Meara, Heath, Sulivan and Colomb before their convergence
THIS STORY BEGINS when the men who eventually changed everything on the east coast of Africa were learning their trade as slaver-fighters on the west coast amid anguish and devastation.
Edward Meara’s childhood was as genteel as his years at sea were violent. He was born into wealth on a leaf-green estate but as a third son was unlikely to inherit. For boys in such a position this left two typical career paths: church or military. The Royal Navy was largely officered by well-born men, for there was a centuries-old belief that they possessed a special aptitude for command and that sailors preferred to sail under high-born officers.
Two things from Edward Meara’s past combined to shape his actions in the fight against slavery on the east coast when he joined the squadron to captain the Nymphe. One was a kind of impatience and high-handedness that might have been bred of privilege; perhaps a sense, too, that his station and welfare were secured by fortune and not by the good opinion of the Admiralty. The other was a history of dealing directly and violently with slavers earlier in his career. Both seemed to contribute to brute action. In the coming months, it would become clear that he also simply had an uncomplicated view of the just way to respond to the slave trade.
His story starts in County Waterford, Ireland, in the 1830s. On the banks of the wide Suir River below Waterford, not two miles from the sea, stood the genteel Georgian estate, May Park. Its master, George Meara, was the factotum of the young nobleman, Lord Waterford. For his patron, Meara did the rough work of politics and business above which Lord Waterford was supposed to stand. When tenants needed evicting, enticements needed paying, even documents destroying, loyal George Meara did the job. When he was not playing the flinty right-hand man, George Meara played the squire. He hunted foxes and mused over the right quality of salt to make the best Waterford butter, while his gardener grew famous strawberries. He married a Viscount’s daughter and ascended in the rank of gentlemen.
Children began quickly to appear in the nursery of the fine house with its splendid views. First twin boys, followed by a girl. Then, in 1831, another boy baptised Edward Spencer Meara. Then, a year later, another girl. The baby girl’s delivery was the last great effort of her mother, who died shortly after giving birth.
The first-born of the twin boys would be heir to May Park, running the farms, the garden, the tree nursery and the staff. The path for the other boys was the same as for many other gentlemen’s second and third sons. The elder, William, would have a commission in the army, and Edward, after some schooling in England, would enter the brig Heroine as a midshipman at the age of eighteen. While his older brother George was being groomed, attending balls, moving in great circles, Edward was serving in the West African anti-slavery squadron and making war.1
January 1850, HMS Heroine, south of Sierra Leone, West Africa
In January 1850, Midshipman Edward Spencer Meara was on the Heroine lying off the coast of West Africa. The brig carried six guns, spanned ninety-five feet, and carried seventy souls. She was captained by Commander John Marsh, charged with hunting slave ships: American, Brazilian, Cuban and Portuguese. She lay at single anchor off the mouth of the steaming Gallinas River, a place dotted with islands, the sorts of places slavers hid their pens. They had filled slave stockades there not long ago, but in recent years the British had convinced more and more rulers on this coast to forswear dealing in slaves, including the countries bordering the Gallinas and Solyman Rivers, slow waterways that snaked deep into the African hinterland. For the rulers that expelled the foreign slave traders this meant less war-making, and the British promised to replace lost income through greater trade with Britain.
Piecemeal, in fits and starts, the traffic here was slowing. But now there was trouble, rumours of war. A people in the region, the Zaro, refused to free their slaves and give up the trade, and word had it that they meant to make war on those who submitted to the British. In this they were encouraged and helped by American and European slave traders. The Heroine was watching the shore intensely.
The long sentry duty was wearing. Supplies had recently run short and the New Year passed with the spirit room empty. A midshipman had answered the captain shortly; a young ship’s boy had died in the night. But in this still, soupy water they could not bury him in the normal way, by gently sliding him from a plank or table into the sea. The morning after his death they laid him in the dinghy, rowed a considerable distance from the ship, and only then consigned his mortal remains, wrapped in sailcloth, to the deep. Far from home, far now even from his shipmates, he sunk alone.
