Squadron

by John Broich

  Yet in 1871 abolitionists in Britain managed to secure parliamentary hearings on the East African slave trade. Between news of the spider squadron’s success and overriding, Livingstone’s rediscovery, and the ways that the abolitionists used both, the Gladstone government felt it risked public agitation getting out of control. Best to reduce pressure on itself and make the abolitionists in parliament take responsibility for what the government considered an expensive and complicated predicament. So, with its abolitionist chairman and a number of sympathetic members on it, the committee began collecting testimony in summer 1871.3

  Westminster, London, July 1871

  Since the end of his assignment in the East Indies, Leopold Heath had been given a new task, joining a group of officers considering the possibilities of torpedoes for port defence. Now he entered the Palace of Westminster, stepping in from the cloudy day, almost cool. MPs were preparing to go home for the summer, but both chambers would be busy later today. He found the committee room and took a seat within; twelve MPs were already there.

  There was the Quaker reformer Charles Gilpin behind a great brown beard, a driving political force in securing the Select Committee. The bald, stout Arthur Kinnaird, Scottish evangelical clergyman and long-time abolitionist. George Shaw-Lefevre, shrewd-looking, recently made Secretary to the Admiralty, and the Prime Minister’s protégé Lord Cavendish. Sir John Hay, a fellow veteran of the Russian War at the Crimea, a handsome man under his angular brown beard. Chairing the hearing, Russell Gurney, judge and MP for Southampton, possessing the aquiline nose correct for a judge, in his late sixties, but his dark wavy hair and side-burns only beginning to grey.

  At one o’clock the hearing began. First summoned was Major-General Rigby, a former Zanzibar consul who had spent most of his life in India and Aden and spoke eight languages. He had worked against the slave trade diligently during his time in Zanzibar, but had limited means. He had reported to the East India Company, whose efforts against the trade were paltry. He had no squadron backing him and little support politically. He had successfully – at least for a time – stopped slaveholding among the British Indian merchants in Zanzibar and on the coast, and freed several thousands from the state of slavery. Leopold Heath could not hear everything that was said, but General Rigby predictably argued for the total and immediate halting of the trade by whatever means necessary.

  In the middle of the afternoon Heath was called forward. The chairman spoke. Russell Gurney had a quiet air, but his dark eyes showed intelligence. ‘You had the command of the squadron on the East African coast?’ So the interview began. Questions followed about the suitability of the ships on the station. Heath told them that the Amazons had done their job well. Then questions about his tactics. Heath told them about his spider’s web. Questions about their rate of success.

  ‘No matter how many ships you have,’ said Heath, ‘there will of course always be some vessels which escape being boarded. It is quite possible that though we boarded 400 dhows during the season I have spoken of, there may have been 400 others that passed outside us.’

  More questions about numbers of slavers that must evade capture.

  ‘You regard that as an unsatisfactory result of all our national efforts for the suppression of the slave trade?’

  ‘Very unsatisfactory.’

  Now questions turned to potential solutions to the trade from the East African coast. If even the most diligent squadron could not stop perhaps half of all slavers, what then?

  Lord Cavendish spoke. His features were as soft as Russell Gurney’s were honed. ‘You said you were for some time on the west coast of Africa?’

  ‘We obtained possession of the port of Lagos, did we not?’ asked Lord Cavendish.

  ‘Yes, I was there at that time.’ Some weeks after Heath’s nightmare raid on the town, the navy made a second, more organised assault. While this time not a rash attack, it still cost fourteen lives, with over sixty hurt – maimed men and boys, from midshipmen to marines to Kroomen to commanders.

  ‘Had that a great effect?’

  ‘I think that it has had a very great effect indeed. It has been a great encouragement to legitimate trade, and I should anticipate the same sort of result from taking possession of the government of Zanzibar.’

  ‘You think no efforts of our cruisers are likely to be productive of great success till the transport of domestic slaves is prohibited?’

  ‘That is my opinion.’ The legal trade hid the illegal while the civilian overseers further hampered their efforts.

  Finally, Lord Cavendish asked, ‘Do you think the sultan would consent to the entire prohibition of all movement of slaves between the coast and the island of Zanzibar?’

  ‘He certainly would not do so willingly.’

  ‘You think pressure might be applied to him that might oblige him to consent?’

  ‘I think you have only to say what you want and you will have it done,’ replied Heath.

  More questions followed, but it was growing late and the Commons was sitting that evening. The committee asked Leopold Heath to return for another sitting.

