by John Broich
6 For Daphne’s duties during the Abyssinian campaign, see Heath’s station journal, National Archives ADM 50/293 from this time period. Weather and other details form this time come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. Details of Daphne’s activities at Mahé come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582; Sulivan’s impressions of Mahé, Seychelles, Dhow Chasing, 135–7; other details in this scene come from Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293.
3. ‘His bark is stoutly timber’d’
1 Abdul Sheriff’s remains the authoritative work on nineteenth-century Zanzibar: Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory on Zanzibar (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), 49, 54, 65, 135, 226, 229, appendices, and elsewhere. With it, read Erik Gilbert, Dhows and Colonial Economy in Zanzibar: 1860–1970 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005). Some details about Zanzibar’s economy come from Nwulia, Britain and Slavery, 97 and elsewhere. Details about the ship and the setting in the harbour of Zanzibar in this section come from Pantaloon’s log, National Archives ADM 53/8772. This includes a reported complement of 130 which varies from other sources. The layout of Pantaloon is preserved by the National Maritime Museum, ship plans NPB8563–5. Other details comprising the scene come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 112, 331. See, for the Indian Hindu or ‘Banyan’ merchants participating in or financing and profiting from the slave trade on Zanzibar itself, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Admiral Sir Arthur Mostyn Field papers, FIE/43100, 99. For this, too, see The Examiner, 1 Feb. 1873, 9. A rare, perhaps unique, photo of HMS Pantaloon is among the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family. Frederick Cooper wrote the foundational book about East African plantation slavery, especially on Zanzibar and neighbouring Pemba, with Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). More recently, Elisabeth McMahon has closely studied slave society on the east coast, especially on Pemba, in Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Information about clove harvesting comes from Cynthia Brantley, The Giriama and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 17.
2 These treaties against the overseas slave trade were the Moresby and Hammerton Treaties which limited the trade to the coast and coastal islands from Lamu (in what is today Kenya) in the north and Kilwa (in what is today Tanzania) in the south. For details on the Zanzibar-centred trade see Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory. For a history of British perfunctory attempts to enforce the Moresby and Hammerton Treaties, see Raymond C. Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), ch. 1, especially 35–6. For the sad state of the ships on the station, especially when slave trade suppression duties were largely moved from the Cape station to East Indies station at Bombay, National Archives FO 84/1268, Admiralty Memo 20 July 1866, 2; for this see also Howell, Royal Navy, 36, 44. For a description of Zanzibar and neighbourhood, see Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, vol. 1 (London: Tinsley Bros., 1872), 256–7; Christiane Bird, The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West (New York: Random House, 2010), 107–8. Details of Heath’s arrival and visit to the sultan come in part from Commodore Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293. The phrase ‘the time has come’ appears in multiple letters from this period, e.g. Leopold Heath to Henry Churchill, 25 Aug. 1868, British Library India Office Records, India Political Despatches, L/PS/6/560 1/11 Coll 1/11. For another instance, Leopold Heath to Secretary of the Admiralty, 2 Sept. 1868, British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85, 2. The sultan is pictured in the British Library, 1867 photograph of Sultan Majid bin Said, BL Photo 1000/42 (4344); see also Baird, Sultan’s Shadow, 181. On Churchill’s presence, see Confidential Letter from Leopold Heath to the Secretary to the Secretary to the Admiralty, 2 Sept. 1868, British Library, IOR L/P&S/18/B85, 2. Details about Heath’s conversation with the sultan and other details come from Leopold Heath to Henry Churchill, 25 Aug. 1868, India Office Records, India Political Despatches, L/PS/6/560 1/11 Coll 1/11, 2, 3, and Leopold Heath to Secretary of the Admiralty, 2 Sept. 1868, British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85. It is uncertain whether Heath knew it, though it would be a surprise if Consul Churchill had not told him, but Sultan Majid did take active steps to fight the smuggling of captives to the north. Earlier in 1868 he had sent 150 men to battle the Omani slavers on the eve of their sailing with kidnap victims. That raid seems to have largely failed, though. In another instance, the sultan’s vizier permitted the consulate’s marines to police suspected haunts of Omani smugglers while the fleet was preoccupied with the Abyssinian War. See British Library India Office Records, India Political Despatches, L/PS/6/560, Coll 1/11, Letters of Consul Churchill to Secretary of State, Government of Bombay, 9 Apr. 1868, L/PS/6/560, Coll 1/11. On Heath thinking he left an impression of his earnestness, and his feeling that he was taking on the duty with more energy than anyone had done previously, see Heath to Sec. Admiralty, 1 Mar. 1869 in British Sessional Papers, House of Commons: Correspondence Relating to the Slave Trade on the East African Coast, LXI, 67.
