of Portsmouth to purchase the essentials for his trial. First they located a folding deck-chair, fabric-seated, far more comfortable than those provided by P&O. Next came a stop at the newsagents where Colomb was laden with an armful of newspapers. And, though the literary Colomb knew they were tawdry, he selected a stack of shilling novels to make the miles pass. For the Mediterranean was wide.
Colomb’s friends saw him and his time-killing materials onto the Damascus. The three found the ship’s bar, raised their glasses, and drank one another’s health. ‘To our next merry meeting,’ one of them said. Between Royal Navy officers that might take place at any of the hundred ports in the empire or on any of the world’s seas. Shortly, conversation scraped aground.
Somewhere below, stokers were at work making steam and finally the three officers were relieved by the bell for embarkation. Colomb handed his friends one last letter before they hurried away and the Damascus’s twin paddle wheels began their roll. A woman in the crowd of waving handkerchiefs cried for the departure of her husband, Colomb’s steward. And Colomb imagined his own wife, far away at home with the children, crying too.
After a brief reprieve from boredom at Gibraltar, every Royal Navy sailor’s home away from home, Colomb dozed as often as he could in his prized deck-chair, feet propped on a backgammon table. Between dozing and feeding, Colomb contemplated his fifty or so fellow passengers and made idle observations in his journal. Upper middle class, conservative, veering towards uncharitableness as the weeks passed. There was little space, few baths and limited games and books aboard. The passengers formed tribes and competed over them. The Pax Britannica, thanks in large part to men-of-war captained by the likes of Colomb, held firm sway in the Mediterranean. So, safe from the threats of Frenchmen, Turk, or pirate, the Hamilton clan could devote its attention to the threat that the O’Connor clan represented to the best breakfast table, chess set, or beef roast.
At one meal, Colomb and his forced messmates heard one tale of charity. One of the P&O officers related how, not long before, one of their steamers had come upon a heavily laden ship apparently in some need. It turned out to be a slave ship crammed with human beings. It was bearing them from some East African port to Madagascar perhaps, or some port in the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf, or even Brazil. It seemed that the wind had failed them and the slavers’ food and water had run out. The victims were starving, so the English passengers had supplied the ship with food and water.
Colomb reflected in his journal that this was a humane response, no doubt, and a mercy to the desperate slaves. But at the same time it was a kindness to the slavers. It meant the preservation of their investment. Saved chattel, saved profits, in his estimation. Colomb would return to hard reflections on the economics of the slave trade again and again in the coming months.
Philip Colomb had an academic bent, was thoughtful and speculative. When he ran into the problems or limitations of ships or systems or techniques, he tended not to accept them but to set his mind to alternatives. His was an impatient and inventive mind. He would be led by cool logic and not, he assured himself, by sentimentality or soft sympathy for the Africans.
He had heard more of this slave trade in the last few years. The missionary explorer Dr David Livingstone – now feared dead in unmapped Arica – had published widely read accounts of the trade, including the warfare that produced a supply of victims. Other famous explorers, Speke, Burton, Baker – household names – wrote similar reports of blood and slavery. Colomb believed that the public at home was awakening, at last, to knowledge. In his view, the Admiralty was taking a greater interest in suppressing the trade because in recent years jurisdiction over Indian
Ocean affairs had passed from the government in India to the government in London. The British Indian government had a more ‘offhand’ approach to the slave trade, at best. That is why Colomb was steaming east to meet the Dryad. But he was still a novice slaver-hunter.
‘Capture plenty of dhows,’ one of his friends had called as Colomb departed Portsmouth some weeks before. But how is this capturing of dhows done, he wondered, and what kind of thing is a dhow?3
HMS Nymphe, Bombay, November 1868
On the station Colomb would meet his old shipmate from the Phoenix’s arctic venture, Edward Meara, who was taking command of one of the other Amazons at about the same time. In the months to come Meara would prove in many ways Colomb’s opposite. If Colomb was dispassionate, Meara was vengeful. Colomb was cautious, Meara bold. And in the months to come Colomb would have to help his more hot-headed comrade out of trouble.
Meara’s prized commission to join Heath’s squadron and captain the Nymphe had found him patrolling home waters as coastguard. Months later found him being rowed over Bombay harbour in 90-degree tropical air in a dark blue uniform as only a sickly wind sighed and vanished. Meara had sailed the West Indies, coasted Brazil, and served in the miasmatic waters off Sierra Leone in a naval career that had taken him to all the world’s oceans, but he had spent the last three years based around his native Ireland. There he had inhabited fog, boarded limping ships in ice gales. Yes, Meara had known heat like this as a young man raiding up the rivers of West Africa, but not recently.
