Squadron

by John Broich

So Churchill acted, posting in the public places of Zanzibar notices addressed to ALL NATIVES OF INDIA IN THE DOMINIONS OF THE SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR. It promised their summary ruin, even imprisonment, if they engaged in the trade. Their domestic slaves must be registered immediately, and these would be liberated in a short time. But among the several thousand Indians on Zanzibar were natives of Kutch in western India. Their prince was allied with the British, but the Kutchees were not directly British subjects. Those on Zanzibar claimed to be beyond the prohibition of slavery among British subjects. And, beyond that, they claimed to be under the inviolable protection of the sultan of Zanzibar.

  Soon after making his proclamation, a message arrived for Henry Churchill. A Kutchee man was selling slaves in the Zanzibar slave market. Churchill had him brought to the consulate and told the man that he would be tried as a slave dealer. But the Indian laughed. ‘I do not deny it,’ the man said. But, he added, ‘I ignore your power to punish me.’ Henry Churchill considered it a confession and, as promised, made summary judgment. He ordered a large fine and confinement in the sultan’s fort awaiting expulsion to India.

  No one was laughing now. Churchill had the attention of Zanzibar’s Indians, many of them quite rich and influential. How far would he go? What business in Zanzibar did not touch, however remotely, on slave trading or slave labour? And Churchill had the attention of the sultan who relied on the taxes that the Indians generated through their ocean-spanning trade.

  The sultan sent direct, sharp words to Churchill. The Kutchees were under his protection, he insisted, and Churchill must not arrest them no matter what he alleged. Anger seethed among some of the island’s Indians, and on top of that the focused malice of the Persian Gulf traders who relied on Indian slave dealers. There were rumblings of riot and treason.

  Into this threatening atmosphere sailed Edward Meara on HMS Nymphe, much to the relief of Churchill who worried for the safety of the several hundred British residents on the island and possibly the security of the sultan’s throne. The timely arrival of Nymphe, of her 64-pound guns, of her marines, brought tranquillity for now. But Churchill’s offensive against Indian slave-dealing on Zanzibar was far from decided: Bombay would soon weigh in on it.5

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘WITH ALL HIS MIGHT’

  Edward Meara between the choices of justice and the law

  EDWARD MEARA’S ORDERS were to show the flag at Zanzibar, check the slave runners who were beginning to arrive on the island before the monsoon, then proceed to Madagascar and the Mozambique Channel to hunt in earnest. From Bombay, where Nymphe parted from the ships that were heading for their spiders’ snares off the Horn of Africa and off Arabia, the line of her track, traced in her log by a lieutenant, formed a gentle incline. Pin-pricks on the chart marked each day’s progress, spaced evenly across lines of latitude. There had been some rain at the end of the voyage but it cooled the hot air a bit. And the presence of the Nymphe in Zanzibar harbour seemed to cool heads there, too.

  Then, as February 1869 turned to March, it was time for Nymphe to sail south across the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar, around 800 miles distant. The story of Meara and the Nymphe’s next month captures so many of the bitter paradoxes of this work, of the painful contrast between personal morality and the limits of Meara’s authorisation to act. The story shows a man compelled by a kind of humanity and justice that to his mind overruled any written law but was yet constrained by laws. And it shows the dangers and complications the officers of the spider squadron invited when they left the element of water for earth.

  HMS Nymphe, north-west coast of Madagascar, March 1869

  Out boats, in boats; sight dhow, chase dhow; fire blank cartridge, inspect dhow; up boat, bend sail: such were the days and nights of Meara and the Nymphe as she was hunting off Madagascar. Here scores of islands might hide slave depots, dhows might be honest traders or slave-runners from the nearby Mozambique coast. Any slaver here was well beyond the limit of the Zanzibar cordon of legal slave trading. The Malagasy, while permitting slavery on the island, had officially forbidden slave importation, and a treaty with the British allowed the Royal Navy to police the ban at sea. For Meara, it was open hunting.

