by John Broich
5 Details from the select committee hearing come from House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1871 (420) Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade (East Coast of Africa), 249–58. Data about the eventual successful attack on Lagos comes from House of Commons, Accounts and Papers, Consuls; Slave Trade (47, part 1) vol. 103 (Nov. 1852-Aug. 1853), 309–18. For Heath and Rothery exchanging insults through their letters and reports Raymond Howell, who relates this exchange in his Royal Navy and the Slave Trade, 62–3. Henry Rothery’s testimony comes from pp. 60–3 of the report cited above.
6 Philip Colomb’s interview before the committee is at House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1871 (420) Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade (East Coast of Africa), 81–5.
20. ‘May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!’
1 Edward Meara and the widow Ellen Renshaw were married at Piccadilly on 12 May 1870. Pall Mall Gazette 14 May 1870, 5. Per his service record he arrived in England on 14 April; National Archives ADM 196/13. On the birth of Ida Meara at Clarence House, Cheltenham Looker-On, Saturday 22 July 1871, 10. The Mearas lived in Clarence House, Promenade (on Imperial Square), Cheltenham. The house still stands. Details of the house staff come from the 1871 census. For Edward and Ellen Meara travelling to Bath, Cheltenham Looker-On, 8 Apr. 1871, 218. For a trip to the seaside, Cheltenham Looker-On, 6 Aug. 1870, 506. For patronising charities, Cheltenham Looker-On, 24 Sept. 1870, 611. For attending balls, Cheltenham Looker-On, 9 Dec. 1871, 716. On the order to refund £933 for a prize judged not be a slaver, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 July 1871, 9. For the text of Meara’s letter to the Admiralty written in Clarence House, see Edward Meara to Secretary of the Admiralty, 27 July 1870 in Foreign Office, British and Foreign State Papers, 1870–1871 (London: William Ridgeway, 1877), 360–1. Edward Meara retired as part of an initiative to ‘buy out’ executive officers on the Navy List who had little prospect of promotion given the crowding on the list but were drawing half-pay, which was expensive to the state. Meara was promoted to Captain and retired to draw his pension from 1873. See Morning Post, 5 Mar. 1875, 7 which suggests that Meara took an active interest in this new program.
2 The 1871 Census nicely places George Sulivan in the modest house 12 St Peter’s Road, Mylor parish, Flushing, along with the other inhabitants and servants in the house. Google street view provides the view, along with Hugh P. Olivey, Notes on the Parish of Mylor, Cornwall (Taunton: Barnicott and Pearce, 1907), 3. The layout of the house and garden are briefly described in Henry Norton Sulivan, Life and Letters of the Late Admiral Sir Bartholomew James Sulivan, 6. Details about Henrietta and others in the family come from there: pp. vii-viii, 394, 416 and elsewhere. Details about Henrietta’s advice on observing the Sabbath come from her serial letter to George Sulivan, Sulivan papers held by the Hodson family, 28 Nov. 1849. The Bartholomew James book cited above makes his strict Sabbath observance clear too; p. xxxi. Data on Thomas Ball Sulivan comes from the Dictionary of National Biography 55, (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1898), 157. The detail about the Sulivan name being a ticket to respect and kindness in Cornwall comes from Henrietta Sulivan to George Sulivan, 10 Aug. (no year given), in the Sulivan papers held by the Hodson family. Details about George Sulivan’s great naval family come from Bartholomew James, Journal of Rear-Admiral Bartholomew James, ix. For the Foreign Office’s official pique toward Sulivan, see the Admiralty letter conveying the news in Secretary of the Admiralty to Leopold Heath, 7 June 1870, in Slave Trade Records of the East Indian Station, National Archives ADM 127/40.
3 For Colomb’s speech and answers to questions on this occasion at the Untied Service Club, see Journal of the Royal United Services Institution 16 (1873), 455. For a newspaper interpretation of the meaning of the 1871 Select Committee’s report, see Morning Post, 12 Aug. 1871, 6. There are many examples of the issue being actively kept in the public eye before Henry Bartle Frere’s mission of 1873. For some, see Henry Bartle Frere and George Sulivan’s friend Horace Waller’s campaigning among Evangelicals and Quakers in Anti-Slavery Reporter 18 (Mar. 1872), 9–10, 46–60. Lieutenant William Henn was called ‘effervescent’ by Stanley, ‘energetic’ by Sulivan. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 251. Even after the Select Committee of 1871 called for decisive change, the wheels of parliament and government moved slowly while a certain consensus was formed, public pressure rose, and Gladstone’s government landed on specific course of action led by specific personnel. See, for an example of parliament continuing to talk about the right time and type of action, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 23 July 1872 (vol. 212), cc 1608–20, in which some members push for action sooner, others later.
