by John Broich
The cutter made it to the ship’s side and it was hard work in heaving waves to bring the East Africans on board, fifty-nine men, women and children. His men came up and Colomb heard the news: the slavers had disappeared into the interior. The man pulled lifeless onto the beach was young Francis Treblecock, ordinary seaman. Though he had been ordered to stay in the gig, he had seemed to see some trouble or danger on shore and wanted to help his shipmates. He had slung on a cork jacket, lifted his rifle above his head and stepped out; but he had misjudged the bottom and the jacket had failed him. Weighed down, he could not reach the surface in time. Without him aboard to keep the boat aimed into the waves, they poured in and the gig swamped.
In the cutter had been Krooman Jim George, who had volunteered to swim back through the high surf from the cutter to the beach with a rope. With this, the men in the anchored sail boat could pull the smaller gig through the rollers to safety. George had succeeded, and began helping the survivors off the beach into the boat. The bosun, meanwhile, had done good work in ferrying former slaves off the beach. Once, twice, three times the gig made the dangerous journey through rising surf to the awaiting cutter. Twenty-eight feet long, six wide, the boat already held eighteen sailors – and now three dozen East Africans.
Then came the final trip with all of the remaining sailors and refugees. The gig was heavy, but the men judged that, with the waves rising, it was now or never to get off that beach. The sailors pulled mightily, and they were almost beyond the breakers when a high wave broke on top of them, filled the gig, and sent it like a stone to the sea floor. Under the swirling water it cracked. In this final boat there had been Kroomen Jim George and Peter Warman, powerful swimmers who managed to pluck up two children from the water, save their shipmates, and haul them up the beach.
Excellent men, thought Colomb of the Kroomen.
But they could only do so much. Henry Blake, not yet twenty years old, never reappeared. Neither did three of the East Africans. The sea and gallows, went a saying of the day, refuse none.
Having heard the story, Colomb needed to concentrate on matters at hand; there were still men on that beach, and they had lost their food, water and rifles in the sunken gig. There was a slaver crew on shore – perhaps two crews – not far off, and they might have preserved their guns. Darkness would fall in a few hours.
Kroomen Coffee and Wheel volunteered to load their canoe with guns and provisions and run the gauntlet of the high waves for the shore. The Englishman goes to the devil, the Krooman goes with him. Colomb believed the situation desperate enough to allow the risk. In the canoe the West African men carefully stowed a few rifles and ammunition, some biscuit, a keg of water, and some instructions for the shore party. The canoe lowered, Coffee and Wheel climbed in. In addition to swimming, the Kroomen were renowned for their ability to work a canoe and Colomb saw their obvious skill as they darted off. He watched as the canoe approached the breakers and was whirled by the first roller like a toy. Then it disappeared from view.
And now what? Dusk was coming on, wind and surf rising. And there were no more boats or canoes. Fifteen fearful minutes passed, until finally rifle fire came from the shore. Two shots, and fear lessened. The note to the shore party ordered them to fire two shots if the Kroomen reached them. Coffee and his partner had somehow dragged the swamped canoe ashore.
And so the Dryad hovered off the shore all through a night of ever strengthening wind and climbing seas. In the early morning the captain saw the shore party through his telescope. Relief spread among the men. He ordered a signal, March. There was no choice but to send his men and the African refugees overland to the Dryad’s base ten miles back up the coast. Soon the people on shore began their walk and Colomb pictured the party ambushed by the enraged and desperate slavers, saw them captured by the local people. The group had to pass through an unknown land, risk blind chasms. But Dryad must head back north to her base.
A little over six hours later, Dryad back at her home under the red peak, the shore party arrived, safe. Colomb soon received their report. It had been rough going, but the released captives had acted courageously, collecting firewood and water on the night of their camp ashore when the seamen had been exhausted. Not long after setting off in the morning the party had come upon several local Arabs in the stony land. The men said they were friends, and turned out to be some of those whom Bin Moosa had met under tense circumstances. They guided the sailors and refugees to a spring, then showed them the way through the hills to their ship.
