Squadron
Page 26
He watched for hours, never tiring of it, though after watching so long his eyes were dazzled. He thought of God. And in the awe, the elation, he felt God. It was a show of raw Godly power over Africa. This was where to look for God – not in stained glass or priestly prattle. And he remembered then how it was said that the Creator, with all the elemental power of nature, still could speak with ‘a still small voice’. The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, … and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.2
*
The closure of Zanzibar’s slave market and the arrival of the great HMS London to enforce the end of the slave trade in Zanzibar waters was the beginning of the end of the East African slave trade. It was not the end, but it was a victory in a battle without which the war could not have ultimately been won. Slavery remained legal on Zanzibar and in the sultan’s dominions, while the local trade in the sultan’s terra firma territory continued.
But on the seas the immediate consequences of the new campaign were drastic. George Sulivan and the station commodore had five to seven ships well-suited to direct against the slave trade on the coast: Briton, Columbine, Daphne, Nassau, Rifleman, Shearwater and Thetis. With the London as a kind of miniature dockyard and receiving centre for released Africans, the ships engaged in the hunt rarely had to leave their work. The coast was divided into rational hunting zones, with suitable ships appointed to each on the sound basis of Sulivan’s and others’ experience (in later years one captain carried Colomb’s book as his main source of guidance), and all the while London loomed like a mother spider at the heart of the new web. There were more years of hard effort by the Royal Navy, political work bringing pressure to bear on Indian Ocean princes, and more blood sacrifice by sailors. But in the coming decade the slavers risked running the Royal Navy’s gauntlet much more rarely.
Far more often they tried to march their victims overland. The Royal Navy did send boats up rivers to try to thwart this, and investigators too. It is very hard to arrive at the numbers of East Africans marched northward during the London era, but probably some few thousands annually. Sultan Barghash declared the overland trade illegal in his dominions in 1876, which at least made his governors subject to punishment if they failed to enforce it. Meanwhile, to the south, the trade in so-called engagés continued under the French flag. This hypocrisy is reminiscent of today’s ongoing traffic in forced labour.
Of course, there was never going to be a happy solution for the disposition of kidnapped East Africans. Either their homelands were flung into chaos and hunger, or they had no homes at all to which to return. But, as George Sulivan himself had long hoped, the Church Missionary Society established a town of freed slaves on the African mainland near Mombasa in 1875. Others were released on Zanzibar in the hopes of providing an alternative to slave labour, which the sultans allowed to persist for years.
After a decade of the tropical sun’s assault, HMS London had to be broken up in 1884. Thereafter slavers immediately reappeared on the coast in force, and there followed a few slaving seasons reminiscent of the pre-Heath era, with poor attention paid by the British and poor results. But then the Royal Navy returned to the scene with a new round of fury in the late 1880s. In 1890 the British declared a protectorate over Zanzibar, and soon, at the price of greater colonial intrusion, the institution of slavery itself was abolished in 1897 by Britain’s client Sultan Hamoud. With some exceptions, the slave trade by sea from the region was over.3
NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS
This is a true story. No detail has been invented. If I write what a certain individual saw, for example, or what a person thought, it is because he wrote as much in a letter or memoir. The book is written with the aim of suggesting that details are invented and lightly flung off the pen, but in fact so many were each won at the price of long hours in the archives. This book contains roughly the same number of endnotes as my first, a traditional scholarly monograph, but my goal was for it to read like a book without endnotes.
Finding just the right detail to add was an enjoyable exercise in ingenuity. And it was enjoyable because, while most historians relish the fascinating detail, the way we make scholarly arguments often precludes their inclusion. An anonymous peer reviewer might accuse us of a lack of focus or professional correctitude, an editor cut and slash in order to get to the argument more quickly.
My sources were very many, as the following pages of endnotes demonstrate, but I will describe a key handful here. First were the ships’ logs themselves, preserved in the United Kingdom’s National Archives, an institution that is a credit to the entire nation. These describe the daily activities on board in a terse, summary manner; but with care much can be extracted from them. They inform their reader about the officers and activities of the watch, sail sightings, weather conditions, exceptional events like a broken spar, a visitor to the ship, a death. Occasionally there are extended marginal notes describing an action, and these, of course, were like gold. How did I know that weed had grown on the belly of this or that ship, how do I know how the sails were set at a given moment? Because the log recorded it. Additionally, the commodore’s station journal was like a log centred on the flagship and offered even more detail about ship visiting, signals sent and received, and so on. This is how I can write that George Sulivan was signalled to dinner aboard the Octavia, for instance. The ‘muster’ or ‘establishment’ books for each ship, which reveal details about the crew – including Kroomen – are also in the National Archives.
Key, too, were letters from many individuals which were abundant and also preserved in the National Archives. Commodore Heath’s correspondence with the Admiralty provided invaluable insight into the state of his thinking before and during the campaign. These were long and forthright. Heath’s captains’ letters to him were crucial in reckoning their thinking and activities. This was perhaps the main way I had access to Edward Meara, who has largely been absent from history until now. We know about Meara’s thinking thanks precisely to the correspondence generated by the politicians who were so disturbed by it.
