by John Broich
CHAPTER 18
‘THE DESPERATE TEMPEST’
The political storm breaks over the squadron
IF COLOMB’S was a moral victory for the squadron and a warning to the slavers at Majunga, it was the last such success it would enjoy; the storm that had so long loomed broke over the squadron in late autumn 1869.
HMS Daphne, Bombay harbour, October 1869
The Daphne arrived from Zanzibar at midday, a hot breeze blowing from the north and east off the mainland of India. The crew busied themselves with the work of coming into port, cleaning, watering, coaling, with a season of refitting to come. George Sulivan busied himself with the work of leaving his ship and post, the most responsible command of his career, the most powerful ship, a ship he had brought to this ocean from England. He had to make way for Daphne’s new captain. Ants, he discovered, had devoured his ornithological specimen, the eagle-skin he collected off the Mozambican coast; only the long, sharp talons remained.
At the squadron’s station a captain always had reports to write and correspondence to read; but here Sulivan found more: copies of dispatches and reports that had passed between Bombay and London. They made dire reading. Some suggested that the squadron’s interpreters were ignorant or corrupt; others that the squadron’s captains flouted their lawful limits and were over-zealous. In one letter, the governor of Bombay argued that a dhow captured carrying slaves on the open sea should have been left alone. His argument was that the ship had been seized outside any waters governed by a treaty between Britain and any local sovereign, but it was owned by an Omani – and Britain had a treaty with Oman that acknowledged the institution of slavery in those lands. Further, the dhow had carried only six slaves, not scores, so the squadron should assume they were not borne for sale, that they were, in the words of government officials, simply ‘domestic slaves’. (This category itself – ‘domestic slaves’ – was offensive to George Sulivan. It was not of the officials’ invention, but he felt that they used it to obscure the reality of the slaves’ situation. It was a term meant to suggest that the Africans would not, in official opinion, be sold as convenient at the next port.) And, Bombay pointed out, the dhow had been carrying a great deal of cargo.
The dhow had been carrying considerable cargo – what did that have to do with the fact that its captain had made chattel of people, thought Sulivan? Had it not supported the market in slaves? And was there not blood, fire and war at the root of it all on the East African mainland? The enslaved men had been only six, had not been chained, could not be proved to be being carried to market; yet experience showed captains, and sometimes their passengers, made personal speculations in a handful of captives. And years of observations showed that the markets of the Indian Ocean were as often supplied this way as with ships with crammed slave decks.
By custom, captains on the East Indies station received invitations to some of the fine houses on Malabar Hill when they were in port at Bombay. Bankers, successful assurance brokers, railway builders and the upper stratum of the civil service often gathered there at extravagant feasts, since their relative wealth in India was so great. On one occasion, George Sulivan made his way there for supper, passing through streets usually crowded with bullock carts and often countless bales of cotton. He found himself seated near an official familiar with the Vice-Admiralty courts that judged the legitimacy of the Royal Navy’s condemnations. They spoke, and Sulivan learned that the man knew of the attention recently drawn to the squadron’s captures.
‘If we go on condemning these vessels for having only a few slaves on board,’ he said, ‘we shall be having our supplies cut off again from the interior.’ Ivory, always ivory on the mind of Bombay; and in 1868 the supply from the East African interior had been short.
One of George Sulivan’s last duties aboard the Daphne was to write a final report to Commodore Heath. I have been led to conclude by many circumstances, he wrote, that the suppression of the Slave Trade and the interests of the Indian Government do not coincide. And there is a tendency to sacrifice the slave to the political advantage gained in relation to the chiefs and others of the slave holding tribe.
They were significant threats, these opinions of Bombay, but George Sulivan hoped they would not be supported by London. For that would be a step backwards, Sulivan thought, that would result in undermining hard years of effort on this coast: the commodore’s organised efforts and his own work – as a midshipman in Castor, as commander in Pantaloon, as captain in Daphne.
