by John Broich
He was presenting a paper on more efficient lanterns for Royal Navy ships with greater lighting power, cleaner burning, and safer.
As he had for years, Colomb was studying new technologies and techniques; not shying from the general conservatism of the Royal Navy; free with his critiques. And he had the spreading success of his signal system on which to stand. Lighting ships was not Philip Colomb’s primary study, though; the Admiralty had him working on a set of plans for coordinated fleet manoeuvres. Now that all ships-of-the-line were fitted with steam propulsion, they were capable of precise movement in almost any weather – if they could keep their boilers fed; so Colomb was tasked with creating a common guide for these, with patterns for attack and defence under varying conditions. It was the natural outgrowth, too, of the increasing adoption of his plan for flashing-light codes which allowed greater coordination at night.
But along with all this, Philip Colomb’s mind was still on the slave trade. After putting in his hours on his appointed task for the Admiralty, he worked on a book. He had scribbled in a journal when time allowed since the start of his commission in the Dryad and now he was assembling these snippets, elaborating and adding. George Sulivan shared some of the photographs that he had taken aboard Daphne with him, and the sprightly Lieutenant Henn shared some of his drawings.
The time was ripe. The public was now well aware of the trade on the east coast. Not quite a year ago, he and his commodore had appeared before the House of Commons committee. There followed a constant calendar of abolitionist meetings on the subject and Colomb wanted to contribute to the work of keeping the matter in the public eye. He wrote, always careful to present his story coolly, dispassionately; careful not to look like a hot-headed abolitionist, but engaging in an exercise in dispassion.3
Surrey, England, March 1873
Anstie Grange, a grand house of red brick and mellow stone on a hilltop above the Weald in Surrey: Leopold Heath had built the house ten years before when he was employed studying gun developments at the Royal Arsenal. His father was a lawyer, printer, ultimately a judge, and wealthy in land; so Leopold Heath was wealthy by inheritance. He had hardly built Anstie Grange on a mere captain’s pay.
But Heath was no longer a captain, he was now an admiral. With the retirement of another since Heath returned from the Indian Ocean, Leopold Heath had received his flag, the blue flag of a rear admiral. He was then fifty-four years old. That was two years ago, and he still did not have a commission – the head of a foreign station, a great ship of the line, perhaps a port.
He moved constantly between Anstie Grange and London to the northeast, attending to financial business, going to shareholder meetings and royal affairs in gold epaulettes. The government approached him, introducing the idea of joining the Board of Admiralty. That would require a parliamentary contest and a descent into party politics – an unwelcome thought. He declined.
After years in the Indian Ocean he had rediscovered his family, and he found that he liked to spend time with them: his wife with whom he liked to take long walks and go up to London to see art, and his seven children. When he had left for Bombay his eldest boy Artie was just thirteen, now he was over sixteen and Heath began to take his adulthood seriously, speaking to the boy at length about his future, explaining the operations of the estate to him, speaking with patience and describing things carefully. He played chess with him and the younger children, competing hard with the older boys and losing only rarely.
Teenage Arthur even attempted a serious philosophical discussion with his father, guided, apparently, by the writings of Herbert Spencer. Heath admitted to his son that he had not read him. Arthur argued something out of Spencer’s book about how men’s striving for selfish advantage was the great mover of society. Leopold Heath tried to dissuade his son of the idea, and hoped he succeeded.
Recently, Queen Victoria herself had made known her support for a complete halt of the slave trade by sea on the east coast – a sign that Gladstone’s government was becoming serious about the matter. And Leopold Heath publicly supported the abolition of the trade, too. But would it have to do so by force? Perhaps the way that a young Commander Heath had tried under a terrorising fire at Lagos, his shipmates killed right beside him?
Finally came the decision. The months had turned to years, and still no commission. If one came now it meant more years away from his family and his expanding interests in the business world in the City. No, it was unlikely now that Heath could advance in rank on the active list, and he shared the sense of most fellow Royal Navy officers that treading water was unseemly. It was time.