3 Philip Colomb’s service record has a number of marginal notes documenting commanding officers’ praise of his intelligence: National Archives ADM 196/36. Most details from this section come from Colomb, Slave-catching, 2, 7, 21–3, 110.
4 As always, the ship’s log provides detailed information about temperature and wind conditions as well as the activities occurring on board during this period including repairs and occurrences around the ship, such as the discovery of a body, and so on; Nymphe’s log for Nov. 1868, National Archives ADM 53/9548. For Meara’s past experiences see his service records, National Archives ADM 196/70 and ADM 196/13; and Cork Examiner, 2 Jan. 1866, 1. Details of the crew come from National Archives ADM/115/691, Record and Establishment Book of the Nymphe to 1871. For the massive heat of the lower deck see data from the trial of the Daphne, The Times, 5 July 1867, 5. The impression of constant infernal heat also comes from an anonymous slaver-hunter centred on Zanzibar, who wrote in 1870, ‘Living on board a gun-boat, therefore is rather hot work, what with the sun above and the engine-fires below – for the chase is an everyday occurrence’, Chambers’s Journal, 12 Feb. 1870, 110. Details of the architecture and layout of the Amazon-class gunboats comes from National Maritime Museum NPB7942 and NPB7944; further details come out by comparing these with Daphne’s upper and lower deck plans. Meara’s experience on the Magnet comes from his service record. Magnet was tender to the ‘blockship’ – a converted steam guard ship – Pembroke Times, 21 Mar. 1859, 12.
4. ‘The imminent deadly breach’
1 Details about Madagascar and Pakenham come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 138–9; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Madagascar and the Slave Trade’, Journal of African History 22 (1981), 216–17 and elsewhere; and Gill Shepherd, ‘The Comorians and the East African Slave Trade’, in James Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 79 and elsewhere. The description of Queen Ranavalona II comes from Alfred Chiswell, ‘A visit to the Queen, Madagascar’, Newbury House Magazine 9 (1893), 465. Churchill’s evidence before the 1871 House of Commons select committee on the East African slave trade describes cynical French ‘liberating’ African slaves for the price of five years of indenture service: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1871 (420), Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade (East Coast of Africa); together with the proceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence, appendix and index, 24. For Sulivan’s revelations about the relationship between Pakenham and the Malagasy, see Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 138–9; some of the text in this passage is a verbatim quote of Sulivan relating Pakenham’s briefing. For Sulivan’s personal impression of Pakenham, as for example energetic, see Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 138. Heading, wind and sail conditions come, as always, from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. On Sunley, see Henry Hu
tton to Acting Colonial Secretary, Cape Town, 25 May 1861, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 61 (6 Feb.-7 Aug. 1862), 65–6, and Anti-Slavery Reporter, May 1883, 129–31. Other details about Daphne’s time in the Comoros come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 140. Details of Daphne’s approach to the Kiswara, weather, etc. come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. Details about Doctor Mortimer come from Edward T. Mortimer service record, National Archives ADM 196/78. Details of the doctor and captain’s exploration and encounter with the small village come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 148–50.
2 Material from Livingstone in this section comes from David Livingstone [Horace Waller, ed.], The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa. From Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-five to his Death (New York: Harper & Bros., 1875), 64, 182. On Livingstone’s dependence on Tippu Tip see Bird, The Sultan’s Shadow, 277–8. On Tippu Tip generally, Heinrich Brode, Tippoo Tib. The Story of his Career in Central Africa: Narrated from His Own Accounts (London: Arnold, 1907); Robert Ross et al., The Objects of Life in Central Africa: The History of Consumption and Social Change, 1840–1980 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 31–3; Prem Poddar et al., eds., A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 55. Estimations of prices paid for kidnapees come from Colomb who gathers his information from explorers Speke and Burton and Consuls Pelly and Disbrow, Slave-catching, 55–8; this is reinforced by a Times of India article of 7 June 1867. The exchange rate of roughly five Maria Theresa silver dollars to one British pound sterling in the late 1860s comes from Robert Geran Landen, Oman Since 1856 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 129.
