Squadron

by John Broich

  A month later, Heath received a letter from Bombay stating that it was the opinion of the Bombay government’s attorney that the squadron’s captains must have proof that any slaves on board were being carried expressly for the purpose of being sold. Ships carrying slaves must be presumed innocent of slave-trading. And so the barometer tilted left again, towards RAIN, but Heath still believed that he had his longstanding instructions on his side, whatever the view of Bombay. He also had evidence in his possession – letters taken from a captured dhow – showing that slave owners sometimes sent their victims to work on a dhow during a passage overseas with the intention of then selling that slave once that dhow reached port. He forwarded these to the Admiralty; slaves that served as crewmen could also be headed for sale, and they didn’t have to just take Heath’s word for it.

  HMS Forte, Aden harbour, June 1869

  On arriving in Aden for his rendezvous with the squadron after the spider’s web campaign, Leopold Heath found a letter from the Admiralty in London. It instructed him to tell his captains to tow captures to port or send them in under prize crews. Captures should, it read, be investigated by authorities in Aden, Bombay or Cape Town before official condemnation. And suspected slaver captains should be given passage to port so they might defend themselves in Vice-Admiralty court. Only if it proved impossible to reach port should dhows be burnt on the spot, and in such cases the officer must carefully detail his justification in doing so in a report to the commodore and these forwarded to the Admiralty for review. And so the barometer dropped, again.

  His squadron had just completed its most successful campaign ever. That success rested on a greater focus than had ever been shown by the station and rested on a strategy of lying in wait for slavers driven before the monsoon. If his ships had to return to far-off Aden towing a delicate dhow and bearing its captain every time a cruiser made a capture, they would be constantly off their positions and slavers would slip through the web. Simply put, the strategy would fall apart.

  Among the documents enclosed with the Admiralty instructions there was a complaint from the sultan of Zanzibar that his people’s dhows had been burnt by Daphne solely for carrying slave sailors or because they carried fittings suitable for bearing slaves over the sea. It was a natural defence of the sultan’s merchant subjects, to be expected. And Heath saw that the consul at Zanzibar, Henry Churchill, had answered the sultan defending the squadron. The squadron did not act arbitrarily, he said, but always took care to distinguish slavers from honest traders. Churchill’s support was a good sign. But Heath came to another letter in the bundle, clearly the one that prompted the new instructions from the Admiralty. It was from Whitehall, the Foreign Office. Bombay’s communications with London had indeed attracted attention, it seemed – and had indeed been convincing, it seemed. The Foreign Office wanted assurances that the squadron was only condemning ships on the basis of ‘ample evidence’ and that they were really in violation of treaties. And so it had asked for the new instructions ordering the slaver-hunters to tow their captures into port. Complaints coming from varied corners, from influential offices: it might be a sign that a real storm loomed beyond the horizon.1

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘THE WIND HATH SPOKE ALOUD AT LAND’

  As word of the squadron’s ‘zealotry’ spreads, so does alarm in official circles

  IN LATE SPRING 1869, Leopold Heath ordered George Sulivan and the Daphne south to the Mozambican coast. It was here that a young Midshipman Sulivan had raided a pirate nest with the boats of the Castor twenty years earlier. In those days, and as recently as the late 1850s, this coast had been haunted by European, American and Brazilian slave-dealers taking abductees to the Caribbean and South America. Now, Arab, Swahili and French ships took them to Madagascar or sugar plantation islands.

  The Portuguese had been involved in what is today called Mozambique since shortly after Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa in 1498. They found a thriving trade centre on an island off this coast, an independent sultanate of one Ali Mussa Mbiki, who subsequently lent his name to the region. Over the centuries, the Portuguese wrested the island from his dynasty and poached or built other trade sites at the mouths of East African rivers. Mozambique Island became a fortress, dockyard, destination for ivory and gold dust, Jesuit headquarters, and slave market. Indeed, in times when trade was good, merchant households typically held twenty slave labourers so that the enslaved outnumbered the free on the island. The Portuguese went on to become the world’s foremost slave carriers measured by voyages, and about 8% of those carried across the Atlantic to the New World were taken from these south-eastern lands.

  What the Portuguese could not manage to do over the centuries was create a stable territorial empire in the Mozambique region. Wealth was made at the coast, trading the ivory that came down from the hinterlands, serving the ships that passed on their way to Goa, dealing in slaves, extracting customs from African, Arab and Indian traders; the upriver regions, meanwhile, had a reputation for malaria and war. Governors sent out from Portugal had a reputation for seeing their time there as a chance to make personal fortunes instead of working towards inland settlement.

  There were some few who saw the interior as a place to make their fortune, on the other hand, people like Tippu Tip in the lands to the north. Colonial militia captains received licences to create inland fiefdoms in exchange for planting the Portuguese flag and enforcing the emperor’s peace. But peace was not very profitable; peace did not generate captives for the slave trade.

  One part-Portuguese, part-African dynasty knew this lesson well and used outright warmaking as its favourite mode of production. The Mariannos’ was probably the most persistent and depraved slave duchy in the colonial period. It was begun by a half-Portuguese colonel, Paulo Marianno, who defeated his rivals and then built a vast slave labour operation and personal army. Europeans who encountered him said he had an unhurried air, and would survey his personal empire from a high balcony in his makeshift palace while smoking cigars.

