Squadron

by John Broich

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘TRAITORS ENSTEEP’D TO CLOG THE GUILTLESS KEEL’

  The squadron sails into political trouble

  Westminster, July 1869

  THERE WAS A SLAVE TRADE bureaucracy within the British government in London. In other words, there was a network of offices and individuals centred on slave trade issues. It originated in the need to enforce Acts for regulating Britain’s own slave trade from the 1780s, grew after the 1807 ban on that trade, and grew again after the 1833 Emancipation Act and the expansion of the West African slave trade suppression squadron. The Admiralty, Foreign Office, Treasury and other ministries monitored their citizens’ and other countries compliance with slaving bans and treaties, gathered intelligence sent in by consular agents or Royal Navy stations, published reports for parliament, administered slave trade suppression budgets, and presided over claims for bounties and paid them. A slave trade department grew in the Foreign Office until, by the 1860s, four permanent specialists (out of a Foreign Office complement of only forty civil servants) spent their days working on slave suppression matters alone.

  The five most influential figures in this system were the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, his superintendent of the Slave Trade Department, the First Sea Lord, and the Treasury’s slave trade advisor. The Prime Minister determined the priority and tone of Britain’s anti-slavery effort, which ranged from the crusading and bluff Palmerston (in office 1855–65) to the far more restrained and ambivalent Gladstone (1868–74, 1880–6, 1892–4). The Foreign Secretary took his cues from his Prime Minister, viewed the entire question through the lens of relationships with foreign powers, and led his corps of diplomats across the globe accordingly. The chief of the slave trade department, of course, took his direction from his master the Foreign Secretary but like any lieutenant shaped things himself depending on the degree and direction of his diligence. The First Lord of the Admiralty was important in implementing national slave suppression policy since he was ultimately responsible for which officers and ships did the work, suppression strategy, and how budgets were spent. But it was in a difficult position, only as effective as allowed by its budget and the shifting level of enthusiasm of the government of the day; blamed when suppression work was going poorly, blamed when it was going too well. The Treasury’s slave trade advisor was an attorney who was tasked with making sure that the government and Admiralty were following British law and international treaty in their suppression work. He also, practically speaking, defended the nation’s slave bounty budget from inaccurate or illegitimate claims by Royal Navy officers.

  In 1869, the slave trade department was led by William Wylde, a thirty-year veteran of the Foreign Office. For most of that time his work focused on slavery suppression politics and enforcement, whether scrutinising the illicit trade from the west coast of Africa, struggling with the Cubans to enforce their own prohibitions, or investigating the trade carried on under American colours. He was diligent in his duties and truly had no love for slavers, but for Wylde the work of stopping the slave trade must be gradual and temperate. The first rule of his masters in the Foreign Office was to keep the peace; and from this followed corollary rules: maintain friendly relations, extinguish fires – do not start them, employ the carrot – not the stick. So, Wylde gathered intelligence, rewarded cooperation from foreign governments when possible, and waited. The benevolent hand of commerce, he believed, must ultimately eliminate the supply of slaves from hinterland Africa. Make local rulers and overlords capitalists and they will have a vested interest in peace; make taxes from ore exports, not slave exports; make a man more valuable as a worker than as a slave. Wylde saw a role for the Royal Navy, too. They should show the flag, enforce existing treaty rules, maintain a small fleet in slave waters. Yet they, too, should wait.

  But in July 1869 he was quite unhappy with the Royal Navy, his alarm growing since word had come some months before from the diplomatic personnel in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Navy was badly overstepping; they were starting fires. Indeed, to Wylde’s mind, they were practically renegade and threatened to unravel Britain’s carefully maintained relations with multiple crowns.

  He reported to the Foreign Secretary who before long ordered Wylde to take steps to rein in the Royal Navy. He was to convene a committee of the Foreign Office, Admiralty and Treasury to rewrite the rules governing Leopold Heath’s squadron before it did too much damage.1

  HMS Forte, Zanzibar harbour, August 1869

  Leopold Heath, meanwhile, crossed west from the Seychelles to Zanzibar, the wide flagship lumbering heavily into the wind and repeatedly doused by squalls over a ten-day crawl. Anchoring, Forte boomed out a 21-gun salute to the sultan’s flag and a boat pulled from the nearby shore under the echoes. The new consul at Zanzibar, Dr Kirk, companion of the great Livingstone, was coming to the flagship, and soon he, too, was greeted with his own salute from the guns.