Still, he was finally experiencing the moment for which he had waited 5,000 miles. HMS Nymphe, sister ship of Daphne and Dryad, lay ahead. Her teak sides were painted black, as were her tubular iron masts. Two towered high in front of a shorter mizzenmast, and all leaned slightly as if swaying from speed. Unlike most ships, the Nymphe’s bow reached forward at the waterline as if she meant force her way through it. Amidships rose her funnel, incongruously straight and stumpy below her proud, tall masts. Her stern was covered with boats hanging on their davits.
Photo of former kidnapees on board Daphne, 1868
Who were the ship’s crew-members, and what was their life like aboard? Following Meara aboard the first time provides some insights. Coming to her side shortly before noon, Meara was piped aboard the Nymphe’s upper deck. Now, at exactly noon, it was time for the sacramental reading of Meara’s commission. This done, Meara was now captain of the Nymphe. The bell rang and afternoon watch replaced the forenoon.
Visible from the quarterdeck, the space of command on the ship’s top – or weather – deck, were more boats cradled amidships, as were the guns. Slightly forward were two large cannon on trucks, while slightly aft were two hulks – six-ton cannon that threw 64-pound shells of 7-inch diameter well over a mile. They straddled tracks so that they could be pivoted and aimed by a relatively small crew of sailors and Royal Marine artillery. The Nymphe and her sisters were meant to destroy from afar, to fire calmly, deliberately. The Amazons threw their insults from a distance, almost indifferently. Still, they shattered.
Soon the bosun called all hands to quarters for muster. The crew took their positions about ship. In this and other musters, Meara began to learn about his crew and vessel. A crew of 150 was a kaleidoscopic society. There were a dozen marines in red, more than a dozen cooks, stewards, and servants, the carpenter’s crew, sailmaker’s crew, armourer’s crew, sixteen able and fourteen ordinary seamen, and more. There was James Barton, ship’s boy from York. The helmsman came from Cork, one of the carpenters from Dublin. William Whitehead, able-bodied sailor, was from London, and William Mitchell, AB, like so many sailors, came from Devon. As with all ships on the station, Kroomen served on the Nymphe. There was Tom King, of long experience on this coast, Juma Matarka, and Ben Johnson: eight Kroomen in all. Young Nobie Rosekie, a refugee from slavers, had recently come on board from Socotra Island off the Horn of Africa and now hunted the slavers who once hunted him.
Down the steep companionway from the weather deck was the main deck, the middle deck on this ship. It was thirty-six feet at its widest and only the ship
’s boys could walk it without ducking under oak beams. It was huddled, but it was a huddled world. It was a delineated world of regions and districts. Along the sides were the cabins of the lieutenants, master, paymaster, surgeon, engineer, and captain’s steward and wardroom steward. Cupboards in essence, each of these were barely long enough to hold a short bed and encompass outstretched arms. But in a crowded ship where privacy was otherwise non-existent, they were fortresses of isolation. The berth for the several midshipmen was hardly larger than these cabins for one, but these teenage boys still knew luxury that veteran able-bodied seamen, many superior sailormen, would never know. All of these small spaces opened onto the wardroom, a shared sphere, vast at sixteen by sixteen feet, where officers and surgeon dined elbow to elbow. Here they mended, played cards, and drank cocoa or coffee under a broad skylight waited on by servants.
The engineers were not citizens of the wardroom, so further forward, amidships, they had their place, less grand by far than the wardroom. The engineers had their own small mess cabin roughly ten by seven feet. Lockers, drawers, racks and shelves were tucked into every available corner for the special tools of their trade. But they had one luxury – a small stall in which they could shower. The engineers inhabited the dark realm of coal encompassing the lower deck. Warm water piped from the boiler room rinsed the coating of black dust from their bodies at the end of their watches. In this neighbourhood, too, the warrant officers – chief carpenter, gunner, bosun and master – had their small cabins tucked in among little pantries, rifle racks, shell lockers and small worktables.
Forward, before the mainmast, was the sailor’s home. Their country took up about half of the main deck. They messed here on tables that could be stowed up amid the beams. And here the sailors slung their hammocks when it was their turn to sleep. Lining the hull were racks for their ditty bags and uniforms, effectively all they had in the world. Through the heart of this place rose the large funnel that emanated from the boiler room directly below. When the engine fires were stoked, the funnel warmed with intense fever and the deck underfoot became warm. When the fires were rolling, the lower deck warmed to around 100 degrees even in cool waters, and the Nymphe had not inhabited cool waters in a long time. Indian sun above the sailors, engine-fires below.