3 For the fascinating hybrid character of the Amazons, see Ballard, ‘British Sloops of 1875, the Wooden Ram-Bowed Type’, 302–17. For other details in this section, including the former strategy of policing close to Zanzibar, see Howell, Royal Navy, 21–3, 44, 53. For the feast that the sultan offered the officers of the Octavia and his secretary of state serving them, see Letters of Bishop Tozer and His Sister, Together with Some Other Records of the Universities’ Mission from 1863–1873 (Glasgow: Universities’ Mission, 1902), 170. Heath’s letter to the Admiralty announcing his new efforts and recommending political and diplomatic changes is Heath to Admiralty, 2 Sept. 1868 transcribed at http://web.archive.org/web/20160707202227/http://www.jjhc.info/HeathLeopold1907admiraltyletterbook1868.htm. Details in this section on Daphne and Sulivan at Zanzibar come from National Archives, Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582, and Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 153–4 and elsewhere. Sulivan used the term ‘run the gauntlet’: Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 153. For Sulivan’s belief that the Indian traders were testing him, Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 154. On Sulivan’s deceptive manoeuvring see National Archives, Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582, and Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 156. The details of the episode of the dhow run aground, including Sulivan’s thoughts, come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 158–63. On the types of activities carried on by the Daphne in this period, including firing warning shots, see Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582. Details from the interviews of Zangora and others come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 185–7. Lt. Henn had already served on over half a dozen ships by this time. His details are at National Archives ADM 196/17. Henn was an artist and his role in the squadron’s efforts after their assignment on the station will become apparent. The details of the large slave dhow with 156 captives and the murdered infant come from Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582, and Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 168–9. On the calculations a slaver made regarding running aground, see Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 115, 169. For the story of Marlborough, Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582, and Sullivan, Dhow Chasing, 179. On Sulivan’s observations of the refugees grouping themselves, his favourable and unfavourable reactions, and Billy and Thomas Balmer, see Daphne’s Establishment Book, ADM 115/245; Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 173–7. Two men died within hours on 6 Nov. 1868 and the woman died on the 7th. The burial of another man on the 10th records the 64-pound ball for bearing down the body; Daphne’s log, ADM 53/9582.
5. ‘In her prophetic fury sew’d the work’
1 Abdul Sheriff believes that perhaps 3,000 abductees were moved north of Zanzibar waters annually by sea in the 1860s, though does not venture an estimate of those bound from Zanzibar or more likely Kilwa to Madagascar and other eastern destinations. He supposes, then, that the Mozambican coast supplied the vast majority of these. For this and other details in this section see Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 49–53, 65, 106–7, 204–7, 231. Many details in this section, including Heath’s thoughts from around this time on the relative statuses of slave and free come from Leopold Heath to Sec. of the Admiralty, 1 Mar. 1869 in British Sessional Papers, House of Commons: Correspondence Relating to the Slave Trade on the East African Coast, LXI, 67–8. Also Leopold Heath to Seymour Fitzgerald (governor of Bombay), 19 Jan. 1869 National Archives ADM 127–40, 1–3; Leopold Heath to the Secretary to the Admiralty, 2 Sept. 1868, British Library IOR L/P&S/18/B85, 3. Details of this rendezvous come from Commodore Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293. On the commander of Octavia who revelled in ordering the lash, see Scott, Fifty Years in the Royal Navy, 27–8. Heath credits the manoeuvre of staying away from Zanzibar and pouncing down from the north to officers with whom he spoke at Annesley Bay in a letter to the Admiralty, 1 Mar. 1869, British Library IOR L/P&S/18/B84, 2. On Colomb calling Heath’s strategy a spider’s web and the squadron spiders, Slave-catching, 185.