  But his princes had reputations for wild violence. Paolo Marianno II made a new name for himself and his father’s dynasty when, fetching a spear, he ordered forty men, captured fighters for one of his rivals in the river region, assembled before him. He approached the first and thrust the spear into him, then repeated this a total of forty times. Marianno could have made money on these prisoners; after all, his brother-in-law was the chief supplier to the French of slave labour – technically ‘indentured’ labour – for their Indian Ocean sugar plantations. Marianno could have had these men marched to the coast, but either his legendary temper forbade it or he meant to send a message to his Portuguese and African enemies: fear Marianno, tremble at his coming. In personally murdering forty men, he made a name that Marianno would pass down to his heir and grandson: Matekenya: he who makes men quake.

  Matekenya built a new fortress on the Shire River as a seat for his slaving empire, a double-rowed stockade, pierced by musket loopholes and positions for four cannon, protecting a town for his followers and slave army. The war captives too young to serve in his personal army worked in the fields to feed it. His brick manor house with its tiled roof stood in the middle of the fort and fields, comfortably furnished in a European manner. His wife, meanwhile, they called a queen. The enslaved sang a song about Matekenya’s aunt Maria who always dressed in Indian fashion as if she came directly from Portuguese India, though she was African. ‘I have no mother/I have no father/I have no mother to nurse me/My mother is Maria.’

  Matekenya’s brother, Bonga, the wildcat, was his top general, while Matekenya’s brother-in-law, Antonio, sent guns to Bonga, who would march into the hinterlands and trade them to the region’s chiefs for war captives. Rulers would take the guns and raid their rivals to pay for them. And Bonga and his men spread their own terror, too, burning and murdering, in order to kidnap refugees themselves. Bonga marched the captives to the sea in chains and Antonio sold them to the French, who would declare
them ‘free emigrants’ and transport them to their Indian Ocean plantations. Antonio used the revenue to buy more guns, and so a decades-long cycle, a fire of war and kidnap, spread across the region.

  Livingstone and his party had seen their handiwork first hand a few years before, had seen bodies floating down the Zambezi River, massacred by the wars of the Mariannos and war’s skeletal shadow, famine. George Sulivan’s friend, a missionary, had heard the people of the Zambezi River lands sing songs of the wars and evils of Matekenya. English and French travellers returned from the interior telling how Matekenya once made a sport of shooting all the Africans he could see from the door of his fine brick house.1

  HMS Daphne, Mozambique Island, July 1869

  It was early summer 1869, and Daphne was about to depart Zanzibar for Mozambique Island. While the men finished stowing supplies ferried across the harbour from French Charlie’s saloon, Daphne’s new surgeon reported. William Dillon was a seasoned doctor though younger than Sulivan, an Irishman, tall and athletic. He told Sulivan that Tom Hurrex, a Suffolk-man who had joined the ship straight out of a prison two years before, had died of dysentery. And, Dillon reported, he had more cases below in the sick berth.

  Some days later the Daphne was at sea east of Mozambique Island, with the eastern horizon just beginning to lighten behind her, showing a sky dotted with cloud. The watch set jibs, set Daphne’s wide gaff sails. The wind blew only moderately, but steadily, coming almost directly abeam as Daphne sailed west, and drawing the air of the southern latitudes to cool the morning. Before long land was sighted, the Mozambique coast.

  Later they raised Mozambique Island, a place a little over a mile long and very narrow, sitting in a bay into which three African rivers poured. Another slight turn of the wheel, up steam and down sails as the current resisted Daphne. The ship steamed into the small harbour slowly and sounded often, since the sea here hid coral all around. The pier of sixty or seventy yards came in sight and soon the men of the afternoon watch dropped anchor.

  At the northern point of the small island a Portuguese fort had stood for centuries. The population of the island was about ten or twelve thousand, comprised mainly of slaves, the rest Africans, Arabs, Indians, Portuguese, and combinations thereof. It was from here that the Portuguese ruled their Mozambican territory, or were supposed to rule – George Sulivan had seen little evidence of Portuguese control beyond this fortress. As a seventeen-year-old he had fought a losing battle at the river Angoche with slavers and pirates precisely because the Portuguese could not drive them out themselves. There was another fort at Ibo Island to the north; there were posts here and there along the coast, mainly for attempting to extract customs dues; and to the south there was a garrison at the town of Quelimane at another coastal river mouth.

  Other than the fort at Mozambique, Sulivan considered all of these places pathetic. The Portuguese might claim to hold the entire coast, thought Sulivan, but by what right or authority? Certainly it is not by right of conquest, since they have not yet conquered it. There were Mozambican Arab towns just across the bay from the Island of Mozambique that scoffed at Portuguese authority. Sulivan soon learned that the slave king Matekenya’s brother, called Bonga, had in recent months slaughtered a Portuguese expedition sent to tame him. And there was some fear that Bonga might put Quelimane itself to the torch to teach his supposed masters a lesson.