George Sulivan’s descendants, the Hodson family, have carefully preserved an excellent collection of his letters, photos and other documents. I am extraordinarily grateful to the Hodsons for granting me the use of these items as well as for their warm hospitality.
The India Office Records at the British Library – another credit to the nation – provided the records that allowed me to portray the thinking of Dr John Kirk, Henry Rothery and other officials from around the Indian Ocean.
Fortunately, the plans of the Amazons are preserved by the National Maritime Museum, and I was kindly welcomed to the ship plan archive in Woolwich by that generous institution. This allowed me to describe the various corners of the ship, to move the actors across and through it, and so on. Other sources in the archives in Greenwich allowed me to write, for example, that Heath and Maxwell explored on horseback to the echoes of jackals.
Geographical descriptions come from letters, memoirs and reports, but also from sailor’s atlases from the period. In that way, I relate the general appearance of the place. If I write that one of the actors saw something particular, I have from some source a direct indication thereof.
Colomb and Sulivan’s memoirs of this campaign of course provided me with the greatest wealth of fine detail on their activities, feelings and perceptions. If I write that Philip Colomb imagined his wife crying at the moment of his departure for the Indian Ocean, if I describe the sound of stokers’ shovels biting into coal, it is because he wrote so in his book. Like any professional historian, I still handle these with a critical eye, thinking about the various contexts in which they are situated, the motives and prejudices of the writers. Often, I was able to compare these literary and polemical items against other sources, like their more official dispatches to their commodore. These memoirs are
widely available and I encourage everyone to read them. They are written, though, in the particular prose-aesthetic and mindset of their time that can make reading a windward labour. Other accounts include an essay by Lieutenant John Challice, Dr John Noble’s medical log now in York Minster archives, and drawings by Lieutenant Henn.
And while my aim was to hide the archival work behind this book, so too have I left unspoken my engagement with a number of historical debates on this subject. The last best book on the topic of the navy and the trade on this coast in particular was by Dr Raymond Howell in 1987, and I honour Dr Howell and his Royal Navy and the Slave Trade. He offered a scholarly sweep of a history of the entire period of British engagement with the slave trade on the east coast; as it was a survey, he was unable to delve into the details of activities and personalities there which my approach allows me. Nor did he have a chance to highlight the manner in which abolitionists in the United Kingdom latched on to the case of the squadron and its suppression in their promotional activities and in parliament. I hope he enjoys what I’ve done. Dr Lindsay Doulton was able to examine the Heath’s squadron’s effect on the public discourse in Britain to some extent in her recent DPhil thesis, for which I am grateful.
I hope I am adding to the fine work Dr Richard Huzzey did with his Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (2012). Readers might compare the ways Heath and his captains struggled with the correct exercise of power and justice with the metropolitan politics of slave trade suppression so well described in Dr Huzzey’s book. And as I fill in and work around the histories of Howell and Huzzey, I write in polite disagreement with Mr Alastair Hazell, author of The Last Slave Market (2011), with whose characterisation of Dr Kirk I cannot agree. I am grateful to Professor Matthew Hopper for his fine Slaves of One Master; his material on the Persian Gulf and the date trade, especially, is fantastic. The origins and flows of capital in this broad phenomenon are critically important to understanding.
Finally, I write in the face of a deeply noxious vein of writing, which I will not dignify by citing, that highlights above all else the connection between this slave trade and the religion of the sultans who profited from it, some of those who financed it, and the dhow-men who bore it over the sea. While it is true that these individuals were Muslims, their religion was no more, no less pertinent to their actions than the Christianity of those who carried on the westward trade or the Hinduism of the merchants and most of the lenders who facilitated it. And it should be abundantly clear that many of the consumers in the east coast market – French, Malagasy, Portuguese, even British – were Christian. The nominally Christian British empire, meanwhile – indeed the devoutly Christian William Gladstone at its helm – fretted over whether to dispossess slaveholders of their ‘lawful property’. It should be clear, too, that complicity to varying degrees spread far and wide.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I was able to share this story because – while working on an unrelated project – my hand fell on a copy of George Sulivan’s memoir on the shelves of the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University. It was a serendipitous discovery possible because Stanford maintained a true research library, full of real books among which one might make discoveries, curated by expert librarians. I am grateful to Stanford’s librarians, all those who support Stanford’s libraries, and dedicated librarians everywhere, especially those who defend that piece of technology – still the best – the book.
I am grateful to the National Maritime Museum archive and their ship model library staff at Chatham, who shared with me and a student a model of the Nymphe as well as many other treasures. The same thanks go to the Museum’s ship plan staff at the Brass Foundry, Woolwich, including the patient and helpful Andrew Choong.
Thanks to the staff of the Yorkminster Archives, the Scottish National Archives, the British Library and their India Office Records library. And thanks to the ILL and other staff at Case Western Reserve’s Kelvin Smith Library.