  Soon the hunt yielded a slaver carrying several captives to be sold in Madagascar. Meara allowed the crew of the huge starboard gun the pleasure of shattering the dhow, the slaver crew standing by on the Nymphe while their ship was transformed to airborne splinters.

  After more days stalking down the coast, peering into a number of shallow bays, the Nymphe found the buoy before Majunga, the provincial capital of the north-west corner of Madagascar. The town stood on a stumpy promontory over a bay, placed above it was a white-walled fort and battery. Meara sent his first lieutenant, Clarke, away with the seized slavers in the cutter before he even anchored, as if to rid his ship of their presence as quickly as possible. Early in the day after arriving, a day whose heat rose high, a boat pulled away from the town for the Nymphe. Soon six Malagasy dignitaries were welcomed up the side. They announced themselves as emissaries of the governor of that province.

  ‘How,’ they asked, ‘was the health of Queen Victoria?’

  Meara returned the standard Malagasy courtesy. ‘How was the health of Queen Ranavalona?’

  The visitors invited Captain Meara and his lieutenants to a supper that night, and Meara accepted.

  In the meantime, the Nymphe’s boats came and went to inspect dhows. A dhow coasted into the bay and Edward Meara chose to join one of his boats’ crews to survey it, climbing down the Nymphe’s side and moving off in the white boat. The dhow made no sign of flying as so many did and Meara came over its side. Men on the station told stories of trouble on such occasions, but this boarding was quiet. Once on deck, Meara saw thirteen African women and four boys, clearly captives for the trade. Yet the dhow sails into harbour under the eyes of what is obviously a Royal Navy gunboat with slaves on deck? No running, no resistance? The dhow’s captain appeared and Meara asked him for the ship’s papers.

  ‘Are there any passengers on board?’ The interpreter Ali repeated.

  ‘Yes. They are all mentioned in the papers,’ the dhow captain responded.

  Meara turned them over. They began, ‘NAPOLEON III, Empereur des Français, à tous present et avenir, salut …’ The dhow, stated the papers, sailed under the French flag. The kidnapped women and children were listed as émigrés. They were – in a grotesque fiction – legitimate passengers. An official on one of the French sugar islands had signed the paper. The interest of the French was in addressing a shortage of cheap migrant labour, whatever the means. No wonder the dhow’s captain had felt secure in entering the harbour under the nose of the Nymphe: the papers shielded him from interference. The French would have made a major diplomatic incident out of any rashness on the part of the commander. Edward Meara could not, though, resist attempting some French on the crew, then on the ‘passengers’. Of course, not a single person on the dhow could make out what he was saying in French. Ali the interpreter was able to exchange some words with the captives on the side, who told him that they had been purchased in Zanzibar’s slave market.

  To Meara it was a contemptible cheat. But he could only delay the dhow while he had the French papers copied. He wanted to send them to Commodore Heath. This was a bad development: if the French were selling their flag to cover the slave trade, Meara and other slaver-hunters would have no way to stop it, short of declaring war on Napoleon III and the French empire. The papers copied, he returned them to the slaver and climbed back down to his boat, while the women and boys in the dhow were left to their fate.

  Rounds of entertaining followed in the coming days. Meara and his lieutenants were met by palanquins and a band on the shore below the town, then they were carried up a path lined with mango trees and scrub bushes to the gates of the fort between two cannon. There were suppers and receptions. At one, Meara asked the provincial governor about the state of the slave trade on this coast. The governor responded s
imply that there was none.

  Dancing followed in the courtyard of the fort, a scene composed of dignified Malagasy men and elegant ladies. One of the Nymphe’s lieutenants danced; Edward Meara danced. Perhaps his older brother George was doing the same thing in Ireland in the ballroom of a great house. Edward Meara issued an invitation to dinner – Royal Navy dinner, an early afternoon meal – aboard the Nymphe the next day to the governor and the fort’s senior officers.