  George Sulivan entered Mozambique Town. Everywhere were signs of former wealth and activity with its wide streets, a large palace, hospital and convent. On these streets were many white-turbaned Indian traders and crowds of East African slaves, but it was a place that had been decaying for a long time. Sulivan soon sensed that there was something unusual going on here, perceived agitation or dread. Daphne’s interpreter Jumah made inquiries and reported.

  It seemed that an enslaved man – defiant or indifferent or runaway – had been publicly whipped so brutally and long that he had died. The majority slave population was terrorised. The minority slaveholders were, in turn, fearful and more vicious so that more atrocities followed. Sulivan thought death by whipping would have surprised him in nearly any other place, but not on this abominable island. He and Jumah returned to the ship.

  Night fell with the barest sliver of moon under broken clouds. Some time after darkness set in completely, word was passed to the captain: a man had swum from the pier and scrambled aboard. He was a runaway from slavery, and George Sulivan had the man brought before him. He questioned him with the help of the interpreter, and the man showed Sulivan recent wounds.

  So it continued for the next few days. By day, the crew of the Daphne could see Africans hiding under the pier, hiding along the shore, waiting for darkness and an opportunity to try the swim to the ship. Some came from across the bay in canoes from the Arab towns there.

  Sulivan questioned them. Most came originally from the interior of the country, sold and bought in Mozambique Town or one of the towns ringing the bay. They would point to a wound, a bloody stripe on the back. One showed him an inch-thick iron bar that had been affixed to his leg, wrapped around it twice, soldered there. It dug into him, even pressed directly against the bone. His master, the man said through Jumah, had hammered it there as a punishment. The Daphne’s blacksmith, John Letten, worked gingerly to saw it off.

  Soon there were ten refugees on board, then a dozen, then more. The evening before Daphne was to depart to hunt to the south, a Portuguese man of uncertain office came up the accommodation ladder. Young William Breen, who once struggled on the beach with his captain to save children from drowning, was summoned since he could understand Portuguese.

  The official did not seem pleased. He had a newspaper clutched under his arm. He produced it and Breen read: Several free negroes are aboard ‘Daphne.’

  ‘We have no such on board. Those which we have are slaves,’ said Sulivan.

  The man spoke in Portuguese. ‘They are not slaves, but free,’ Breen translated.

  ‘If so, they had a right to come on board,’ said Sulivan.

  ‘No! They require passports.’

  Not only would they be flogged, perhaps to death, if I returned them, thought the captain, but it would be a disgrace to the flag and dishonourable.

  ‘They are slaves. They came on board the ship for protection,’ responded Sulivan. ‘I refuse to surrender them.’

  Sulivan could not have known the official trouble – further trouble – he had brought on himself and his squadron.2

  The British empire’s preoccupation with the Persian Gulf started before there was much of an empire to speak about. It began there the same way it began in India: with the seventeenth-century East India Company searching out trade opportunities and opportunities to drive off their Portuguese and other European rivals. And so, from small beachheads British influence inched inland by winning more and more concessions from local rulers, often in exchange for the services of the Honourable Company’s navy, until by 1869, with the East India Company replaced by the Raj in Calcutta, the Gulf was firmly under British naval dominion. From a sprawling colonnaded Residency in Bushire, Persia, the Indian government enforced a maritime truce hammered out with difficulty between princedoms for whom corsairing and raiding had been a way of life. It also enforced treaties against the foreign slave trade in Gulf waters and policed piracy. Meanwhile, it watched jealously the manoeuvres of the French in the Persian court and, even more so, the Russians – who might very much like a friend on the western frontier of India.

  As in the Indian Ocean, various Hindu and Muslim Indian merchant communities followed the spread of British influence and established themselves in the chief ports. Under British protection they grew in influence until, as in Zanzibar, the customs of Muscat in the eastern Gulf were collected by an Indian firm. While at the western end of the Gulf, exports of pearls – the most important luxury export of the region – were in control of Hindu merchants who sent them to Bombay, whence they fed a hungry world market. That pearl industry depended on
many thousands of slave divers.

  · · ·

  There was a row in the Persian Gulf. Lewis Pelly was Britain’s chief diplomat to Persia and tasked generally with keeping the peace in the Persian Gulf. He had spent years getting the myriad coastal powers from Muscat to Basra to observe a maritime truce, shuttling between courts, even getting a new telegraph line extended in the region to help him collect and react to news. And the news was that the Royal Navy were the ones setting fires, not adventuring Arab or Persian corsairs.

  In spring 1869, at the height of the spider’s web campaign, Lewis Pelly received some alarming messages. The Persian governor of a Gulf port wrote angrily to accuse HMS Dryad of arbitrarily seizing a trading ship returning there from Dubai having sold a cargo of dates. Dryad had stolen the captain’s trade proceeds, he wrote, and burned the ship – all the while within sovereign Persian territorial waters. The governor threatened to go to coastal leaders and summon a raiding party to retaliate. Pelly suspected that the Russian and French delegations in the Persian Court at Tehran would soon fan the flames of this controversy, if they hadn’t already.