  At the next, there were more questions about tactics, then about relations between the sultan of Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf sultans. Their approach was academic, never hounding. They seemed to sympathise with the challenge the commodore had faced with limited resources. Still, they asked about the criticism his captains had received from political authorities around the Indian Ocean and in London. Heath rose to the defence of his officers, but managed to control his temper, a temper that sometimes revealed itself in his letters to the Admiralty.4

  None stoked that temper like Henry Rothery, the Treasury’s legal advisor on the slave trade. Leopold Heath thought him stupid at best, and quite possibly a perjurer in his condemnations of the squadron. In his letters to the Admiralty, Heath wrote that Rothery had a personal basis for his critiques of the squadron’s tactics; Rothery, in turn, called Heath ‘insolent and arrogant’ in his memos. Heath called Rothery’s findings ‘arbitrary’ and ‘irregular’ in his letters. Rothery was one of the men behind the committee that issued the new instructions for the squadron at the end of 1869, helping to stop the squadron’s work by essentially halting any captures except those of very heavily laden slavers, requiring that most slavers be towed to one of a few ports for adjudication or be at dire risk of being overturned.

  Henry Rothery sat in this room at this very moment. Leopold Heath’s second interview over, Rothery was called forward.

  ‘You are legal adviser to the Treasury in all matters relating to the slave trade?’

  The committee asked him about the functioning of the Admiralty courts around the Indian Ocean, about where he thought Africans taken from slavery should be settled, about prize money and bounties, and about the abuses that Rothery alleged.

  ‘The Admiralty instructions issued in 1870 were drawn up in consequence of reports made by you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rothery explained how the squadron had overstepped its bounds and how it was necessary to keep a closer eye on it; he hinted that the captains on the station indulged in wilful ignorance of the rules for the purpose of playing pirate.

  ‘We had no idea that the officer commanding could have so misapprehended his instructions. The instructions are entitled, “Instructions for the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” and not of “slavery,”’ Rothery said. Perhaps, he suggested, it was because of some kind of fanaticism.

  ‘I may mention another instance which led to the issue of those instructions,’ he said. ‘One of our officers captured a vessel, and brought the slaves – the slaves being domestic slaves – to Zanzibar; Dr Kirk or Mr Churchill said that the vessel was undoubtedly a legitimate trader, but that officer, notwithstanding that the vessel was restored, carried off the slaves to the Seychelles.’

  ‘In your opinion is it exceedingly important that every protection should be given to honest trade there?’

  ‘I think it should be encouraged in every
possible way,’ said Rothery.

  ‘I presume it is to the increase of legitimate trade that we may look, more than anything else, for the suppression of the slave trade?’

  ‘I should have thought entirely.’5

  The next day Commander Colomb took his seat.

  ‘You were employed for some considerable time on the east coast of Africa in the suppression of the slave trade?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sir John Hay, the retired captain, asked him practical questions about the right ships for the duty, about how long officers should work on the station, about their preparation.

  ‘Did you find great difficulty owing to the fact that the home trade in slaves at Zanzibar being legal, the foreign slave trade to the Persian Gulf was able, under the cover of that, to evade the action of the cruisers?’

  ‘I think that made the greatest difficulty. I think that threw a great barrier in the way of dealing with the trade about Zanzibar. I think the whole state of things would be altered if all slave trade to and from Zanzibar were made illegal.’

  ‘Do you think it possible to stop it altogether by naval operations so long as that mode of evading it is open to the Arab dhows?’

  ‘No, but I should say that I doubt whether it would be possible to stop it altogether by any forcible measures. I think the stoppage of it altogether must be done by dealing with the authorities at the ports of debarkation by means of treaties.’

  ‘Would you anticipate any great advantage from treaties?’

  ‘Yes, because I think when armed with a treaty the naval force can act more efficiently. The treaty does not act so much directly as indirectly by keeping the people in fear. I would not trust altogether to the moral force of treaties in those cases, but treaties give the naval officers a great deal more power than they otherwise would have.’

  More questions: about the fate of captives on the overseas trip; about where best to post patrols; about allegations that the squadron precipitously burned dhows.

  The Scottish evangelical Kinnaird asked, ‘Was there any commendation for, or special notice taken of, activity on the part of any of the officers commanding the cruisers?’

  ‘My own experience is that it was a little the other way.’

  ‘You thought that no encouragement was given you?’

  ‘I speak, of course, of what happened to myself. I had one or two letters from the Foreign Office which were not commendatory, but the reverse.’

  ‘So that there was rather discouragement than encouragement, in putting down the slave trade?’

  ‘So far as my experience goes.’

  Questions followed about the hard future ahead of people taken out of slave ships, then about whether slavers might evade a stronger naval force by going overland to the north.

  ‘Is there anything further which you wish to state to the committee?’ asked Sir John Hay.

  ‘I should like to mention that there is a trade to Madagascar which is still in a more or less flourishing state.’

  Colomb had noticed that the committee members focused all their questions on the trade permitted by treaty between the mainland and Zanzibar, and the smuggling trade to the north. They had kept their hands off the matter of the trade between Mozambique and Madagascar – where both the Portuguese and Malagasy were supposed to have made it illegal.