  Then he and his lieutenants made their way back down to the shore and the gig. There they came upon a commotion in the darkness: an African was in the gig and refused to be moved. On seeing the officers approach the man begged to be taken off the shore through what language he could, managing to communicate that he had been beaten by his master. Meara tried to express his regret to the man. He must not take him; the institution of slavery was legal on the island, and the gig was on the shore of that island. Whatever the captain’s personal feelings on slavery, and they were categorical, Meara must not abscond with slaves because they were slaves. He must not. The gig’s crew finally lifted the African from the boat and set him ashore. They pulled back into the night and the bleak-sided Nymphe.

  The next day the Malagasy officials and officers left the shore to a salute from the Nymphe, with the battery above the town returning it. Meara hosted the Malagasy in his wide cabin. The dinner over at last, the round of entertaining was over. He told his guests that he would proceed down the coast the next day. It was a Sunday afternoon and the crew had few duties, and except for the standard muster at quarters in the afternoon, all was quiet.

  The night too was quiet, with a hot wind blowing from over the island. In the middle of the night it shifted to blow from the sea and the temperature dropped slightly. Clouds began to obscure the stars; rain was coming. In this darkness, a noise, a man in the water, swimming for the ship. Then another man appeared paddling in a canoe. Calls, action, and the men were helped up the side. Edward Meara was summoned and discovered two Africans on the deck.

  Meara recognised one of them, the slave he had removed from his gig. The other man was also fleeing from slavery. Their master tormented them, they said, and kept them half-starved. And so Meara was presented with the choice again. He understood that they were begging his personal protection; to return them to shore was certainly to condemn them. Was it different now that they had crossed the water, that he had not removed them from shore? Was it different now that they stood on the deck of a British man-of-war – was this deck the same as free English soil itself? It started to rain.

  Then came a murky, wet dawn and Nymphe crept out of the bay under steam. She was headed for the Seychelles with the two newly freed men and the several lifted from the slave ship days earlier. A mild south-easterly leading wind was on her quarter. Within minutes of leaving the bay the watch set the lean, dart-like jibs above the pointing bowsprit, then the yardmen climbed to their positions and set the square topsails. Below these the watch set gaff mainsails on the lowest yards. Nymphe would soon catch the Madagascar current to help carry her north and the refugees away from this place.

  Not long after this, after Nymphe pointed her head toward the Seychelles, Edward Meara summoned the two men to whom he had given his protection with Ali the interpreter also entering the cabin. The name of the man who had appeared in his gig two nights before they transposed to ‘Malbrook’, the other was called Ferejd. Malbrook spoke a Mozambican tongue and gleaning his meaning took some time, but his story slowly took shape. He had been seized across the water, placed in a boat to cross the channel, and sold to a merchant – a vicious man – in Majunga. It seemed that slavers had landed Malbrook and Ferejd not two weeks before. No slave trade to Madagascar, indeed.

  The men said that slavers in two dhows had landed almost two hundred captives at the time. They could, said Malbrook, point out the very dhows, which were still anchored there. Still anchored there. Edward Meara immediately issued orders and, not an hour after leaving Majunga, the Nymphe came around with a course shaped the way she had come. Sails shifted, sails reefed. Her head was very close to the wind now and steam would have to drive her back. The rain stopped.

  She was back at anchor before Majunga by noon and immediately the two freed men pointed out the pair of slave ships. Meara ordered a party of thirty formed, issued rifles and other arms. The captain dropped down with the boats and took the lead. Like the eighteen-year-old Midshipman Meara on the west coast of Africa, Commander Meara was once again marching to confront slavers. The dhows were drawn up close to the shore, so after a short pull the sailors drew the boats up on the beach. Soon a crowd formed nearby and Meara noted muskets among them, and spears. Were these the slavers themselves? If so, they made no move now, though peril was close.

  Then an Arab man approached. Speaking through Ali, he confirmed that the dhows were slave ships. With that final condemnation, Meara ordered the two dhows put to the torch there and then. He dispatched a note up the hill to the governor explaining that he had been ‘under the painful necessity of burning two dhows that had landed 200 slaves twelve days ago’.

  Some Malagasy officers hurried to the beach and the blaze to ask what was happening.