I am particularly indebted to the staff of the UK National Archives at Kew (still called the Public Record Office when I began researching this book), and grateful that the people of Britain support that exceptional institution so historians and others can try to unravel how things came to be both in Britain and throughout the world.
I am extraordinarily grateful to the Hodson family for granting me the use of George Sulivan’s papers and photos as well as for their warm hospitality. And thanks to Mr J.J. Heath-Caldwell who transcribed a number of unique documents related to his ancestor, Sir Leopold Heath.
Many thanks to the excellent history work of Drs Caroline Shaw, Richard Huzzey, Matthew Hopper, Erik Gilbert, Raymond Howell, and many more scholars, too numerous to mention here in full, but to whom I am nevertheless deeply grateful.
Thanks to my department colleagues and students, including undergraduate Mr Evan Cerne-Iannone and graduate student Mr Sandy Clark.
I am grateful for research funding from the Baker Nord Humanities Center, which has been a generous supporter over the years.
Thank you to John Silbersack, Peter Mayer, Gesche Ipsen, Deborah Blake, and all those with a hand in producing this book.
Thank you to those who have dedicated their work and resources to battling human trafficking.
I am most grateful to my wife and son to whom this book is dedicated.
NOTES
Part and chapter titles are drawn from Othello, whose protagonist was a kind of Venetian navy captain and who was enslaved for a time. For his memoir, Philip Colomb used a quote from Othello for an epigraph: ‘I pray you, in your letters,/When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,/Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,/Nor set down aught in malice.’”
The epigraph is a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, quoted in William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Slavery and the Slave Trades in the Indian Ocean and Arab Worlds: Global Connections and Disconnections’, Proceedings of the 10th Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference, Yale University, 24; and his ‘Islam and Abolition in the Indian Ocean’, in Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and its Aftermath, Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 160.
Introduction
1 The details about the captives under the slave deck of the small dhow come from interviews made aboard HMS Forte in May 1869. The shallow hold would have been quite warm given the eighty human bodies, the air temperature of 86, and sea temperature between 86 and 88 per Forte’s log. These rare instances of ‘slave narratives’ are recorded in Slave Trade Records of the East India Station, National Archives ADM 127/40. This large volume contains no pagination; these narratives appear at the very end of the volume. The details about the ship’s capture by HMS Forte come from Percy Scott, Fifty Years in the Royal Navy (New York: George Doran, 1919), 28; and Forte’s log for May 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9931. This scene is revisited later in this history and reveals that Forte fired multiple warning shots, finally heard by the slaver crew.
2 It took ten years for the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act to be extended to territories governed by the East India Company. For a highly readable account of the struggles of the West African ‘Preventative Squadron’ turn to Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009); see her ch. 18 for the eventual slow-down in the trade, notwithstanding American smugglers tempted to run the blockade by high prices fetched in the US market. For the current state-of-the-art overview of Victorian anti-slavery, see Richard Huzzey’s excellent Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
3 The assertion that the West African Slave Trade Suppression campaign was the most expensive humanitarian operations in history and the 2% of national income average come from Robert Pape and Chaim Kaufman cited in Christopher Leslie Brown, ‘Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Heuman and Burnard, eds., Routledge History of Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 281–97. Richard Huzzey’s calculations provi
de my figure of around 0.3 to 1.3% of national expenditure; see his Freedom Burning, ch. 3 and especially fig. 5. For details of the ships and manpower involved, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 90–2 and elsewhere. See also Keith Hamilton, Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2009).
4 For just a couple of many sources of information on Kroomen’s strength, see Richard Burton, Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po, vol. 2 (London: Tinsley Bros., 1863), 26–7; and Charles W. Thomas, Adventures and Observations on the West Coast of Africa and its Islands (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860), 108. The Kroomen’s strength was a matter of practicality. Head Kroomen selected their men on the basis of their ability to load ships with heavy casks, coal bags, etc. Thomas reported that it was said that a common standard was whether a man could carry a beef cask of 200 pounds above his head into deep surf. More on the Kroomen comes from Philip Colomb, Slave-catching in the Indian Ocean: A Record of Naval Experiences (London: Longmans, 1873, 249–50, and Diane Frost, ‘Diasporan West African Communities: The Kru in Freetown and Liverpool’, Review of African Political Economy 29 (June 2002), 285–300. For one of many sources of information on the Krooman tattoo, see House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from Commodore Sir George Collier Concerning the Settlements on the Gold and Windward Coasts of Africa, vol. XII [90], 15. For the old Krooman saying, see MacGregor Laird and R.A.K. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa by the River Niger, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), 33. On the Head Krooman taking responsibility for the discipline of Kroomen, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 249. More details come from William Allen and T.R.H. Thomson, Narrative of the Expedition Sent by Her Majesty’s Government to the River Niger (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 122–3. For Krooman pay and much else see Robert Burroughs, ‘“[T]he True Sailors of Western Africa”: Kru Seafaring Identity in British Travellers’ Accounts of the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of Maritime Research 11 (Sept. 2009), 61 and elsewhere.