  The consul up the side, the formalities of the welcome were completed, and the commodore and Dr Kirk spoke. Dr Kirk agreed with those diplomats and Foreign Office officials who believed that the squadron had been overzealous in their pursuit of slavers in the previous year. And the consul believed that summary condemnation and burning at sea was the root of the problem, giving Britain a bad name, making her navy look piratical, angering the sultan whose cooperation Kirk was always at pains to court. That spring, the Admiralty had written to Heath telling him to advise his captains to tow slave ships into Zanzibar or Aden unless strictly impossible; Heath obeyed, but responded that doing so would practically halt his anti-slaving work. Dr Kirk suggested that he understood the commodore’s objections: the time lost away from the hunt, the way that dhows tended to swamp in the hands of those unfamiliar with them, the coal expenditure. So he had a plan to propose: why not, he asked the commodore, have your captains tow the suspect ships to the nearest port within the coastal dominions of the sultan? Leave the ships there in the hands of the local governor and return to the ships’ hunting grounds. Then, when the season was over, try the cases with him in Zanzibar as Vice-Admiralty judge. If Heath’s captains could prove their cases, prove that the seized ships were truly slavers, the sultan would order his governor to hand over the ship for condemnation. And – good news – Kirk had already raised the plan with the sultan who had agreed. Leopold Heath did not bother to hide his scepticism; the consul’s plan meant posting foxes to police the henhouse.

  Dr Kirk then told Heath that he had recently ruled against Edward Meara and the Nymphe. In his role as Vice-Admiralty judge, he had just ruled that a condemnation – a burning – by the Nymphe off the Keonga River on the coast was illegal. The dhow, while it had equipment on board that could be used in the trade, while it had some slaves on board, while its pass to transship slaves was well out of date, was not condemnable. The slaves on board said that they were being shipped for sale, but to Kirk’s mind they were not reliable witnesses – they were slaves, after all, falsely claiming they were being taken to sale so that they might be freed. So judged Kirk.

  Heath told the consul that Commander Meara should fight him in court, appeal the case to London. In England, Heath said, Kirk’s judgment would be reversed.

  But the consul’s judgment was official and final. It only remained for Edward Meara and the Nymphe to put in to Zanzibar, then Kirk would order Meara to pay the dhow’s owner the price of the burned ship, reimburse him for the condemned goods that had been sold off, and restore the dhow owner’s other property – the slaves themselves.

  By now Leopold Heath could not have mistaken the loom of a serious storm on the horizon. There were Kirk’s moves against the squadron, and there was ongoing pressure being placed on the Admiralty by the Foreign Office. The growing sense from that ministry was that, as officials in Aden and Bombay argued, only ships fully laden with Africans should be deemed forfeit by the squadron’s captains, while ships carrying fewer should be stopped but presumed innocent of shipping Africans for sale.

  Heath wrote
to the Admiralty that Kirk did not understand the trade, either on the East African coast in Zanzibar waters or to Madagascar and the French-held islands. He insisted that the instructions by which his squadron operated authorised it to condemn ships that carried even a few slaves on board when there was any chance that they could be sold at the next port and that he had proof that it was a common practice on the coast for captains to ship a few captives as a side investment. Heath wrote that if the critics of his squadron had their way, only a minority of slavers would be caught.

  Given all this, he concluded by stating that he had come to believe in a new solution to the problem of slavery in this ocean. More strength and more numbers in the squadron, yes; but it was also time to close the slave market at Zanzibar. He dictated, ‘the most efficient step that England could take in this matter would be the purchase of the sovereignty of Zanzibar’.