Then one hazy afternoon a boat pulled away from the shore, in it a man who had been stationed on shore as lookout. He came up the side with a letter for Captain Marsh. He brought certain news of war: the Zaro had indeed descended on the lands that had quit the slave-trade.
The next morning the drum beat to muster, then Edward Meara boarded the Heroine’s sailed pinnace, a small gun fitted onto it and manned by the coxswain and a few of his crew. Finally, Captain Marsh boarded behind them. As the little flotilla prepared to depart the Heroine’s side, the first lieutenant appeared, quietly steaming to be missing the action – perhaps the best chance for promotion he would ever know.
The Heroine fired a gun to alert the lookout on shore that they were coming, and the men pulled, and the pulling was hard. There was a steady north-east wind almost directly in their faces, and sandy shoals near the river’s mouth hindered even the shallow-bottomed pinnace. Finally on shore, they found the lookout and interpreter. He in turn took Captain Marsh and his men to a war council with several princes of the coast and river lands, where they learned that the Zaro had seized the town of Juring, a place about six hours up the river by canoe. So John Marsh and the princes drew up plans for driving the Zaro out of these lands. Plans laid, Marsh had a signal sent to the Heroine: he wanted his marines. They and a small group of trusted sailors arrived on the beach by that evening and the collected men made camp for the night.
At sunrise, Edward Meara and the war party departed. Red-coated marines, blue-coated officers and able-seamen in a fleet of boats, several leaders of the countries lying on the Gallinas and Solyman in their own long war canoes. Around them, their men-at-arms in more canoes. Midshipman Meara was in the pinnace, and his men pulled more easily now against the slow, wide rivers. Shortly after the sun began its descent in the sky the company reached the town of Juring. All was quiet and unmoving as the sailors and marines got out of the boats. They explored, finding the stockade walls undefended. There was evidence that goods and supplies and people had been borne away. The Zaro, it seemed, had heard of the boats’ approach well before they had arrived.
Commander Marsh called a council and the princes gathered around to plan their next move. Then there was a noise and a man appeared from the edge of the town, running towards them. Quickly it was apparent that he was no threat and he yielded himself. He was, he explained, a slave escaped from the Zaro. Those people, he said, had taken another town three miles upriver called Siman, and he had heard them discussing their next target, yet another town above that one.
The company acted quickly, re-boarding and pulling fast for Siman. They were not too late this time. The boats were greeted by musket-fire coming from a stockade fort close by the river. Not only musket fire: the enemy had a small gun of their own. The captain’s coxswain and gig’s crew began working the pinnace’s gun while Midshipman Meara and Lieutenant Corneck coordinated the pinnace’s crew. Meanwhile the marines returned the stockade’s fire and the defenders started falling. One. Several. Five. But none of the Royal Navy sailors or allied West Africans had been struck down. In time, smoke poured from the stockade. Then smoke and licking flame appeared in the town behind it.
The Zaro men inside began to abandon the burning fort, many moving for cover in the scrub along the river. Still the pinnace’s small gun fired on. Now the men loaded it with grapeshot and spattered the river’s edge with iron balls. Again it was loaded with the cluster of iron grapes; again came the shower of metal and dust. Now the sailors loaded it with a tin case packed with smaller musket balls; again the blast. Round after round after round. On top of that, hundreds upon hundreds of musket and pistol shots. Lead and iron sowed – death and dying reaped – along the river bank.
Finally, enemy fire was silenced, the Zaro fighters obliterated. John Marsh and his men did not bother to count the enemy dead on that riverside. Their purpose was achieved. The captain, fearing miasma, wanted to get his men away from the dead and from the river, and so ordered his boats to return.
On the way back down to the coast the fleet stopped at a village of one of the African allies for a ceremonial meal of victory and thanksgiving, but they did not stay long. The Royal Navy men re-boarded, descended to the coast, and made camp on the beach above the waves. And Midshipman Meara – who would receive a commendation from his commodore for his role in the attack – was back on the Heroine the next afternoon.2
HMS Niger, November 1851, off Lagos, slave coast of West Africa
Less than a year after Edward Meara’s first immersion in the sweat and blood of the slave trade fight on the west coast of Africa, the Royal Navy struck at that coast’s most powerful slaver king. But the action was a debacle, improvised on the run, with marines and sailors storming a beach and fortified town in the face of iron and lead. Leading the charge up the beach was Commander Leopold Heath. The confused nightmare that he lived that day may have instilled in him his powerful inclination towards careful planning and tactics. The cost of extemporisation that day was paid in men’s lives.