In time, Philip Colomb reflected on the deaths of his men. They were from his gig’s crew, his coxswain’s select men. And he reflected on those East Africans who had survived the wrecks. They had been forced inland to make the same desperate walk that his own men had made, but perhaps many, many times longer, with no friends around, and with what food and water? And so Colomb reached his characteristic conclusion: that for all the sacrifice of life, the fate of most of the slaves that had been stowed in those ships was many times worse now than if the Dryad had never found them.2
HMS Nymphe, Mahé, Seychelles, May 1869
Meanwhile, far to the south-east, the Nymphe wound its way into the complicated entrance to the harbour of Port Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles. Poles painted like barber’s poles guided the way through a channel past reefs, while white sand under the shallow water lit the sea emerald. Above the port of about 10,000 souls, a cone of rock sprang up many thousands of feet, sometimes reaching above the clouds.
Anchoring, Edward Meara and the crew of the Nymphe then landed scores of former slaves, most of whom had been taken from the dhow cut out in Zanzibar harbour in a storm of lead balls. The refugees came under the charge of the chief magistrate, a representative from Mauritius. The men and women headed for their separate houses, and homes were sought out for the young children without parents. There, too, landed young Hodgson, whose arm had been ruined in the fight. There he must await return to England, his work over.
And there Edward Meara gave his crew general leave. Within just a few hundred feet of the beach they found limes, oranges, pineapples, bananas, mangoes, red lychees, all growing semi-wild. The Seychelles merchants, selling eggs and steak, beer and wine, practically leapt at the sight of the seamen. Surgeon John Noble was soon certain that the men had enjoyed themselves only too well since not long after this period, the men started to come to him complaining of spots in places where they regretted finding them. Some of the women landed there by the Royal Navy made their living through prostitution. Amid all of this, ordinary seaman Henry Rogers and marine private Patrick Doyle took the opportunity of a Sunday afternoon leave to desert.
Two weeks later, Nymphe was heading for her rendezvous with most of the squadron at Aden at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula. The monsoon wind and current was at full force now, so that in the absence of magically refilling coal holds, the Amazons were under the same inexorable power of the monsoon as the dhows. The spiders could no longer perch motionless in their places, especially since at certain places on the ocean the web itself – the current-borne sea – moved. It was time for them to report, compare tactics, and work out a new plan for the second half of the year.
So under overcast skies, the Nymphe was moving north towards the squadron rendezvous at an easy pace, Africa not far off to port, before a steady wind. To make the greatest use of it, Meara sent the topmen up the masts high above ship and sea to let out all of the reefs of the topsail; then they mounted higher, crossed the lithe topgallant yards and furled topgallant sails. Their work done, he ordered a slight increase to engine speed and the Nymphe quickened.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon watch, a man spotted a sail almost directly behind them to the south. Captain Meara ordered a stop and Nymphe hove to and swung round to face the sail. It proved to be a dhow riding up the coast and he ordered a cutter dropped. Lieutenant Hodgson was invalided and Clarke was recovering from a spear wound, so Meara had to send a twenty-one-year-old sub-lieutenant, one primarily
concerned with navigation, to captain the cutter. And this young officer, Charles Hopkins, had to keep the cutter between the dhow and shore or invite calamity.
Soon the cutter and dhow converged, Hopkins managing to keep it from running ashore, and in about an hour the cutter and dhow were sailing toward the Nymphe. Before long the crew could see that its deck was covered with Africans. Lines were thrown between the Nymphe and the dhow, the men warped it alongside, then helped up no fewer than 266 Africans.
Almost before this dhow finished burning, a second one was spotted and the entire scene was repeated, so that before dusk there were 419 released East Africans on board, over twice as many former slaves as sailors.
From then on it was a difficult passage around the Horn of Africa to Aden. Surgeon John Noble saw the worst of it. In another repeated scene, he struggled to save the lives of the sick and starving. Two days after they came on board, two girls died. Dr Noble lost another patient the day after that, then another. Until finally, the next day at dusk, the overladen Nymphe steamed into Aden harbour. Over these four days Edward Meara had rarely allowed her speed to drop below eight knots.