4 Heath was promoted admiral in late 1871. For one of several examples of Heath presiding at a shareholders’ meeting, see Western Times, 13 Feb. 1872, 8. For Heath at a royal levee, London Standard, 15 Mar. 1872, 3. I am grateful to Mr. J.J. Heath-Caldwell for the invaluable service of transcribing the diary of Leopold Heath’s son, Arthur Raymond Heath. This provides an invaluable glimpse of Leopold Heath as father. It details his frequent trips to London, daily activities, his patience with his children, even the talk about selfishness as the fundamental human motivation that seemed, given the context in the diary, to be motivated by Arthur’s exposure to the ideas of Herbert Spencer. I am grateful for his transcription of Mary Emma Heath’s diary, as well, which provides hints of her fondness for Leopold and reveals that Arthur was called ‘Artie’ in the house. The diaries are available online at http://www.jjhc.info. From Arthur’s diary, I draw from entries including, but not limited to, 13 Jan., 29 Jan., 2 Feb., 11 Feb., 14 Feb., 26 Feb., and 5 Mar. 1873. For the news reporting the Bartle Frere mission’s progress see, just for one example, Hampshire Telegraph, 1 Feb. 1873, 10. See also R.J. Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere Expedition to Zanzibar’, 122–48. And for the discouraging reports in the newspapers at this particular moment, see Liverpool Mercury, 18 Feb. 1873, 6. For Leopold Heath’s ongoing public work against the East African slave trade, see Morning Post, 13 May 1874, 6. The Frere mission to Zanzibar was a topic of the Queen’s New Year speech in 1872. Other details for this section, including the fact that he was approached to join parliament and the Board of Admiralty, plus his motivations for retiring, come from Heath’s own hand transcribed in his nephew George Heath’s Records of the Heath Family (published privately), 1913. Rumours of the possibility of running for parliament to serve at the Admiralty come from Hampshire Telegraph, 1 May 1872, 2. For Heath becoming a board member for the Devon and Cornwall railway company, see Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 10 Feb. 1872, 2. Arthur Heath’s diary hints that his father was motivated by the unwillingness to be away and his new City interests.
5 The members of the squadron that had written publicly included Lieutenant Challice, with his article, ‘In Pursuit of Slavers’, Dark Blue, 4 (1872): 303–7 and a letter to the editor of The Times, 14 Nov. 1872, 5. Challice also contributed the pamphlet, Remarks on the Scheme for the More Effectual Suppression of the Slave Trade (London: J. Wingfield, 1869). Lieutenant William Henn had contributed drawings including one of the Zanzibar slave market to the Illustrated London News, 8 June 1872, 1. Sulivan’s own photographs of refugees from slavery on board Daphne were published in The Graphic, 8 Mar. 1873, 168. It is certain that Sulivan followed some of this activity from clippings found in his personal papers preserved by the Hodson family, e.g. The Times, 2 Nov. 1872, 4. This letter was written by an officer recently on the station, probably from Daphne, Nymphe, or Dryad given the author’s awareness of the Mozambique Channel trade. The letter also condemns the Indian government’s complicity or at least lack of concern over the trade. Sulivan had also made a clipping of a report on a meeting at Mansion House, London, attended by some very influential politicians and activists. This was probably the 4 Nov. 1872 meeting, though that detail is not included in the clipping. The information that Sulivan wrote his book in order, at least in part, to instruct Sir Henry Bartle Frere and his mission comes from Sulivan to the Secretary of the Admiral
ty, no date, but around 1872, in the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family. The mission to Zanzibar consisted of Sir Henry Bartle Frere, Reverend G.P. Badger, Mr Clement Hill of the Foreign Office, Captain Charles Jago, R.N. (later Captain Fairfax), Charles Ewan Smith, Frere’s secretary, Charles Grey, and Frere’s son B.C.A. Frere. See John Martineau, The Life and Correspondence of Sir Bartle Frere, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1895), 70–106. This account, based almost entirely on Frere’s letters, describes his negotiations at Zanzibar, the intrigues of the French there, a trip to Majunga where Meara had had his intense stand-off, and reveals Frere’s awareness of Portuguese complicity in the trade from Mozambique. This rare book is digitised and available to read online.