The son of a wealthy judge, the thirty-four-year-old Heath was broad-shouldered and large-fisted, but the impression of brawn was moderated by the roundness of his face. He looked precisely like the keeper of a pub in a suspect part of a town, with shoulders and hands that could shift barrels with ease, or pummel the unruly. His face might be genial so long as the clientele behaved; otherwise it might become coldly fierce with only a slight shift. Heath had risen quickly, and his first command was a plum commission for a new commander. She would have been suitable for a post-captain’s command, with fourteen guns throwing 32-pound shot, a great twelve-foot screw that could drive her at ten knots, a crew of 160, and only a few years old when Commander Leopold Heath had led her from Portsmouth.
Leopold Heath, photographed at the end of his career, after having been made Rear Admiral, 1871
Leopold Heath and HMS Niger were summoned to Lagos from their patrolling grounds to the west on the slave coast. On arriving off Lagos, Heath saw several men-of-war huddled, the brigs Harlequin and Waterwitch, and the iron paddle gunboat Bloodhound. The fast-looking brig Philomel was there too, and a signal soon ordered Heath to appear on her.
There he met the other commanders and the coast’s consul, John Beecroft, about sixty years old, grey-whiskered, with long experience in West Africa. There was something hard and uncompromising in his face. A council began, and Beecroft reported that the government in London had lost patience with Lagos and its slaver-king, Kosoko. London had had its diplomatic approaches rebuffed, and the British community and liberated Africans in the region had been threatened. London viewed Kosoko as one of the last great hindrances to the end of the slave trade on the west coast, and had ordered John Beecroft to try to make a treaty with Lagos for the suppression of the trade. The consul should strongly hint that Britain would otherwise support Kosoko’s dynastic rival and see him deposed.
So Beecroft asked the collected officers to put him ashore under a white flag – but supported by a large flotilla of boats for his protection. A show of force, but not an attack. Beecroft said that he knew the character of such African chiefs. All they needed was a show of British power to come to terms quickly. The senior officer of the gathered ships deferred to the Crown’s representative, and preparations began to cross to Lagos at sunrise.
Back on his ship, Heath gave orders for Niger’s contribution to the flotilla. Lagos was a dangerous place, many of its people experienced in war-making, an army of some thousands, well-armed with good muskets provided by Portuguese and Brazilian slave agents. The town overlooked a river and extensive lagoon and had a navy of war-canoes with which it commanded the network of lagoons and rivers in the area. The town itself was protected by scores of guns. Not many years past, its approaches had been hung with severed heads.
Well before dawn, Heath issued orders to Niger’s senior officers. He would go with six boats – two gigs, three cutters and a twelve-oared pinnace. He would bring eight of his officers, fifty-one sailors and sixteen marines. In the dark, Heath climbed down into his gig with his boat’s crew, the master’s assistant and a marine. His boats pulled off to join those of the other collected ships. The black iron Bloodhound would tow the flotilla as close to shore as she could. Twenty-two boats, including a Krooman canoe, gathered; over three hundred men. Consul Beecroft was indeed bringing a show of force behind that white flag.
At six o’clock in the morning the group moved across the short distance of sea for the entrance to Lagos. First was a small gig with the consul in it, flying a very broad white flag. Then came the black iron paddler, flying its own white flag. The boat fleet trailed behind her. As they entered the river road for Lagos and came around a bend, shots cracked from the right bank. The flotilla was still several miles from the town and Heath could not be sure whether this was the beginning of an ambush or a group acting on their own. The muskets were out of range for now, in any case.