It was a false hope.1
Westminster, London, November 1869
On a chilly, cloudy late autumn day, representatives of ministries that most directly oversaw the work of slave trade suppression – the Foreign Office, Admiralty and Treasury – gathered at the Foreign Office. Summoned by Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, they were to respond to the raft of complaints levelled at Leopold Heath’s squadron that had been arriving from the east for months. They would write new instructions for Commodore Heath’s squadron, a squadron that – without any directive from London – had overhauled the approach and increased the intensity of anti-slave trade operations in the Indian Ocean.
A series of figures began arriving at Whitehall. There was William Wylde, the man in charge of slave-trade matters at the Foreign Office; there was the Foreign Secretary’s first lieutenant, Arthur Otway, with a silvering mane of hair; there was a Royal Navy captain, Henry Fairfax, formerly lieutenant of the Ariel with experience hunting slavers from the Cape station. Henry Churchill, consul of Zanzibar, was absent because he had to travelled to Germany to take a cure. There was the stylish young gentleman, Hussey Vivian, senior staff in the Foreign Office and protégé of the Foreign Secretary. In contrast with him, there was the older Henry Rothery, a member of an obscure sect of lawyers practising an ancient body of ecclesiastical and maritime law. Charles Dickens called their society, the Doctors Commons, desperately old-fashioned, a group which ‘in the natural course of things would have terminated about two hundred years ago’. The treasury employed Rothery to advise them on slave-trade matters.
The men made their way to Lord Clarendon’s rooms, where the smell of tobacco smoke was never far off – in a prior posting to Spain, the Foreign Secretary had acquired the habit of smoking a kind of miniature cigar – and so the meeting began. William Wylde and Henry Rothery took the lead in the proceedings, producing a list of episodes in which the squadron had condemned dhows on evidence that the two ministries agreed was insufficient: there had only been slave fittings on the ships, or, while there had been slaves on board, the Royal Navy commanders could not absolutely prove they were being shipped for sale. And far too often the squadron’s ships were claiming that they had no choice but to burn condemned slave ships on the spot. True, various diplomatic staff in the region acting as Vice-Admiralty judges had reviewed and confirmed the condemnations, but they had acted in error. Stricter rules should prevent this.
The committee agreed, of course, that it would like to see the end of the slave trade at some future date once an alternative economy developed. But the primary concern of most of the men in the room was promoting the trust and goodwill of the Zanzibar sultan and his merchant princes. Otherwise, prestige loss and commerce dampened, the sultan and other rulers might turn to the French.
So the men drew up a list of new procedures for the Foreign Secretary to hand to the Admiralty which, in an inferior position to the other ministries, would have to accept and pass along to Heath. Hussey Vivian volunteered to write a draft to give to Lord Clarendon, though he warned that the hunting season would slow his work.
A few weeks later, with winter descending on London, Lord Clarendon was preparing to send on the committee’s report and new naval instructions to India. The Foreign Secretary was approaching seventy and his side-whiskers and most of the sparse hair on his head were mostly white. In this post he had served under three governments and seen revolution in Europe, the Russian War at the Crimea and Baltic, and the Civil War in
America. For many years he had worked under just a few guiding principles: maintain the friendship of France while watching her ambitions, expand free trade, and at all costs do not be dragged into war by the hot-headed. For over a year, a Royal Navy squadron on the east coast of Africa had been violating two, perhaps three, of these principles. It was interrupting the free flow of trade directly and, by stirring up trouble, threatened it indirectly. It was both interfering with French business and encouraging Indian Ocean kingdoms to look to the French as chief protectors. If not checked it might lead Britain unwillingly down a blind path to unwanted fighting.