  Heath prepared to dispatch his response to Suez and beyond, but he had other important news to enclose for London. A caravan of Arab merchants arrived on the coast and crossed to Zanzibar shortly before Forte left the harbour. The travellers carried word of David Livingstone. The famous explorer, long feared dead, was alive.2

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘VOUCH WITH ME, HEAVEN’

  Sulivan tests the depths of hypocrisy while Colomb examines the fate of the African refugees

  THE PORTUGUESE CROWN decreed a ban on slave trafficking by its subjects in 1836, though few took notice in Mozambique. There followed a decree in February 1869 – only made public in Mozambique in July 1869 – that called for the end of the status of slavery throughout the Portuguese colonial empire. In late summer 1869, George Sulivan witnessed just how effective was Portugal’s abolition declaration. Even if Portuguese officials in Mozambique Town had truly wanted to halt the traffic in humans in the Mozambican interior, it is doubtful that they would have had the influence to do so, Portuguese power being so weak outside the main ports. Besides, for colonial officials, a posting to one of Portugal’s colonies on the East African coast had few attractions, but the opportunity to make money by abetting the trade in engagés was one. For their ‘services’ Portuguese officials, including the governor, the attorney general, the head of customs and the governor of the port of embarkation, each received their share of engagés dealers’ fees. Other Portuguese merchants became contract procurers for the French – one entered into and fulfilled a record contract for 1,500 ‘free labourers’ one year – and they in turn stoked the local economy by employing subcontractors and purchasing vast amounts of food and trade goods.

  HMS Daphne, off the Mozambique coast, September 1869

  George Sulivan was back on the Mozambican coast where he found news that Portugal had recently officially abolished the slave trade in its colonies. It remained to be seen what such words meant in this abominable place.

  The Daphne was anchored off a small island hiding place, not seven miles from the Mozambican coast, with tall pines crowding over white sand. It was a morning of clouds in blue sky and fresh breezes, but not a peaceful morning as Daphne’s great guns were pounding away. The crew was exercising at quarters for battle, with the marines, the gunner and his mates, bosun, gun crews, lieutenants and midshipman arrayed in their places. They hurled 64-pound shells, 7-inch, 22 pound shells, shattering case shot, and exploding percussion shells, aiming at the trees as if they were masts.

  Not long after the exercise began, a lookout sighted a vessel to the south moving north up the coast towards them before a southerly wind. Not a high-prowed dhow, and no fat lateen sail, within about twenty minutes it showed itself a schooner. The gunnery exercise still going, Sulivan ordered one of the cutters manned and dispatched to perform the routine inspection. The cutter beat into the wind to intercept the schooner, which did not flee, and not long after the ship, bearing a Portuguese flag, was alongside. Sulivan examined the people on board with the interpreter Abdalla, the former assistant of the deceased Jumah. The ship was recently out of Quelimane, the Portuguese fort near the Zambesi River, and was bound for Mozambique Island. The crew was mostly Portuguese, but some men on board were Indian, born in the British territories of India, but now trading out of Mozambique Island.

  On the ship Sulivan saw eight African children aged perhaps four to ten. Questioning some of them in Swahili, Abdalla repeated familiar stories. ‘Stolen … dragged … sold … brought in a vessel from the mainland … beaten.’ Sulivan and the interpreter eventually came to a clutch of the youngest of the children, boys and girls, who had holes in their lips and ears where there were once ornaments. Abdalla put the usual questions to them, but the children showed no sign of recognising Swahili, the lingua franca of the region. No one on board the Daphne or the Portuguese ship could understand them. They have recently been brought from the interior, thought Sulivan – so far in from these lands that they did not speak Swahili.

  Questioned, the captain of the schooner said that none of the Africans on board were slaves. They were, using the Portuguese jargon, ‘free negroes’. He had passports for them all, purchased at the customs house on Mozambique Island. One of the men from British India kept the passports for the four small children who did not know Swahili. They were Portuguese subjects, he claimed, and were migrant labourers.

  Sulivan knew that Arab slavers took the blame for the trade across the Mozambique Channel when in fact the trade was fed by the Portuguese and their allies. And it was sometimes carried on by them in this piecemeal way, a handful of victims at a time. Portuguese ship captains or owners trading up and down the Mozambican coast would make small trades for a handful of captives along with their other cargo. These they would take to the island of Mozambique. A quiet sale, then, either to dhow captains running for Madagascar, or to a private buyer on the island, or to engagés dealers. An open slave market like the one at Zanzibar was illegal on Mozambique, illegal even before the recent declaration of emancipation made in Lisbon. But shadowy market there was.