  ‘You have Mozambiques in your possession who were brought here by those dhows,’ said Meara.

  ‘If you meet with Mozambiques upon the high seas, then you yourselves capture them and report to your government,’ replied one Malagasy officer. ‘But if we meet with those who bring them across the seas to us, then we report to our government.’

  At some point during the burning of the dhows, a confusion broke out down by one of the Nymphe’s boats. Two of Edward Meara’s gig’s crew were hustling the Arab informant onto the boat. The man had a hole in his clothes. Someone – never spotted – had tried to murder him in broad daylight, and the blade had passed through his robes. Soon Meara and his men returned to the Nymphe, and the nearly murdered man came aboard and dared not leave again.

  In a few hours the captain ordered a new landing party formed, a bodyguard for Meara’s visit to the governor. Twenty men and two officers armed themselves and in the middle of the afternoon they descended to their boats, pulled again for the beach, and marched up the little road to the fort. Governor Ramasy, flanked by some officers, admitted Meara. After formalities the captain demanded the captives according to the treaty between their countries that forbade the overseas slave trade.

  ‘Twenty days ago the dhows arrived with slaves on board, and we have referred the matter to the government at Antannarivo, and are awaiting their reply as to what we must do,’ said the governor. This was something the governor had failed to mention over the course of several long dinners, though he had told Meara there was no slave trade to that coast.

  ‘I will not leave this port without those slaves,’ said Meara.

  ‘Very well. We must wait till we hear from the government.’

  ‘How long will this take?’

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘My orders prevent me from waiting here so long.’ He asked to count the number landed.

  ‘We cannot tell, for this is a land full of slaves, and we cannot allow you to count them unless we hear from our government.’

  ‘I will do what I ought to do, even if I have to fight for them.’

  ‘You yourself know what you ought to do, but the words of the treaty say there should be no fighting between the English and Malagasy for evermore.’

  ‘Will you give up those slaves or no?’

  An officer said, again, that the matter had been referred.

  ‘Then I go. But at midnight I will act.’

  Back on the Nymphe, with dusk approaching, Edward Meara ordered the great 64-pounder loaded, pivoted on its track, and aimed to pass the shell about a mile clear of the fort. Fired with a shaking clap, it was like a shot across the bow.

  Meara and the other captains in Leopold Heath’s squadron had worked out a kind of code of conduct stating that searching for captives ashore was s
o perilous an act that it approached carelessness with men’s lives. With uncertain ground, uncertain opposition, any captain who led his men ashore to release slaves assumed all the risk to his neck and career. In case of disaster the squadron would not defend the captain who risked it. Meara had not seen anything like a slave enclosure on shore. Could he really march on shore at midnight and expect to locate the people kidnapped from Mozambique? Locate them among all of the ‘legal’ slaves?

  No. As outraged as he was, Edward Meara would not march his men ashore at midnight. Nor did he the next day. He kept the boat crews busy hunting the bay for more slavers. And they succeeded, his experienced lieutenants seizing another slave ship, the East Africans lifted out, bags of rice unloaded onto Nymphe, the slaver crew deposited on shore, and the dhow burnt.

  Later that same day a boat pulled from shore. Envoys of the governor came up the side and Meara greeted them. By now they were aware of the two refugees, former slaves, on board, as well as the Arab man who had identified the slave dhows.

  ‘Return those persons you have taken without permission,’ said one of the envoys.

  Meara suspected that handing over the informant constituted his death sentence.

  ‘British sailors who escape from their respective ships to Madagascar must be delivered up to the consul or the captain of the vessel from which they escaped, if found,’ the envoy went on. ‘Therefore, do not carry away those persons you have seized, lest you break this treaty.’

  ‘What you say is perfectly true,’ said Meara. But, he continued, ‘they are Mozambique slaves. Therefore, I retain them.’

  ‘If you are right in seizing them, where is your commission for so doing, that we may have it in our possession?’

  Meara’s last vestige of diplomacy dropped away. ‘I give you my commission.’

  The next morning, at dawn, Nymphe left Majunga.1

  CHAPTER 7