Lord Clarendon was now taking action on this squadron, Commodore Heath’s. His committee had duly declared that the squadron was burning ships without sufficient cause, antagonising the rulers of the Indian Ocean, and stated that its official view was that the slave trade would have to be stopped slowly, piecemeal. To put down the trade and institution of slavery, these very Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea rulers would some day have to be called upon to cooperate. These rulers would have to enjoy support from their domestic merchant elite who now felt threatened by the squadron, and whose ships and cargoes had been seized because they carried a handful of slaves. The focus, the committee stated, should be on supervising the legal trade and preparing the economies of the region for eventual abolition, not making all-out war on the institution. This personal war of the squadron was based on a false over-reading of their instructions. No, Britain must not be hasty in pushing towards the abolition of slavery on Zanzibar or a ban on the import of slaves from the coast. It would deprive the inhabitants of Zanzibar of that labour on which they have hitherto relied for the cultivation of their fields and estates, the committee stated, and would most certainly ruin many useful branches of industry which are now springing up on the island.
The new rules practically forbade seizing a ship on the grounds that slaves were aboard; it must appear to be a significant slaver. The ship then must be taken to a Vice-Admiralty court immediately, even at the cost of ending a mission, unless it could be absolutely proved that it was a physical impossibility for the cruiser to bring it to port.
All satisfactory for the Foreign Secretary. Of course, could he eliminate slavery and the trade with a stroke of his pen from this office he would. But in the real world the object, he told himself, could be purchased at too high a price. Lord Clarendon had periodically had to cool the abolitionist zeal of diplomatic personnel around the world who had threatened carefully laid arrangements. But he had never had to intervene with a commodore before now. The committee report and new instructions sent off east, the squadron should now be brought to heel.2
Along with the report and new instructions, Lord Clarendon ordered another letter to be sent to the Admiralty and Commodore Heath. Two captains of the squadron had, it seemed, taken to freeing slaves. Commanders Colomb and Meara had been accepting escapees from slavery on their ships. Clarendon dictated that the runaways who had made it onto the Royal Navy’s decks should have been forcibly returned to their masters. The British ships had each been in the territorial waters of a friendly power. The captains had, he judged, ‘deprived the subjects of that power of their lawful property’.
· · ·
The Somerset ruling of 1772 in a way paralleled the cases of Colomb, Meara and Sulivan refusing to allow escapees to their ships to be returned to their captors. James Somerset, enslaved by a Boston customs agent, was brought to England in 1769 and there fled from his master. Captured again, his owner locked him on a ship bound for Jamaica to be sold as a plantation labourer. Seeing an opportunity to test whether slavery was legal in England, abolitionists took the ship’s captain to court for false imprisonment. It was during this trial that barrister Bull Davy famously argued that ‘the air (of England) is too pure for a slave to breathe in’. Once in Britain, no one could be a slave, for beside the common idea that Britain was somehow an inherently ‘free’ place, in contrast to places imagined unfree such as Catholic France or Czarist Russia, there was no legal basis for slavery in England, it having died with the last medieval serf. The defence, meanwhile, argued as Lord Clarendon did in 1869 that slaveholders had the right to have their ‘property’ restored. Lord Mansfield ruled in favour of James Somerset, and abolitionists used the ruling to wage their war against the trade and institution in the coming decades.
Part of Lord Mansfield’s ruling pointed out that ‘a foreigner cannot be imprisoned here on the authority of any law existing in his own country’, and it was in this sense that Colomb, Meara and Sulivan seemed to feel that they had no obligation to return fugitives to Portuguese or Malagasy authorities. Unless the Amazons’ decks transmuted into Portuguese Mozambique or Madagascar, the captains would not recognise slavery on their ships. From the commodore down, the squadron’s officers understood that British law was in effect on British ships, whether or not those ships were in the territorial waters of a country with legal slavery. Even the aggressive Meara would not allow a runaway who had hidden in his gig drawn up on the beach to be carried to the Nymphe; but when the man swam to the Nymphe afloat in the harbour, Meara judged it altogether different.
The Foreign Office was concerned with maintaining good relations with slaveholding countries and worried about letting this issue drag Britain into unexpected or deeper commitments. It was not difficult to imagine a situation in which Royal Navy or ships or steamers flying the Union Jack were swamped with runaways. To its official mind, sheltering runaways was like sheltering another country’s lawbreakers. There were those, too, whose racial conceptions made them think domestic slavery was an acceptable state for the supposedly less-advanced African. And, as always, the question of where to take refugees was a serious one.