The senior captain in the group ordered the two flags of truce to be kept flying and carried on steadily, though fire from the bank increased. Now it seemed less likely to be the result of men acting alone. Bloodhound, which was towing the boats, plunged into mud, wallowing and coming to a stop. Musket balls were falling around the boats. Then crashes sounded from the direction of the town a mile away. Lagos had opened fire with cannon on the white flag of truce.
The British hauled down the white flag. This was no longer a diplomatic mission. Then, from a point where muskets were firing on the riverbank, several war canoes pulled away from the shore. It seemed they would cross to the other side of the river and trap the British flotilla in crossfire, so a group of British boats moved away to head them off. There were small cannon mounted on some of these, including some of Heath’s, and they began hurling shrapnel at the enemy.
Bloodhound remained stuck in the river’s ooze and could not bring its long gun or two carronades to bear. From a distance, beyond the surf, the Niger’s guns occasionally popped, but they could not reach those of Lagos. One choice was for the boats to retreat to sea, leaving the Bloodhound to defend itself until the tide lifted it or it could be towed off. Another was to push forward to the town and attack, perhaps silencing the guns there. After an hour of exchanging fire with the forces on the riverbank and sustaining fire from the town, the senior captain ordered a landing. Some of the boats would cover the debarkation while about 175 men landed under the town.
Heath and his men would lead the attack. His boat crews pulled into constant musket fire, and he estimated that five large guns from above in the town were also targeting them. Heath could see that the defenders were organised and well-positioned. They never intended to receive a diplomatic visit, they were prepared for an assault, probably reacting to the aggressive appearance of the flotilla. And the men defending the beach were not shrinking. Leopold Heath could see their resolve and the long stretch was stubbornly defended. They fired with skill, too. But still Heath’s boat and the others drove on into the waiting onslaught.
Heath leapt as the gig touched sand, his feet among the first on the shore, his men leaping out behind him. The other boats touched and the marines and sailors poured out of them. The two young mates of the Niger hurried to his side to lead with him. The first houses of the town were not far from the river, and there were some low stone walls. He and his men were utterly exposed on the beach. There could be no slowing, no stopping. Heath ran and his men ran.
Somehow, Leopold Heath survived the desperate crossing to the first stone buildings, but still he and his boats’ crews were exposed to fire. Somewhere a swivel gun, more than one, was pounding at them with small shot. Onward into the town they had to go to confront their attackers and perhaps silence the swivel guns and big guns. And so they plunged on.
It was a warren, a maze of alleys. As they struggled up an alley, they were shot at from intersecting streets. Henry Hall was shot at Heath’s side and lay dying or dead; John Dyer fell dead. Now the boat crews of one of the other ships had landed and were also trying to advance into the town, but they were being barraged and the boats trying to cover the landing were being pelted. A man was shot in the back. A marine’s arm was splintered by a cannon shot.
But Leopold Heath’s men were taking the brunt of the fire. At sea, a captain was aware of his enemy. Survival was a matter of wind, manoeuvre, gunnery, the response of the crew. Not all of these forces were in his control, certainly, but the fight was not this blind plunge into desperation, like being thrown into a ring blindfolded, expected to defeat five opponents who could see you and threw their punches at their discretion. They were being constantly outmanoeuvred and outflanked. The amount of incoming fire only increased as Heath and the sailors and marines pushed up. The Lagos fighters contended every intersection. Now a marine fell, and sailors John McCarthy, Bill Hall and Tom Todhunter.
Finally, having advanced no more than three hundred yards into the town at bloody cost, never finding the cannon firing on the boats, Leopold Heath decided it was enough. He could not ask the men to fight further. There was no possible tactic for success. When they managed to dislodge one of the defenders from his place, he only circled around to take up a new position. Meanwhile, Heath’s men were falling and dying: two dead and six or seven brought down. This was the cost of an improvised landing in unknown conditions.
He ordered the neighbouring houses and buildings put to the torch. The fire was punitive, but also offered some cover for their dangerous retreat. Turning and running would have meant more murder of his men, so Heath led them in a careful withdrawal. Covering for one another, they began to edge down to the beach and the waiting boats. An explosion sounded somewhere amid the flames, then another. There was not much wind so there was no spreading firestorm, but the fire seemed to be covering their backs. The survivors made it, bloodied, into the riddled boats.
