Squadron

by John Broich

  And now the government of Bombay spoke. It feared abolition would drive the Kutchees and other Indians into the arms of the sultan beyond the influence of the British. So Bombay renounced the plan, declaring that the Indians of Zanzibar, though they should not partake in the trade, should continue to hold slaves for their personal use.

  Meanwhile, a rumour circulated through the small British community at Zanzibar that suggested the sultan would not or could not prosecute those who smuggled captives illegally to foreign shores. Either he did not care about those who ran the blockade, or was too financially beholden to those who profited from that trade, or feared reprisal from the perpetrators. It seemed that the piratical Omani Arabs that had battled the boats of the Nymphe in Zanzibar harbour that bloody night had never been arrested. Word was that their tribe, their quarters, their very identities were known. But they had walked freely in the town after the incident; indeed had spent over a month on Zanzibar before embarking in a dhow for the north. The sultan had promised the British consul he would arrest them.3

  HMS Dryad, at sea bound for Mauritius, September 1869

  If Philp Colomb’s racial views were deeply prejudiced, though challenged or complicated by his experiences on the squadron, what were those of the squadron’s other sailors? Of course those, too, would have been complicated and varied, but the scene on the Dryad as she carried the 140 East Africans freed from Madagascar provides some clues.

  The ship rounded the north side of Madagascar, then worked its way east towards Mauritius, called Isle de France when the grandfathers of these sailors took it from Napoleon. A stiff wind blew broad on the starboard bow and the sea sometimes heaved.

  Philip Colomb thought of himself as particularly dispassionate or, as he considered himself, practical. He consciously watched himself for creeping sentimentalism of abolitionists, whom he tended to think maudlin. When such emotion appeared, as it had when he watched slavers’ victims drowning, it was rare and fleeting. He believed that he did not need to draw on sentiment to motivate him to take action against the slave trade in any case. He rejected sentimental conventions about Royal Navy seaman too. He knew that the popular mind held the foremast blue-jacket to be ‘a jolly tar’: simple, but brave and inherently good. Colomb knew better; he knew them in their complicated detail, ranging from ignorant, drunken devils to the almost saintly.

  But as he watched his men with the Mozambicans taken from Madagascan captivity, he could not help but slip in his feelings towards the men. They were to a man gentle. Having 140 additional souls meant extra cleaning, extra feeding, meant working around the bewildered and ungainly, meant all kinds of disruptions. Bin Moosa, for example, had constant extra work to make the crew understood by the refugees. But the men were patient, often cheerful, helping to doctor the hurt, sharing out bits from their mess, mother-henning. Colomb sensed a common feeling of pity among the men, so much so that when one of their passengers got in the way they would not even speak in the tone they would use with a wayward boy in England.

  If the East Africans represented nothing but a bonus payday to most sailors, the scene would not have been one of mother-henning. And Philip Colomb, who above all the captains in the squadron viewed the question of the slave trade through the lens of hard-headed economics, would have been the first to interpret the men’s little generosities as ‘preserving their investment’ or the like. Instead, in Colomb’s and others’ descriptions, the sailors tended to display a simple sympathy, if perhaps it had the flavour of paternalistic ‘handling’ of stereotyped ‘unfortunate creatures’.

  There were two or three meals of rice or grain per day, and the men fitted hoses to the fire pumps on the deck to provide a daily shower with water warmed by the boilers. The first instance was confusing at best for the East Africans, but in subsequent days the shower seemed to be enjoyed, the women preserving modesty beneath wrapped undergarments. The Africans sang and clapped at night, a music Colomb found maddeningly repetitive, and he congratulated himself on his indulgence in letting it go on.

  Whatever his esteem for his West African Kroomen, Colomb clearly did not consider these East Africans his equals and was quick to identify the ways they were uncivilised. He was appalled at what he deemed his passengers’ poor toilet habits, and shocked when he came upon a man and woman having sex. (Neither Colomb nor the other officers on the squadron left word whether the sailors and refugees ever had sex, but they did note that the men had their obvious favourites among them.)

  On a day of beautifully moderate warmth, the Dryad steamed into Port Louis, Mauritius, and moored head and stern. The most pleasant spot on this ocean, he thought. Not just for the green and relative cool, but for the sense it gave him as European, prosperous, organised, well-governed.4

  As George Sulivan did months earlier, Philip Colomb now had a look at the conditions under which he would leave the Dryad’s refugees. Most of the adults, he soon learned, would become indentured labourers. British observers, including Sulivan, railed against what they viewed as Portuguese and French hypocrisy for calling themselves anti-slavery but participating in the engagés trade, but was that fair given the British use of indentured servitude in the Indian Ocean in the same years? Like the French on Réunion and Mayotta, British growers on Mauritius and the Seychelles were perennially short of cheap labour to plant, harvest and process sugar and other crops. In both places, during French and British colonial rule up to 1833, that had meant slave labour; afterward, it meant indentured servitude and importing labour that, if not slave labour, was not free.