  To Sulivan’s mind it was unjust that the Portuguese escaped blame. But, he thought, here was a perfect chance to expose the trade carried on by the Portuguese themselves. Now he could put their hypocrisy on display. Now he had four children with tales of kidnap and sale, and four small children who could speak no known language, who could never be claimed to be selling their labour freely. Yes, the men on the schooner held passports for them, but Sulivan was certain that he had these Portuguese caught.

  So he had a choice: he could take the crew and children on board the Daphne and tow or burn the schooner, defending his action later in the Vice-Admiralty court at the Cape of Good Hope. But there was a risk that the court would accept the sham passport system. He knew that the squadron was under heightened scrutiny from civilians. Who knew how far it went? A less risky choice, he believed, was to escort the schooner into the harbour of Mozambique Island itself. Surely the governor there could not claim that these children were mere passengers who had bought passage to Mozambique Island, migrant workers. The schooner must be condemned.1

  After a short passage north over flashing bright seas, the Daphne lay at anchor in the wide harbour of Mozambique Island, her prize, a Portuguese schooner, lay not far away. Having busied his people with rattling down rigging, scraping and preparing to paint, George Sulivan crossed to the pier, went down it and into the town to find the governor, Fernando da Costa Leal. That schooner, he expected, would soon be condemned and burnt, the African children borne to the Seychelles or Mauritius or perhaps to Bishop Tozer’s small school on Zanzibar. Past the flat-roofed houses and the cathedral, once grand, but wearing badly under the tropical sun, he headed for the governor’s mansion, plastered pink.

  Sulivan eventually found him and an interview followed. After pleasantries Sulivan and Da Costa Leal came to the matter of the passports, properly signed by the appropriate authority in Quelimane. The governor judged these all in order, and came to a decision. He told Sulivan, assured him, that the children were not at all slaves but ‘free negroes’,
as proved by the passports. Still, as he spoke, the governor slipped, saying that the children legally ‘belonged’ to the Indian merchant on board. He caught himself up: they were not property, they did not ‘belong’ to anyone. The schooner, he concluded, was a perfectly legal trader and honest transporter of free labourers.

  Sulivan had not expected this depth of hypocrisy. He thought the entire institution of Portuguese colonialism on this coast a kind of fraud, thought their protestations against the slave trade were cheap, affected piety, but he had not truly believed this was possible. Yet it happened, Governor Da Costa Leal had solemnly declared the sun the moon. The children on that schooner who could not speak Swahili, let alone Portuguese, had somehow travelled to the coast of their own volition to contract with an Indian merchant for labour services and transport of their own free will.

  And so now Captain Sulivan was left two bad choices: abandon those children to lives as slaves – lives, including for the girls among them, in which their bodies were forfeit to the whim of a master’s appetites; or place a prize crew on that schooner, run for the Cape and plead for a successful condemnation in the Vice-Admiralty prize court. And at the same time detonating, most likely, a diplomatic bomb since the governor here had given a clear ruling as to the legality of the passports.

  Probably madness, but still he considered it. Finally, though, he decided what he could only decide given the existence of the papers, the judgment of the governor: the children were lost to captivity.2

  Also in late summer 1869, the squadron – or one of its allies – suffered another blow that displayed the gap between officials’ pious words and deeds. Consul Henry Churchill, before he left for England to recover from illness, had tried to break Zanzibar’s main Indian community of their slavery habit. These Indians, many of them subjects of the Rao of Kutch and not immediately British subjects, kept slaves and Churchill suspected them of dealing in slaves alongside their other trade in ivory and copal – trades that could hardly be unlinked since revenues from one fed the other, goods traded to supply one supplied the other. Churchill had threatened the local Indians with arrest if they did not stop, had even arrested one man who had laughed off his authority to do so. But since then Dr John Kirk had taken over the consulship.