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.