  The committee indulged Colomb in letting him describe this trade for a few minutes, but no more. It seemed as if they didn’t want to touch it. Perhaps the politicians found the matter too fraught – a tangle of international relations. The traffic across the Mozambique Channel was closely tied up with the French and the Portuguese and their trade in engagés from Portuguese colonial lands or Madagascar. The French, too, were openly covetous of Madagascar, their sugar islands surrounding the great island; aggravating the Malagasy might drive them into the welcoming arms of the French. The traffic in the enslaved to the north involved Zanzibaris, Omanis, Persian Gulf adventurers and Swahili blockade-runners. It was a situation in which the ‘enemy’ was easily distinguished by race and religion and neatly set in opposition to the side of ‘good’. For whatever reason, the Select Committee turned Colomb from the subject, then dismissed him.6

  CHAPTER 20

  ‘MAY THE WINDS BLOW TILL THEY HAVE WAKEN’D DEATH!’

  The last effort to compel Zanzibar

  Cheltenham, England, July 1871

  AS HIS FORMER COMMODORE AND shipmate appeared before members of parliament in July 1871, Edward Meara became a father for the first time. He married less than a month after arriving back in England, and his wife had now given birth to a daughter here in his new home, Clarence House, Imperial Square, Cheltenham, an elegant villa with a broad garden square in front of it and a staff of servants.

  At forty years old, Edward Meara set aside one life and began another, with trips to Bath and seaside resorts, patronising charities and attending balls. He was on half-pay, but wealthy from his father’s estate and his wife’s. He had been schooled at Cheltenham College in his early teenage years, so coming to Cheltenham was something of a return, and it all meant something of a return to being a gentleman’s son.

  And it was something of a turning away from his past twenty years in the Royal Navy, where he had spent long days and nights in West African creeks clouded with mosquitos, where he had seen terror and death – towns in flame and icy wrecks and William Mitchell’s life’s blood leaving him on board Nymphe in Zanzibar harbour.

  He was still occasionally badgered by the Admiralty and Treasury, directed to refund prize money because a capture was judged not to be a slaver, and to explain himself for refusing Dr Kirk’s order to re-enslave several Africans.

  He had recently been called upon to explain his refusal to Consul Kirk so, sitting in Clarence House one day, Edward Meara took up pen and paper and wrote. With reference to that part of Dr. Kirk’s letter stating that I refused to give up the slaves after the decision of the court, he stated, I beg to state that I certainly did. Then, not reaching far for a justification, he wrote, For in the evidence of the slaves, they were slaves. It was the response of one who did not feel he had to explain himself because he believed in the fundamental justice of his actions. And because he was about to retire.1

  Flushing, Cornwall, summer 1871

  Meanwhile, George Sulivan was at his mother’s home in Flushing, Cornwall, a village that looked across the harbour to the busy quays of Falmouth. It was a modest house on narrow St Peter’s Road, which rose gently round the peninsula. The view was all water, shipping, sky.

  In the house with him was his much older sister, two young maids and his mother, Henrietta, now eighty years old. Her health was failing, but her eyes were still clear. His mother had carefully tended his morality as he grew up in the form of an elementary code of conscience and justice, paired with the plainest Christian observance and aversion to sectarianism. She had spent long years worrying over him and his brother, a decorated veteran of the Russian War, a long-time shipmate of Mr Charles Darwin, whose book had made such a stir. She worried for their safety and for their integrity and conduct, but was not a worrier. A forceful character, she had been the daughter of a man rich with Spanish prize money, then she had been the daughter of a bankrupt man; she did not complain, just adjusted. She was wise enough to worry about her sons’ tact as religious nonconformists in the political arena of the Royal Navy, and wise enough to counsel a young Midshipman Sulivan that though their family carefully observed the Sabbath, he did not profane it by following orders and performing his duties on that day.

  For now, she had both of her remaining sons on dry land, safe: one made post-captain and one retired with a knighthood. Though some of her children already lay in the family vault, the sailors in her family had been lucky. Her father, a companion of Nelson and Cockburn, had died retired on land at seventy-six, having very happily spent his hoard of prize money. Her husband had battled the French, Spaniards and Americans in the same wars, and he had died at home, in F
lushing, at seventy-seven, without the slightest whiff of gunpowder in the air, without shot at his feet in the cold ocean.

  George Sulivan was made a post-captain, but on shore with half pay. He had ascended to that place so long coveted, but now was fit for even fewer postings, fit only for the heavyweights of the Royal Navy. The Sulivan name evoked respect and kindness in that corner of Cornwall, but of all the spiders, Sulivan had the least wealth and fewest connections. He had prize money from his captures, modest bounties, but no one ever became really wealthy from slave bounties. Colomb, Meara and Heath had family fortunes, incomes, rents, office. Sulivan was connected, but only to naval forefathers, siblings, cousins, nephews. So he waited. He could not know whether a posting would come tomorrow, or whether he had seen his last command.2

  Westminster, London, May 1872

  The next spring, Philip Colomb was speaking at a Pall Mall club for officers of Britain’s various military services, an elegant building with an Athenian façade, columns and a suitably martial frieze.

  ‘At least one-third of the cost of the candles for those ships may be saved, while the ships themselves will be much better lighted,’ said Philip Colomb to the assembled men. ‘But if not better lighted, we can give them one-third more light than is now allowed them, without calling upon Government for more money.’