  The first unfree labour on Mauritius, as in much of the British Caribbean, was the system of so-called ‘apprenticeship’ that lasted for six years after the abolition of slavery there. This was really an accommodation for slaveholders and their gradualist sympathisers, meant to ease the transition from slave to free labour to lessen their economic pain. Over 600,000 formerly enslaved people in the empire above the age of six were forced to remain on their plantations and work for their former masters for forty-five hours per week for six years. Many abolitionists called it hypocrisy for the British to declare themselves liberators then deliver the supposedly emancipated into forced labour, and between their protests and those of the formerly enslaved, the apprenticeship system was halted two years early.

  After those years, many former captives naturally left their captors behind and made their own way; hence the shortage of labour on plantations. First, the growers on Mauritius hoped to ‘recruit’ labour from East Africa, paying rulers on that coast ‘fees’ for the privilege, in exactly the same way that the French came to do, thereby encouraging slave-trading. The Colonial Office refused to allow it in 1840. The big growers then turned to the solution of drawing far more labourers from India, who came mostly from the north-east or south, often from a slave caste, and entered into the contracts for five years in exchange for wages, food and clothing. They were attracted by wages advertised at two to three times local rates and sometimes could receive advances that allowed them to buy themselves and others out of slavery. By the mid 1840s there were almost 40,000 Indian indentured labourers on Mauritius. By the 1860s, for every one person of free background, there were three formerly enslaved and eight indentured or free Indians in a population of over 300,000.

  Though often motivated by economic desperation, at the moment of signing the contracts they did so of their own free will; this is the key difference between what the French and Portuguese were doing and what the British did. But having done so, these Indian workers had limited freedom. They were required to spend every day but Sunday on their employers’ fields. And it seems they frequently were not aware of all the handicaps embodied in their contracts. If they chose to run from their planting operations, they were often hunted down as if they were refugee slaves, subjected to savage violence. Yet they were not legally subject to any whim of their masters and were liable to be tortured or raped as a slave might be. They might also sue their employers for non-payment or other fail
ures to meet their contract; almost 10% of indentured workers did so on Mauritius, winning their cases over 70% of the time.

  In the 1860s and up until 1872 the Royal Navy brought about 2,500 African refugees to the Seychelles where they were welcomed by existing planters and merchants, who thought their islands under-populated and their economy in need of labour and consumers. In Mauritius the total number is lost, but official letters indicate they were sought after there too. This is in contrast to Aden, where at least in this period, Edward Russell did not like to see refugees dropped off; he complained that it was too hard to find them work. In Mauritius and the Seychelles, some refugees entered into a contract for five years of weekly labour in return for wages and food, while others laboured on their own terms, especially in the Seychelles where there was less industrial farming. Afterwards their fates were mixed. Some became sharecroppers, others bought their own land; others experienced poverty and limited prospects.

  The East African refugees had not freely entered into a contract, of course, as had the Indian indentured immigrants. They could no sooner chose the destination of the Nymphe or Dryad than walk on water. Yet even had they been able to choose the destination, they could not have gone home. The engagés contractors or slavers would have laughed at their fortune as they re-abducted them at any port at which they might land. And in the unlikely event that the refugees reached their homelands, chances were those places had been over-swept by fire or famine when the victims were originally seized. Of course the British could not have forcibly escorted the refugees to their homes in Zanzibari or (semi-) Portuguese Africa, except by starting a war or engaging in bald colonial expansionism.5

  At Port Louis, Mauritius, an immigration officer directed the landing of the refugees from the Dryad, the boats working to and from shore throughout the afternoon. Colomb was interested in seeing what became of them, seeking to compare their experience to that of the Africans set down at Aden amongst stone and airless heat. So he went and observed where they were accommodated, finding clean, airy houses, separate ones for men and women. Suits of bright cotton clothes distributed and good food provided, the Mauritius government did its work with generosity and diligence, to his mind.

  But then came the question of the refugees’ fate after a brief period of recuperation. Mauritius, Colomb knew, was one great sugar factory. Sugar was all, and when market and nature were benign, all prospered. If a cyclone struck or the market was glutted, all suffered. The Africans he left there would find work on the sugar plantations usually contracted to a planter who would provide food, housing and clothing in exchange for labour obligations for five years. The planters could provide for them only as well as sugar provided for the planters. All shared the risk. And when the period of work obligation was up, what then? Compete in the labour market against the far more numerous Indian labourers on the island? And what hope for education was there? What exactly was this freedom that he, to Colomb’s mind, was thrusting upon the people he was leaving there?6

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘FALSE AS WATER’

  Dark days for Meara and Sulivan at Zanzibar, while Colomb wins a joyless victory in Madagascar

  HMS Nymphe, Zanzibar harbour, September 1869

  Edward Meara’s Nymphe lay at anchor in Zanzibar harbour, the hands cleaning, the carpenter making a new mast for one of the boats, and the sailmaker and his crew busy. The main task of the day was to set up new running gear – to rig and adjust new permanent rope. The tropical sun incessantly assaulted the working manila rope of the ship, and it was time to replace it.