The dawn after arriving, a hot morning as always, the boats shuttled the refugees to an island in the harbour, a place of bare sun-blasted rock, a far different place from the green Seychelles. For the African arrivals awaited long open barracks where food and water were provided, but little else. Work was scarce for them in Aden, and many were transported on to Bombay. India offered no promises of opportunity or contentment, but the refugees stood a better chance there. The luckiest went to the Seychelles or Mauritius where there was more work to be had.
Having hurried, the Nymphe was the first of the squadron to arrive at the rendezvous at Aden. Then came in the Dryad and Philip Colomb. Then arrived the Forte and Leopold Heath and the smaller auxiliary, HMS Star. Sulivan and Daphne were at the Seychelles having already reported at Aden two weeks before. The ships’ crews helped their African refugees to the quarantine station while others were busy with restocking and refitting.
The officers compared tracks, logs, experiences. As Edward Meara and Philip Colomb discussed their capture, Meara had to admit his luck, relating how two full slave dhows essentially tripped over him in the final days of his mission. It was, he said, as if the slavers sailed up to him and politely asked, ‘which side they were to come up for discharging their cargoes’.
At Aden there was a Vice-Admiralty court judge, and in the coming days he declared official the squadron’s condemnations and issued prize money, bounties for the slave ships and for each African released. And one by one the captains emerged from the consulate happily carrying claims from the Treasury for thousands of pounds.
In May 1869, the spider’s web stratagem met its greatest successes; Heath’s web had worked the way it was meant to. Including the totals from Daphne the squadron had destroyed thirteen dhows that April and May alone: 967 men, women and children freed from their captors. In under two months, the squadron had released almost as many captives as it had in the entire year of 1868, and that had been a comparatively good year because of Sulivan’s work. The squadron released over twice as many people from slave holds in just two months of the spider’s web than had the Royal Navy on the east coast annually in the previous decade. In the minds of Heath and Consul Churchill the sense of success was heavily tempered by some well-known and unshakeable figures: the customs house scribes on Zanzibar recorded collecting taxes on around 17,000 trafficked humans to that island annually – ‘legally’ trafficked: they were meant for the slave labour farms of Zanzibar, neighbouring Pemba, or the sultan’s coastal domains. The fact that his squadron intercepted so many slavers convinced Heath that the trade was larger than he had imagined; given the limits of the ocean his squadron could cover, some vast majority must be slipping by him. Still, the squadron’s web represented a revolutionary overturning of past practice and results.3
PART II
‘A dangerous sea’
CHAPTER 11
‘TOO TRUE AN EVIL’
Forces array against the squadron while Daphne approaches the realm of a slaver king
TROUBLE WAS BREWING for the squadron. While they were facing heat, disease, boredom and slavers’ guns and spears, the squadron’s most powerful opponents were beginning to muster. Between late 1868 and mid-1869, first India then London took notice of the threat of Heath and his new methods – the threat to their economic and political arrangements, not the squadron’s threat to slavers.
Britain’s relationship with the Zanzibar sultanate was the province of both the Foreign Office in London and the British Indian government in Calcutta, capital of the eastern half of the British empire, a sort of Constantinople to London’s Rome. (‘Why, this is London!,’ Kipling wrote of the city on the Hooghly, ‘This is Imperial.’) Calcutta and its sub-administrations, Bombay and Madras, concerned themselves with Britain and India’s relationship with China, with administering the vast province of Burma, with piracy in the Straits and beyond that threatened trade to Singapore and points beyond; they worried about the threat of imperial Russia near its northern borders, about difficult relationships with Afghanistan and Indian princes beyond Britain’s direct rule. High on the list of concerns was keeping tradeways open through the Persian Gulf, out of which flowed a stream of pearls and dates and other luxury goods, a place of simmering dynastic and national rivalries. Also high on the list was keeping the paths between Zanzibar and Bombay open and active. Zanzibar meant ivory and copal, chiefly; and it represented a market for cotton textiles and other trade goods and source of cash remittances from its successful Indian merchant community back to India.