As the surgeon tended to the many wounded officers, marines and sailors, Niger limped to a rendezvous with the squadron’s commodore, Henry Bruce. Bruce was furious. Consul Beecroft had practically invited the fight. The senior captain on the spot should never have agreed to the plan since a blockade would have brought King Kosoko to his knees as surely as an assault, far better. While Heath and his landers had fought bravely, they never should have been placed in that position. A consul, waving a directive from the Foreign Office, did not supernaturally transform into an experienced naval officer with experience in executing a controlled, overwhelming landing. He should never have been followed into the fiasco.3
In these years, it was difficult for abolitionists to focus the will of Britain to keep up the fight against the trade on Africa’s west coast as costs mounted, lives were claimed, and Britain’s complicity seemed to fade into the past. But in the same period there was a trade on the east coast at which Britain directed almost no will at all. That is because this trade was simply too far away, it historically involved fewer British perpetrators, and the empire had no territorial presence on that coast. Yet in the 1850s and 1860s roughly 15,000 people were forced overseas by slavers from regions today called Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya. The kidnappers themselves were sometimes Portuguese, sometimes Arab, sometimes African, but often of mixed ethnicity. The dealers who collected the victims at the coast might be any of these. Purchasers on the coast could be French or Portuguese, sometimes operating under the cover of legal fictions that called them dealers in ‘migrant labourers’ instead of slavers. Other purchasers were Arab or mixed Arab-African middlemen who carried slaves to markets in Portuguese Mozambique, Madagascar or Zanzibar. From these markets, the abductees might be forced to labour on East African island plantations growing sugar or cloves for Indian, Arab, French and occasionally English masters. They might be forced to Madagascar or all the way to the Persian Gulf to be forced labour on date plantations, slave soldiers, domestic slaves, or sexual slaves. Often those who financed the slaving operations – providing silver or trade-stuff, ships and crews – were Indians or Omanis. On a wider scale, those who underwrote the trade were those who bought the ivory that some captives were forced to carry to the coasts on their way to slave pens and the spices or produce harvested on slave labour farms.
The will to police the east coast trade had to be encouraged over the heads of those who profited from the status quo. That was hard enough, but it also had to be policed without an east coast Royal Navy station as there were on the west coast. In those moments when attention was paid to the slave trade on the Indian Ocean side, Britain had to secure treaties with coastal rulers allowing the Royal Navy to inspect ships. These were hard to come by and very limited, and the work itself had to be directed either from Bombay or the Cape – both very distant – or from the island of Zanzibar, which was itself the largest slave market on the coast.4
HMS Castor’s pinnace, November 1849, Mozambique Channel
It is on the east coast of Africa, not far from the island of Zanzibar, that young George Sulivan enters the story in 1849. Heath and Meara were gentlemen’s sons, and in the Victorian Royal Navy as in Lord Nelson’s, most of the officer class were gleaned from such men. George Sulivan had no land or title, but his name itself meant something. In their native corner of Cornwall, the Sulivan name evoked respect. George’s father had battled Frenchman, Spaniard and American in Britain’s long war with Napoleon. His grandfather had too, amassing for himself and his sailors a hoard of prize money (which he promptly spent). His brother had been a lieutenant on the Beagle under Fitzroy and was a friend of the naturalist Darwin. Cousins proliferated throughout the service.
George Sulivan
Seventeen-year-old Midshipman George Sulivan, with scores of sailors of HMS Castor, prepared to attack a slaver fort. Sulivan boarded the Castor’s sailed pinnace and twenty other men packed in, preparing for a voyage of several days. Their target was near a river-mouth island called Angoche. It was in African territory claimed by the Portuguese, but the Portuguese could not control it. The fort was held by Arab and African traders, pirates and slavers. Spanish and US slave traders had been seen visiting it disguised as whalers in order to collect captives by the hundred for sale in Brazil. The Royal Navy was acting at the request of the Portuguese, so the slaver fort and any ships there were fair game.