  For good news, Edward Meara found in Zanzibar a letter from his commanding officer reporting promotions for his men. Sub-Lieutenant Norman Clarke, who had worked long and hard in the feverish creeks of this coast and at Madagascar hunting slavers, was made lieutenant in recognition of his cutting-out of a slave dhow in this very harbour when he had received a spearhead through the leg. So too was Sub-Lieutenant Tom Hodgson promoted. His arm was wounded, hand nearly exploded, that tumultuous night and he was recovering in England.

  For bad news, Meara learned that the British consul on this island, part of whose role it was to judge the legality of the squadron’s captures, had ruled against him in a recent case involving a ship condemned to fire by Lieutenant Clarke in Keonga Bay that spring. Though it had four enslaved crewmembers, the other men on board had insisted they were merely fishing. The captain’s brother had drawn a knife and refused to leave the burning dhow. Clarke had declared it a slaver on the basis of the enslaved crew, cooking materials consistent with feeding a large number, and the fact it carried a slaving licence that was out of date. Everything hinged on the licence – now lost – being out of date since these were the sultan of Zanzibar’s waters and the alleged slaver could have pled that he was shipping slaves from the mainland to Zanzibar perfectly legally. Put simply, if the licence had been in order, the crew of the Nymphe had no case. When Dr Kirk investigated, he interviewed the interpreter of the Nymphe and judged that the man was only semi-literate: he could not have read the date on the slaving licence. The seizure was unlawful – never mind the four enslaved people on board.

  For Kirk, this represented a model case for the principle that the Royal Navy should tow suspected slavers into a port like Zanzibar in order to get his judgment on a case before burning the ship. (Clarke and his crew of boarders were forty miles from the Nymphe at the time and judged they could not sail her to their mother ship.) It served, too, to discourage the Royal Navy from seizing ships ‘merely’ because they carried enslaved people. And it was, as he reported to the Foreign Office, an opportunity to ‘convince the Arabs of British justice’.

  The burning of the ship not upheld by Dr Kirk, Edward Meara was by law personally responsible for the ship owner’s losses – both of his ship and of his cargo, which had been sold at Zanzibar. Meara had known he was liable in such cases. And Meara had read a directive from his commodore reminding his captains to tow ships into port whenever possible. Knowing the risks, had Clarke and Meara scorned them for the sake of bounty money, were Clarke and Meara betrayed by an illiterate or piratical interpreter, or was it an illegal act of renegade justice against people holding four kidnapped men? There is no direct evidence to confirm any of these, though Edward Meara certainly showed a pattern of pushing up to, and perhaps past the limits of his orders for the sake of what he thought justice. And he was soon to do so again.

  Heath had been outraged to hear of Kirk’s decision weeks earlier, and suggested to Meara that he challenge the ruling in England, but Meara wanted the matter put behind him. So one morning, bearing a bank draft, Edward Meara and several of his senior officers made the quick crossing from the Nymphe to shore and alighted. The British Residency was on the beach barely above the waves at their highest tide, white-walled and many-windowed, with a low wall surrounding a small garden in front. An outbuilding beside it held a small but precious store of naval supplies and one room a small cache of coal. Dr Kirk had private quarters in the rear of the place. Edward Meara and his men were led in to a large room set aside in the Residency for proceedings of the Vice-Admiralty court with high ceilings, dark beams crossing them, and iron posts supporting these.

  There was Dr John Kirk, who welcomed them with conciliatory talk – he had to work with the Royal Navy as well as his political overseers, after all – telling the captain that though he had ordered restitution, he believed that Meara and his men had acted under their instructions as they understood them. He had instructions from the Bombay governor’s office to stop condemning ships on the grounds that they were merely transporting slaves. The Royal Navy needed to prove that Africans were transported for the express purpose of sale. Kirk reminded Meara that he was acting on orders from above.

  Hamed bin Sahel, owner of the dhow burnt by Meara’s lieutenant, entered as did the representative of the sultan of Zanzibar, vizier Sheik Suliman bin Ali. His fine house stood immediately next to the British Residency. Dr Kirk laid out pap
ers: a document clearing Meara and his officers from further indemnity and a receipt. Edward Meara produced the draft on a bank in the sum of 709 silver Maria Theresa dollars.

  Papers exchanged, papers signed, and with that Edward Meara had paid a slaveholder, a man he believed was a slave-trader, at the command of the British government. And on top of that, Meara was directed by Dr Kirk to return the man’s slaves to him as well.1

  · · ·

  Dr Kirk wanted Captain Meara to return Hamed bin Sahel’s ‘property’ to the slaveholder in the name of ‘British justice’, yet at the same time Kirk wanted a captive held by the sultan returned to him. In the same days of September 1869, the consul was scandalised to hear that a white boy had recently been given to the sultan of Zanzibar as a gift. One of the sultan’s cousins bought the boy, a twelve-year-old from Ottoman Trebizon on the Black Sea, at Mecca for the extraordinary price of 1,000 silver dollars. Managing to speak to the boy to confirm the rumours, Dr Kirk demanded that the sultan release him in the most forceful language he had used with him. He wrote, ‘this traffic in Europeans and Asiatic slaves is to us much more revolting than the negro slave trade’. The boy was soon seen in the palace covered with gold lace and Kirk had no doubt about ‘the vilest of purposes’ for which he was intended.