One morning he came downstairs and found his family at breakfast – all there, healthy, cared for. Only a few years ago he and the hands of the Forte had lifted stiff, skeletal bodies out of a slave ship, the bosun rigging a cradle for a motherless infant and trying to find a way to feed her. Leopold Heath came downstairs to tell his family of his retirement. He would stay with them.4
The 1871 Select Committee before which Heath and Colomb appeared issued a report strongly favouring ending the trade. The committee concluded that the trade between Zanzibar and the coast opposite – a trade left legal by Britain’s treaty with the sultan – made it too difficult to police the trade to distant ports. It provided cover for slavers to operate and too often captives first taken to Zanzibar were ultimately carried off across the sea – a point Heath and Colomb had argued. Because of that fact, the seaborne trade must be completely stopped – now, not after many years of the gradual workings of the invisible hand.
The question was how to accomplish this. In 1870, Mejid bin Said died and his brother Barghash assumed the throne. His health recovered, Consul Henry Churchill had returned to Zanzibar to convince the new sultan there to halt the trade. He had been rebuffed, the sultan pleading that if he halted the trade the rich men who relied on it would see him killed or overthrown. It would take work to get the sultan to close his market and halt the trade in his waters. Money, some other bargain, perhaps even direct force. That remained to be seen.
The wheels of parliament moved slowly and there was no immediate plan. And public pressure lessened right after the Select Committee reported in favour of action because the slave trade was thrown from the headlines by a new sensation – a story having to do with the CSS Alabama, the ship the Amazons were designed to defeat. The United States had taken the United Kingdom to court since the Alabama was built in a British shipyard before proceeding to sink over fifty American ships. At stake was the relationship between the countries which had been badly strained during the American crisis and questions about British sovereignty.
But savvy abolitionist politicians took up the matter of the East African slave trade and, armed with the Select Committee’s endorsement for action, they set off on a tour of public meetings to agitate for government action.
As he waited for a commission, George Sulivan decided, like Philip Colomb, to write a book about his experiences fighting the slave trade. Other veterans of the squadron, too, were writing letters to the editor, articles, pamphlets, and publishing drawings in the newspapers. George Sulivan had seen them, and knew the power that the rediscovery of Livingstone had contributed, knew the good work his commodore and Captain Colomb had done at Westminster. He had read about the growth of a movement to take action against the trade on the east coast, a series of public meetings led by prominent abolitionist politicians. So he would prod, too: show the fire and murder at the base of the trade, the obliteration of families, the cruelty of the slave carriers, the hypocrisy and inhumanity of governments all around the Indian Ocean. He had the photographs he had taken of starving children lifted out of slave ships. He had a drawing of a dhow collapsing in the surf on the beach, bodies tumbling out of it.5
Hawarden Castle, northern Wales, November 1872
Prime Minister William Gladstone was at his estate in northern Wales, a great pale-stoned manor house surrounded by a park, brook and wood. He was composing a note to his Fore
ign Secretary in Westminster. It had to do with the East African slave trade matter.
Gladstone had been dragged into the thing. It really was not his preoccupation, but the passion of those somewhat distasteful radicals his Foreign Secretary called ‘the Anti Slave Trade People’, those like Arthur Kinnaird, who had compelled a parliamentary committee on the matter; Kinnaird, whom Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary considered rather self-important. He and many others had shepherded an outcry among the people so that finally Gladstone’s government had been obliged to promise action in the Queen’s Speech last year. It was his Foreign Secretary’s opinion that the matter had become a potential weapon for the opposition in parliament.
The Prime Minister was certain that he was no less sorry for the plight of the slaves than the next man, though he was sure he was not one of those, as he called them, ‘negrophilists’ who would sacrifice the lives of white men to save black. After all, those blacks were, to his mind, a less developed race and of lower capacity. Besides, maintaining squadrons to fight slavers cost money, tax money, and taxes were the bane of commerce; and commerce was the surest way to put down slavery, commerce must eventually insinuate itself into the depths of Africa creating alternatives to the trade in slaves.