Loaded, five boats sailed, and by nightfall had drawn within six hours of the fort. Time to stop for the night, and the boats anchored close together at a place called Monkey Island. The lieutenant leading the expedition ordered an extra-large ration of spirits portioned out and with it a dose of quinine for every man. The boats’ crews each sang in turn, keeping it up long into the night.
At daylight the boat fleet continued for the island. After noon Sulivan saw the fort’s walls in the far distance, a red flag flying above them. The palisades overlooked a very shallow tidal inlet – the reason that these shallow-draft boats were chosen for the attack. Trees closely hemmed the bay. The boats moved on. A couple of hours passed and a tide began lifting them in toward the fort, but very slowly. Now they were only several hundred yards away. At two hundred yards the fort opened fire. There was roundshot, but also grape, masses of small iron balls meant to tear apart the human body. A sailor fell, then another, his ribs hammered in by hard metal. The boats were having trouble approaching the fort. The tide was not lifting them quickly enough, and even these shallow craft were scraping the bottom. It was like a nightmare in which one is helpless to move in the face of danger.
The fort fired on. There were more guns than the British had expected, and more men. Some fired from a dhow anchored close under the fort’s walls, while the Royal Navy boats struggled to manoeuvre. Only the crew of Sulivan’s managed to bring their single small gun to bear; they loaded it with exploding canister shot and lobbed fire over the fort’s walls. Finally, the fire from the fort beginning to slow, another boat managed to rush the dhow anchored under the fort. The sailors scaled it and attacked, and soon it was on fire. But as the men began their retreat they came under new musket fire from the nearby tree line. Two more sailors fell and had to be carried off the burning dhow.
Sulivan guessed that there were over 2,000 defenders of the place while the attackers were fewer than 100. There was little doubt that there were enslaved Africans penned nearby the fort, collected for the next American or Brazilian customer, but there was no hope for them. The small gun on Sulivan’s boat was working some vengeance, but what would it mean to the Mozambicans in the slave pens? Now the tide was receding; the boats would ground if the flotilla did not abandon the attack and retreat from the inlet soon. And so they did, bleeding and tending their wounded.
Some months after the raid a letter arrived at the Cape for Midshipman Sulivan. It was from his mother; whose father, grandfather, husband and two sons were Royal Navy officers. I think of you a great deal in that place, she wrote. I don’t like your going up rivers after slavers. You know a little makes me anxious, although my trust for all things that concern my children is fixed on God.5
HMS Phoenix, Cape Desolation, south-west Greenland, May 1854
Philip Colomb began his navy career as a fifteen-year-old in HMS Sidon serving in the Mediterranean. He was born in Scotland, his father a successful general and his mother the daughter of a baronet, twice Lord Mayor of Dublin. Colomb entered the navy already a midshipman like Heath, Meara and Sulivan. As a fifteen-year-old he had been thrust above veteran able-bodied seamen who had sailed the world over and fought Napoleon’s navy before Colomb was born. But at the same time Colomb was on the receiving end of his lieutenant’s thrashings, ordered to stand double watches on the precarious bitt in the ship’s bow, or atop the paddles’ box, or to have precious shore leave denied.
Five years later, twenty-three-year-old Philip Colomb found himself mate of HMS Phoenix. ‘Mate’ was a sort of in-between rank. He had passed out of the ranks of the midshipmen not two years before, but was not yet a lieutenant; no longer a ‘young gentleman’, not yet a commanding figure. Still, he had responsibility for a watch and sometimes commanded the quarterdeck.
The Phoenix was near the Arctic Circle on a mission to find explorer Captain Edward Belcher. Belcher, in turn, was on a mission to rescue the famous Sir John Franklin whose last quest to find the Northwest Passage, it was known, had met with disaster. Belcher had searched for almost two years with no luck. His time was up, and Phoenix was sent for him. The Admiralty decided that quite enough sailors had died on the ice.