Not long after his return to England, George Sulivan received a letter from the Foreign Office bearing an official rebuke. The Foreign Secretary was displeased over the incident that took place in the harbour of Mozambique Town when Sulivan protected escaped slaves who had fled to the Daphne, one of them with a bar fused to his leg. Captain Sulivan, the letter stated, should have handed them back to the man who had come on board to demand their return.3
HMS Dryad, at sea bound for Bombay, December 1869
As the squadron’s new instructions were en route to India, HMS Dryad started for the squadron’s winter rendezvous at Bombay. A hot wind descended from India to seep over the Indian Ocean. Jib sails at her head and staysail at her mizzenmast, Dryad sailed very close hauled to the wind, her screw, meanwhile, boiling the sea.
Philip Colomb was sitting at his round table in the great cabin in the early afternoon, dinner time at sea, when he noticed that his new assistant steward was missing. The work of departing Zanzibar and wrapping up the patrol had kept him too busy to think about the East African boy until now. Colomb questioned one of the stewards.
‘Sabourri is sea-sick, Sir. He’s been werry sick ever since we come to sea.’
‘Oh, is that it? He’ll soon get over that. However, I will see him after dinner.’
Sabourri was fourteen years old, a refugee from slavery taken out of a slave ship some years back. An English resident of Zanzibar had adopted him and taught him English and the Bible. Not a week before, the man had approached Colomb at Zanzibar, asking him to employ Sabourri on board the Dryad for a spell. He suspected that the boy was inclined to stealing and needed to learn discipline as only a man-of-war could teach. Though he had a pedantic inclination, Philip Colomb did not want to be a schoolmaster; yet he liked the man and really had very little excuse not to take the boy on as the ship was full of them, even from such exotic places as America, and surely had far harder cases than this. Colomb agreed to take the boy on board.
At his first interview with him, the captain took a liking. Colomb chastised himself for being sentimental, but the boy was handsome and soft-spoken. The captain always assessed the intelligence of Africans with whom he dealt – his constant triangulation, like racial reckoning – and he plotted the boy as an intel
ligent, perceptive sort.
Sabourri did not appear after dinner was cleared away, so the captain made a search himself, leaving his cabin, passing the marine, passing the wheel, and down the steep companionway on the quarterdeck. Colomb was amid the various stores now, and he soon found the boy lying in his steward’s storeroom, clearly exhausted from sickness, barely able to look at Colomb. It appeared a debilitating case of sea-sickness such as very often overcame landsmen new to the sea.
When the boy did not recover by supper, Colomb had Dr O’Connor look at him. He did not like Sabourri’s appearance. Not seasickness – something else, perhaps a reaction to food. The doctor recommended a hammock in the open air, and one was slung for Sabourri under the forecastle close to the sailor’s water closets. The sick berth attendant, John Shilston, stayed with him. Shilston was a thirty-year-old Devonshire man, a capable man; not only capable, Philip Colomb observed when he looked in on them: tender. Caring as only seen in blue-jackets and women, thought the captain.
The next evening Colomb hosted the doctor and senior officers for dinner. Daniel O’Connor was good company. A particularly small man, he shared an Irish background with Colomb, though the doctor was of south-western stock and Colomb’s people were Dublin patricians. They also shared the experience of war and hardship in Chinese waters. At one point in the supper the doctor was called away by a message from the forecastle; word was that the child was worsening.
The doctor departed and Philip Colomb began to fear the worst, the worst for the child and the worst for the entire crew: a plague on board that might cut scores of them down, a killer that might decimate them before they could reach Bombay, and no hope for them there either. By the time O’Connor returned, the table had been cleared and the captain was alone. John Shilston, the doctor said, had collapsed and now struggled to live. He had gathered from Shilston’s messmates that he had been weak and, yes, had diarrhoea – common enough complaints of the sailor in the tropics; but now the doctor and captain knew the truth, the plague that Colomb had feared – it was cholera.