But today, pushed by public opinion and the opposition he and his cabinet were experiencing, he wrote to the Foreign Office. He was working out the details of whom to send to Zanzibar to deal with the sultan, the powers to give that representative, the terms they should lay before the sultan. It seemed that they had landed on a man to send, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, who had great experience in those parts and was a favourite of the abolitionists.
Frere began his career as an agent of the East India Company and rose to become the governor of Bombay and the new British government of India. Exceptionally, he was a longstanding opponent of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. He retired from his governorship in 1867 but was still closely involved in Indian Ocean matters, especially active in publicising the ongoing slave trade in those waters. He even mounted a speaking tour after the 1871 Committee hearings at which Heath and Colomb testified did not result in immediate action by the government.
Sending Frere would appease the stirred-up ‘Anti Slave Trade People’, but Gladstone wrote that he was quite uneasy about using force to end the trade. And he wrote about his concern that forbidding the traffic in any Africans between the coast and Zanzibar might be rather too harsh. Wouldn’t this, he worried, interfere with what were called ‘bona fide’ needs for slave labour not destined for a slave market?6
Just before the Gladstone government sent its envoys to Zanzibar to negotiate the closure of the slave trade, Sulivan’s and Colomb’s books were published. They were widely reviewed in newspapers and periodicals, praised from the Athenaeum to the Pall Mall Gazette to the Westminster Review. Reviewers compared them to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called them powerful without being over-wrought. The specifically abolitionist press celebrated both books for how they were maintaining the public’s interest in the matter. They were frequently both commended for their use of woodblock transcriptions of photographs which, reviewers wrote, did more than mere words to drive home the brutality of the trade. Indeed, one of the images from Sulivan’s book, that of a skeletal little boy, accompanied advertisements for abolitionist rallies.
Then the British mission headed by Sir Henry Bartle Frere was off, its movements and progress related in the newspapers. A few weeks before, they reported that the party had arrived in Aden, then Zanzibar and a grand reception by the sultan. But recently there had been more discouraging news: that the sultan had said that he was powerless to stop the trade, that those who profited from it would see him killed before he agreed to halt it; reports that the merchants of Zanzibar had pled with the mission that halting the slave traffic would ruin the Zanzibar economy.
The new sultan, Barghash, needed to be forced if he was to keep his throne. Frere, acting largely of his own accord, agreed to force him, tearing up the old treaty allowing the transport of captives between the coast and the island. The Royal Navy presence on the coast, including the now-veteran Daphne, blockaded Zanzibar and the sultan’s coastal ports. It stopped the island’s merchant shipping, embargoing everything but American and European merchants, and the Royal Navy unleashed pent-up frustration over being hamstrung by the fine points of the legal vs. illegal trade.
It was the kind of unilateral strong-arm action and commitment that William Gladstone had wanted to avoid – especially for the sake of ‘mere’ Africans. But the blockade worked. The newspapers at home published the news with pride: facing such power and blockade, the sultan capitulated. The slave market on Zanzibar was closed, the importation of Africans to Zanzibar banned, the trade by sea in the waters of the sultan illegal. The sultan of Muscat at the mouth of the Persian Gulf agreed too, and banned the trade in his waters. Consul Henry Churchill’s effort to keep Indian Zanzibaris from holding slaves – once halted by the Bombay government – was now enforced. The Frere mission and Royal Navy promised the total ruin of the rich men of Zanzibar far more directly than the elimination of the slave trade, and it had worked.7
CHAPTER 21
‘HERE IS MY JOURNEY’S END’
A return that marks the beginning of the end
Falmouth, Cornwall, June 1873
Before leaving Zanzibar, the Bartle Frere mission had interviewed Royal Navy officers on the spot asking how a ban on the slave trade might be enforced. They had told them that a base of operations would be needed at Zanzibar, a large ship equipped with many boats, some steam-powered, and a great store of supplies, good medical accommodations, a large crew and an experienced leader.