2 The report that Sir Seymour found Heath’s interview with the sultan of Zanzibar ‘very objectionable’ comes from a note of Charles Gonne, Secretary to the Government of Bombay to the Secretary of the Foreign Department, Government of India, Calcutta; British Library IOR L/PS/6/560 1/11 Coll 1/11, 1. A likeness of Sir Seymour Vesey Fitzgerald is at the National Portrait Gallery, item NPG Ax17766. For the concerns that occupied Sir Seymour, with the slave trade conspicuously absent, see among many other potential sources, Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972), 89, 109 and elsewhere; Popular Science (October 1882), 859; and Allen’s Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence for British and Foreign India 29 (1871), 47, 55, 119, 467. Sir Charles Aitchison’s photo is at the British Library, Dunlop Smith Collection, Photo 355/3/(17) and at the Library of Congress, item number 2013646213. For Aitchison, including his millenarianism, George Smith, Twelve Indian Statesmen (London: John Murray, 1897), 287–307; and his reputation for masterful inactivity, Dictionary of National Biography 64 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1901), 26. Aitchison’s notes are within the same file as Sir Seymour’s, British Library IOR L/PS/6/560 1/11 Coll 1/11.
3 For information on Edward Lechmere Russell, see C.E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), 308. For Russell’s opinion of letting go ships with small numbers of enslaved Africans, see British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85, 8–9. Moses D.E. Nwulia nicely described this in his Britain and Slavery, 86–7. For Russell’s idea that Africans might be better off enslaved than liberated, as ‘unfortunate’ as he found slavery, see British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85, 6. The argument that economic principle determined that enslaved people were not usually mistreated made a reappearance in a 2014 review in the Economist of Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Russell’s letter to the Bombay government of 29 Jan. 1869 in British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85, 9.
4 For the suggestion that Heath couldn’t have grasped the scale of the forces he was prodding, and for the connections between India and East Africa in this period, see ch. 6 of Thomas R. Metcalfe’s excellent Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For the economics of the slave and other trades, the Indian merchant/finance community of Zanzibar and Bombay, Sewji and his customs farming, and the idea that the
sultan relied on Sewji’s capital and Sewji’s capital on the Pax Britannica, Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 104–9, 147. For Zanzibar’s Indian trade community and its mortgage lending and human collateral on loans, Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 142–6. For the particular desirability of the ivory re-sold at Zanizbar, Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Pattern of International Trade in East Central Africa in the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 87.
5 For Henry Churchill’s warning against Indian slaveholders and traders see his January 1869 notice reprinted in National Archives FO 881/1742, 37. On the Kutchee’s rejection of Churchill’s authority to the point of laughing, see H.A. Churchill to Secretary of the Government of Bombay, 26 Feb. 1869, in Memo, Slave-dealing and slave-holding by Kutchees in Zanzibar, 1870, British Library, India Office Records L/PS/18/B90, 1–2. For Churchill’s preference for immediate abolition, see Churchill to Acting Secretary, Government of Bombay, 1 Mar. 1869 in National Archives FO 881/1742, 1; on Churchill’s fear of violence during these days, see H.A. Churchill to E. Meara, 3 Feb. 1869, British Library, India Office Records, IOR L/PS/9/48, Secret Letters Received from areas outside India, 2. For the sultan’s warnings about Churchill stirring unrest, Memo, Slave-dealing and slave-holding by Kutchees in Zanzibar, 39.
6. ‘With all his might’
1 For the story of Meara boarding the ‘French’ dhow, see Commander Meara to Sir L. Heath, 5 June 1869 in British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/ B85, 12; see also the passes issued at Nosy Be reprinted in British Library, India Office Records L/P&S/18/B85, 9–10. On the custom of considering the deck of a naval ship British soil, see Royal Commission on Fugitive Slaves, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1876), xx. Details of the episode of Meara at Majunga come from Nymphe’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9548; letter of Meara to Heath 29 Oct. 1869, and letter of Madagascar Secretary of State to T.C. Pakenham 4 Apr. 1869, reprinted in Foreign Office, British and Foreign State Papers, 1869–1870, vol. 60 (London: William Ridgeway, 1876), 529–32, 543, 546–7; Royal Commission on Fugitive Slaves, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1876), 180. On the understanding between Heath’s officers that a captain sending men ashore to raid for captives could not expect the backing of the rest in case of mishap, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 208. The appearance of the approach to the fort comes from Colomb, who visited only months after Meara: Slave-catching, 327–28. For the timing of Nymphe’s arrival in this tense atmosphere see her log from this period, National Archives ADM 53/9548.