The Admiralty sent an experienced arctic surveyor, Edward Augustus Inglefield, and his old workhorse of a ship, Phoenix: 174 feet, 10 guns, 135 souls, and quite modest speed under steam. Inglefield was a capable captain, lettered and conscientious about guiding his young officers in character. An eager photographer and painter, he relished observing these hard landscapes. He photographed the deeply cleft inlets and ice-scapes, getting indifferent Inuit to stand still long enough for successful exposures.
By inclination, Colomb was not one to share his captain’s interest in the sublime. Fantastic peaks, he reflected, and gracefully-shaped icebergs are few. The ordinary Arctic scene is dull and monotonous. At this moment as he headed to take the watch the sea was shrouded in fog. Phoenix had a transport in company for picking up Belcher’s crew in case they were wrecked or ice-bound, but the transport was out of sight in this fog. The Phoenix had to fire a gun on occasion to show her position and encourage the transport to stay close.
On Phoenix’s mission with Colomb was Lieutenant Edward Spencer Meara. Sometimes Colomb would relieve Meara from his watch in the wet, 40-degree subarctic air. It was not the last time Colomb would lend Meara a hand. In the subtropical waters off East Africa Colomb would one day try to extricate Meara from a tangle.6
Three of the captains in this story were veterans of the fight against slavers; the fourth, Philip Colomb, was not. But he had a reputation as a tactical thinker. It was a distinction Leopold Heath knew well; as commodore, Heath had an idea about how to utilise Colomb’s tactician’s brain in his anti-slavery campaign.
HMS Defence, English Channel, July 1863
Advance the clock nine years to 1863, and Lieutenant Philip Colomb could be found on the weather deck of the colossal ironclad Defence in the English Channel. The lieutenant had just fifteen minutes to teach two signalmen how to use a machine they had never seen before. The device before them was on trial on this July day. It looked something like an organ grinder’s machine, a kind of hurdy-gurdy with a barrel organ cylinder and crank. A long arm extended upwards from this and at the top was a lantern with a shutter covering it.
It was a signalling machine, and Colomb quickly showed the two men how to input a number into it. The number corresponded to a phrase – the sorts of phrases flags had communicated between Royal Navy ships for centuries – Enemy in sight. Cease firing. Require assistance. Colomb showed the men how they might also input Morse code into the machine. Then he cranked the wheel. Whatever the rate of cranking, the machine lifted and lowered the shade atop the lantern with perfect regularity. Short-long, long-short-short-short, long-short-long-short. Flags had served the Royal Navy for centuries, but at night they had never much served at all.
The road to this day and this trial had been long. The Admiralty was a famously conservative place and the word ‘innovation’ constituted an invective. Colomb’s machine was not welcomed, even called foolish, and he met many closed doors. He demonstrated it many times, but trials he thought were successes they called failures. Though just a lieutenant, Colomb wrote appeals to challenge these judgments, to ask for new trials. He wrote letters to those who opposed him, appealing to their reason. He came close to impertinence, but stayed just short of the line. But his was a forced, tenuous humility. He believed what was reasonable was right. Might, in the form of a rear admiral’s pennant, did not make right – reason did.
He might have been betrayed by a face that tended to suggest smugness. His eyebrows arched naturally, imperiously. He had the long nose common in his family and it could give the impression that he was looking down it. If his face did not suggest smugness, it suggested that he knew something amusing, maybe about you.
He was well-bred, but Lieutenant Colomb suffered from being the third son in a family that had a better name than estate. To develop his machine and keep promoting it, he had to sign away significant rights to any future earnings that it might make from selling it to the navy. He had little money. A year before, Colomb had won an important supporter. He was a captain who had seen the Russians put flashing signal lights to good – or ill – use at the Crimea. This man had made a name for himself as a capable organiser when he took responsibility for landings near Sebastopol. He was Captain Leopold Heath. Perhaps Heath’s endorsement had helped Colomb get this latest trial.
Colomb quickly finished his tutorial to the signalmen, then the trial began. The rear admiral of the Channel fleet stood by. A distant ship received and responded to the signal with ease; it was a clear success. By the end of 1863 the Channel fleet had adopted the system, and Philip Colomb was promoted to commander.7