And so, in early summer 1873, the commission came. George Sulivan had a ship, a posting like none other in the world, and the fulfilment of a mission that had occupied him since he was a midshipman.
He was to prepare to meet the mammoth HMS London in Plymouth. She was a 72-gun second rate with two ranks of gun ports, two rows of stern windows, a wide poop deck and forecastle, over two hundred feet long and with 260 sailors and marines. London was almost as old as he was, a veteran of Sebastopol in the Russian War. In truth she was a giant of a bygone era, though she had been refitted with steam engines. But she was no cruiser: her role was to be the centre of operations, a stationary headquarters in Zanzibar harbour and a carrier for large and capable boats. And so George Sulivan, who had begun his work on the east coast of Africa over twenty-three years before in cramped midshipman’s berths, would return in a ship only slightly smaller than HMS Victory. His great cabin would be roomier than his mother’s house.
His mother Henrietta learned the news of the success at Zanzibar and of her son’s commission to return to his work there, but now she could rest assured that her son would not be the one running up malarial rivers after dug-in slavers. While her youngest boy’s mighty command was fitting out alongside a jetty at Plymouth, she departed this life.
HMS London, Zanzibar harbour, November 1874
HMS London in Zanzibar Harbour, 1881
London sailed from Plymouth via Madeira, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape to her new station. It was late equatorial November when George Sulivan and his great ship approached her new home, the wide harbour of Zanzibar, sounding and sounding again on the approach. The wind picked up quickly and she shortened sail. Finally, finding herself in 60 feet, she dropped anchor. The sleek new gunboat HMS Rifleman was there to greet her, and the light two-gun Nassau, whose shallow draft would allow her to patrol the bays of the coast. Sulivan’s Daphne had been busy over the summer and autumn stalking the seas around Zanzibar to enforce the treaty. She, too, would appear in the harbour in the coming months.
Soon Sulivan ordered the 21-gun salute to the new sultan, Barghash, and paid his respects in the chequered hall. Then the captain settled down to work; he had to rig a hospital and machine shop on board and set up a forge. He was going to need more men, ideally Kroomen, and more senior officers for leading boat
patrols. He needed to write to the Admiralty as soon as possible. The new treaty and the arrival of the London would not end the slave trade on this coast. To bring about that end he needed to keep London focused on Zanzibar.
In November 1874 a great ship sailed into Zanzibar harbour. Its captain had been mocked in this very place by slavers eight years before as he stood helpless on the much smaller deck of HMS Pantaloon. But no longer; there were no slavers here anymore.
There were no slavers to be seen under the sun, at least. And the captain of the great London was here to keep it that way and follow them into the shadows. The trade was no longer legal, but it was not ended. The captain was there to end the beginning and begin the end. Many years of work lay ahead for Sulivan and his successors working at Zanzibar, but that beginning would not have been made without the focus and commitment of Leopold Heath, the efforts and blood sacrifice of the squadron, and the abolitionists at home who used their stories to force action in the face of those who wanted to wait for the slow workings of free trade.1
HMS Castor’s pinnace, Mozambique Channel, November 1849
A small sailed boat detached from the 36-gun HMS Castor was patrolling for slavers off the coast of Africa in the Mozambique Channel. It was deep night with no moon, though stars dimly lit the sea, quiet. The narrow boat was moving slowly up the coast on its way to the next river, the next village to hunt. Only the young man – boy, really – at the stern, Sulivan, the midshipman, was awake. The others curled in corners or on the hard planks, sleeping. Nothing but an occasional flutter of the sail or ripple of water from the cat’s-paw breeze broke the silence.
Now something drew his attention to the coast, about two miles away across the dark. The heavens above it lit up, again and again. Soon lightning poured over the entire coast in a cascade, illuminating that world over the water almost without ceasing. It was like nothing that he had ever seen before. Delirious light – supernatural, rapturous light – over Africa. And yet all silent: no rumble of thunder, no rain, reached him.