For the British Indian administration, the goal of order and the flow of trade through the Indian Ocean did not jibe with zealously fighting the slave trade. The Viceroy in Calcutta, the Earl of Mayo, was in fact reported to think the slave trade question an annoying diversion from his sprawling tasks. The Indian government had never concerned itself too closely with outlawing domestic slavery in the Raj. It was technically illegal from 1843, but under the theory that it should honour local custom to avoid disrupting things, the government looked the other way unless a slave managed to find a British official and plead for release.
Keeping trade moving freely and quickly – and towards India, and not Marseilles or New York – meant keeping Swahili and Arabian rulers and Indian mercantile colonies happy and secure. To this end, India had to keep one place in particular sedate: the port capital of the Omani sultanate, Muscat, which sat right at the opening of the Persian Gulf. The sultans of Oman and Zanzibar were brothers, their father having built an empire that stretched down the East African coast similar to many European empires – a string of colonial ports for extracting the riches of the interior. When the sultan of Oman died, his eldest son claimed Muscat and the younger, Majid bin Said, claimed richer Zanzibar. A dynastic war on the high seas of the Indian Ocean loomed. Trouble in Muscat waters would have meant trouble for all trade coming out of the Gulf toward Bombay and beyond. In order to avoid chaos on the shipping lanes and in the markets, Indian officials brokered a treaty in which the Zanzibar sultanate paid the Omani sultanate an annual subsidy in acknowledgement of its richer inheritance. Zanzibar’s most reliable source of income for the paying of that subsidy was the tax it collected on imported humans. Meanwhile, a major component of the economy in the Oman region was the illegal importation of slaves from Zanzibar by blockade runners. One prince in the Gulf of Oman said that for the mere price of twenty baskets of dates bought on credit, one of his subjects could buy twenty slaves in Zanzibar whom he could then sell back in the Gulf for 1,000 silver dollars. With peace at the gate of the Persian Gulf depending on careful political arrangements – in turn, dependent on the success of the slave trade, the Bombay government made clear that it did not want any disruptions to the status quo.
Heath and his captains were doing just that, and the British Resident at Aden at the southern tip
of Arabia was the first to warn Bombay. Starting with Sulivan and the Daphne at the end of 1868, then in even greater volume in the spring of 1869, shipload after shipload of refugees appeared in Aden’s harbour. With so many, Sir Edward Russell suspected that Heath’s captains must be overstepping, overzealous. This, he believed, risked wrecking long-cultivated British relationships with the princes of the Arabian coasts and Indian Ocean. Writing to Bombay and copying in Leopold Heath, the Resident warned that the squadron was condemning ships if they had any slaves on board, even a handful, even if they were the personal slaves of passengers or enslaved crewmembers. By that threshold of guilt, the squadron might burn half the shipping in this ocean, so many native merchants carried a few personal slaves. Instead, only large ‘cargoes’ of slaves should be stopped. Yes, he wrote, those carrying small numbers of slaves for sale might then be able to ‘escape …, but on the other hand a great injustice is avoided, and I am of opinion that if the wholesale destruction of dhows is permitted, the British name will be abhorred, and the minds of the Chiefs and natives will be turned decidedly against us’.
The governor of Bombay himself then approached Heath while the squadron awaited its late March 1868 launch from Bombay. He shared Russell’s concerns and told Heath that he was referring the question of what constituted a legitimate slaver to Bombay’s attorney general. He was also referring the question to the India Office in London.
At the moment this seemed a squall, not a hurricane to Heath’s mind. He believed that his squadron’s instructions were clear. They were the same that had governed the West African squadron in which he had served as a younger man, that had choked the trade to the Americas. A ship carrying slaves on the open sea was forfeit, the status of the slaves did not matter. They could be domestic servants, sailors, or solely carried for sale. Besides, Heath knew that the slaves, whatever their status, could always be sold. It was nearly inconceivable that the squadron should let pass ships because they were only carrying, say, half a dozen victims. If the instructions changed to set a certain threshold below which a slaver could pass, the obvious result would be that every ship on the African and Arabian coasts would carry this many, knowing that the British could not touch them. The heartburn of the Resident at Aden would cease, imagined Leopold Heath, but at the cost of practically legalising the slave trade.