6 Hawarden Castle in Flintshire became Gladstone’s through his wife. The Foreign Secretary to whom Gladstone wrote was Granville Leveson-Gower, Lord Granville, Lord Clarendon having suddenly died in his office in June 1870. For Granville and the ‘Anti Slave Trade people’, see Granville to Gladstone, 16 Sept. 1872, in Agatha Ramm, ed., The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1868–1876, II (London: Royal Historical Society, 1952), 347. Granville’s word for Kinnaird was ‘officious’, in Granville to Gladstone, 19 Nov. 1872, Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 364. For the Queen’s speech mentioning the East African slave trade, see Quarterly Review 133, Oct. 1872, 522. For the cabinet bowing to pressure, see R.J. Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere Mission to Zanzibar’, Historical Journal 5 (1962), 136–41. See also Huzzey, ‘Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade’, 253–66, and Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, 363–83. Gladstone’s term ‘negrophilists’ comes from this article as does his view that Africans were a ‘lower race’ and of ‘lower capacity’, pp. 377–9, as does Quinault’s conclusion that Gladstone viewed abolitionists with ‘distaste’, also p. 377. For Sir Henry appeasing the abolitionists, see Granville to Gladstone, 19 Nov. 1872, cited above. For Gladstone’s concerns about the use of force and his interest in whether a means for enslaved Africans to be borne from the coast to Zanzibar could be preserved, see Gladstone to Granville, 7 Nov. 1872, in The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 359.
7 Doulton nicely covers the way Colomb’s and Sulivan’s books were reviewed by a wide variety of periodicals in ‘Royal Navy’s Anti-Slavery Campaign’, 274–7: The Athenaeum, 3 May 1873, 560; also 17 May 1873, 624–5; British Quarterly Review, 58, July 1873, 224; The Examiner, 7 June 1873, 595; Illustrated Review, 8 May 1873, 489, and Apr. 1873, 437–8; London Journal, 25 Jan. 1873, 56. For the abolitionist press: Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1873, 154; Christian Missionary Intelligencer, June 1873, 177–88, 186, 181; English Churchman, 3 July 1873, quoted in the Christian Missionary Intelligencer, Aug. 1873, 253. For details about the course of the Frere mission and subsequent blockade, see Howell, Royal Navy and the Slave Trade, 89–95; see also Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere Mission’, throughout. The newspaper coverage of the signing of the treaty was particularly celebratory and proud: Western Daily Press, 18 June 1873, 4; Glasgow Herald, 18 June 1873, 6; Dundee Courier, 18 June 1873, 2.
21. ‘Here is my journey’s end’
1 On the officers advising Frere to secure a guard ship at Zanzibar, see George Malcolm to Henry Bartle Frere, 24 Mar. 1873, National Archives 127/41, and Frere to Lord Granville, 4 Apr. 1873, FO 84/1391, 175–80. An image of London as headquarters at Zanzibar appears in Illustrated London News, 17 Dec. 1881, 268. George Sulivan also owned a photograph now in the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family. Henrietta Sulivan died 22 June 1873. Details of London’s arrival come from Morning Post, 7 Jan. 1875, 5. See also Howell, Royal Navy and the Slave Trade, 114–15. Details of London’s arrival in Zanzibar, Daphne’s appearance later, and other details are drawn from HMS London’s log, National Archives ADM/10589. I borrow the final sentiment from Raymond Howell, who puts it nicely: ‘Sulivan never allowed the admiralty to forget the London on its isolated station.’ The ongoing work of Daphne after Sulivan’s return to England is documented in the Scottish National Archives, Journal of Commander J.M. Hope, GD 364/2/115. This is an excellent source but proved beyond the scope of this book.
2 The final scene is drawn from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 32–3. And the ‘still, small voice’ that Sulivan recalled is from 1 Kings 19: 11–12.
3 In the five years after its arrival, the boats of the London removed around one thousand abductees from slave ships, whether on the open sea or up rivers. Reports on the slaver interception are documented in the ‘returns’ listed in National Archives, Slave Trade Advisor Report Books, HCA 35/82–6. Howell’s Royal Navy and the Slave Trade is excellent on the period after the signing of the Frere treaty with Barghash, ch. 5 and elsewhere. And see Christopher Lloyd’s The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cass, 1968), 269 and elsewhere. The key recent scholarly monographs on the Indian Ocean slave trade come from scholars William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1989), Gwyn Campbell, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge 2003), and Deryck Scarr, Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean (London: Palgrave 2002).
INDEX
abolitionism 4, 7, 23, 32, 33, 194, 196, 220, 221, 236, 237, 246, 249, 251
Abyssinia (historic name for present-day Eritrea) 37, 227
Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807 6, 184
Aden 44, 52, 83, 85, 86, 105, 119, 143, 144, 145, 151, 153, 164, 188, 198, 237, 252
Admiralty 27, 29, 37, 39, 54, 71, 153, 184, 185, 186, 188, 208, 217, 219, 220, 230
Afghanistan 85, 149
Aitchison, Charles 85
Alabama, CSS 39, 249
alcoholism 100–1, 118
Ali (see “interpreters”)
Amazon class 39, 82
Aminha 1, 4, 131
Angoche 25, 124, 159
Annesley Bay 34, 37, 43, 44
Anstie Grange 247
Antananarivo 97
Anti-Slavery Reporter 235
Anti-Slavery Society 5, 230
apprenticeship 196–7
Arabian Peninsula 44, 46, 52, 111, 117, 125, 143
Arabian Sea 5, 31, 47, 54, 72, 219, 225
Arabic 49, 115, 124, 168, 226
Arabs 46, 64, 158, 194, 201, 233
Arctic 27–8
Articles of War 41, 60, 102
Ascension Island 42
baghlah 69
Bahrain 228
Bakaat 2, 131
Baltic Sea 219
Baluchis 50
Barghash (see “Said, Sultan Barghash bin”)
Basra 162
Beecroft, Consul John 19–20, 23
Belcher, Admiral Sir Edward 27–8
Black Sea 34, 203
blockade 7, 23, 36, 72, 236, 252
Bloodhound, HMS 19–21
Bombay (historic name of present-day Mumbai) 5, 8, 24, 35, 36, 38, 43, 46, 47, 55, 72, 83, 84–5, 87–8, 90, 144, 149, 151, 152, 153, 161, 162, 165, 193, 202, 215–7, 225, 251, 252
bounties 105, 110, 185, 201
Brazil 14, 19, 25, 26, 32, 54, 55, 155
Breen, William 74, 76, 160
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 5
Briton, HMS 256
Brooke, Gerard 180
Bruce, Admiral Sir Henry 23
Bull, John 42, 45
Burma 149
Bushire, Persia 161
Calcutta (historic name for present-day Kolkata) 36, 85, 149, 150, 161
Cambridge, HMS 40
Cape of Good Hope 191
Cape St. Andrew 169, 170
Cape Town 42, 105, 153
capitalism 3, 185, 262
Caribbean 33, 155, 196
Castor, HMS 155, 168, 217, 255–6
Cavendish, Lord George Henry 237, 238
Ceylon (historic name for present-day Sri Lanka) 115, 162–3, 164, 226
Cheltenha
m, England 243–4
China 32, 40, 88, 115, 149, 224, 225
cholera 224
Christianity 32, 33, 61, 62, 66, 107, 123, 129, 182, 206, 236, 244
Christian Observer 233
Churchill, Consul Henry 51–2, 88–90, 145, 153, 164, 193, 249, 252
Church Missionary Society 257
Civil War, U.S. 4, 5, 33, 40, 249
Clarendon, George Villiers, Earl of 217–20, 221
Clarke, Norman 92, 107–8, 126–8, 144, 200–1, 207
cloves 23, 46, 47, 48, 87, 205, 225
coal 85, 106, 143, 172, 187, 202
Cockburn, 8th Baronet, Admiral Sir George 245
coconut 5
Coffee, Ben 141
Colomb, Cdr Philip.
career background 28, 52–5; family 27; promotion 30; signals research 28–30; views on race 6, 33, 124, 177–8, 212
