The commodore’s resolution and the journey of the Daphne
WHY DID MEARA, Heath, Sulivan and Colomb launch their unprecedented attack on the East African slave trade from 1868? First and foremost, because Leopold Heath as the squadron’s commodore determined to do it. Heath’s Royal Navy superiors and political overseers gave him no special order to do this. Policing piracy and slavery in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea was one item in his station’s portfolio of roles. But he smashed precedent in the focus and scale of power he committed to fighting the slave trade.
As Heath was resolving in his mind to launch his campaign in 1868, he was unwittingly sailing into a whirlwind of contending forces and philosophies swirling around the question of slavery, race, economic dogma and the role of government. The commodore formed his decision in the context of a culture that predominantly deemed slavery repugnant on many grounds; expressing support for the institution itself was no longer a publicly acceptable stance, as it had been when parliament had debated the question of eliminating it throughout the empire in the 1820s and early 1830s. An 1833 Act eliminated the status of slavery in the empire from 1834 (1835 on Mauritius and later in other East India Company territory). Of course, it had taken a ruinous war in the USA to settle the question of the validity of slavery there. Meanwhile, in many states and kingdoms across the globe, slavery remained after America’s Civil War: in Brazil, China, Cuba, Madagascar, the Portuguese colonies, many parts of West and East Africa, Persia and Gulf principalities, Zanzibar and its East African footholds, and elsewhere.
But if the basic consensus against slavery in Britain was certain in 1868, what to do about slavery and the trade outside the empire was not at all. There were all kinds of opinions about the extent and limits of British action, about what actions exactly to take. The same abolitionist groups that won success in the empire worked to focus attention on the East African trade in the 1850s and 1860s, but they often failed. And working against their arguments for action were powerful currents in British politics pushing for fewer international commitments and less government spending – including on the Royal Navy.
Related to this were those who believed that free trade – a watchword of the age – would eventually end the slave trade on Africa’s east coast. In their vision, British and Indian merchants would spread throughout African ports and, by trading for raw resources other than black ivory, slowly but surely re-orient African markets away from trading in the enslaved.
Among others, the influential Scottish missionary David Livingstone encouraged this solution. An agent of the London Missionary Society, directed to convert the natives around a small outpost in East Africa as a young man, Livingstone decided that he could better spread Christianity and abolish slavery by being an explorer. By exploring, he could encourage the trade that ultimately, he believed, would meet his goals. In the 1850s and 1860s he became a household name as a pioneer and adventurer. The British public lost contact with him in the late 1860s and he was feared dead. When reliable news reached Leopold Heath at Zanzibar that he was alive in 1869, and when Henry Stanley subsequently sought him out in 1871, it helped refocus attention on East Africa and the slave trade there. Newspapers printed new tales from Livingstone describing the warfare, famine and depopulation that went hand-in-hand with slave trading. But Livingstone and his allies still looked to Christianity and commerce for an eventual solution.
Related to arguments against actively pushing for emancipation and in favour of the power of market forces were popular ideas about race. These held that ‘the negroes’ were lazy, naturally servile, and possessed no innate desire for freedom. If you gave them freedom, they would only use it to refuse to work. Forcing freedom on such people, the argument went, was hardly good for the African at all. In the Caribbean, after parliament abolished the institution, formerly enslaved people were forced to be unpaid ‘apprentices’ for a further four years on the theory that an imagined black race was innately apathetic and needed to be taught habits of work once the slave-driver disappeared.
This was a line of race thinking represented on Heath’s squadron by Philip Colomb, but these opinions were not shared by all. Others, like George Sulivan, rejected such theories, thinking in terms common from Wilberforce to Harriet Beecher Stowe: that Africans were more like Europeans than not, and were as worthy of freedom as any European. Public ideas of race and slavery were mixed: Dickens could write about Africans being little superior to animals, yet write, ‘still they must be free’. Anthony Trollope could write that ‘God for his own purposes … has created men of inferior and superior race’ while nevertheless arguing in 1860 that ‘if we can assist in driving slavery from the earth, in God’s name let us still be doing’. On the other hand, some pointed to the recent American Civil War as the bloody price of ‘human-equality fanaticism’ and ‘abolition mania’. Yet others criticised the tremendous national expense of suppressing other countries’ slave-trading at the behest of naïve abolitionists.
With regard to the east coast slave trade, about which public and official Britain knew less than the west coast trade, some argued in the 1860s that expense should be spared because there, as opposed to the West Indies or Americas, ‘slavery was of a domestic character’. One MP said, ‘We have already done enough, and having carried out a great measure of justice at a cost of £20,000,000 … I think we should abandon the Quixotic idea of constituting ourselves the knights-errant of the sea at a time when non-intervention was the order of the day.’
As Heath was resolving in his mind to launch his campaign, he was unwittingly sailing into a storm of contending political forces. There was a slavery suppression bureaucracy in London, including corners of the Foreign Office, Treasury and Admiralty. Further, there was the government of India, the consular and diplomatic framework throughout the Indian Ocean and Arabia, and Downing Street. All of these Heath threatened to disrupt with his sudden departure from the status quo.1
Annesley Bay, Red Sea, January 1868
To find Leopold Heath in the moments when he decided to launch his campaign against the slave trade, advance the calendar seventeen years from the time when a younger Heath retreated from the slave fortress of Lagos through smoke and blood, past years fighting the Russians in the Black Sea, patrolling the English Channel, and teaching gunnery, and go to Annesley Bay in Abyssinia (today’s Eritrea and Ethiopia), north-east Africa, in 1868.
Commodore Heath had charge of a massive landing. He stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Octavia, his broad blue pennant flying above on the mizzenmast. On board was Sir Robert Napier, a lieutenant general of long experience in Indian campaigning. Napier had a sweeping moustache and a permanent squint as if etched by the Indian sun. Heath was thickly built without being fat, and had penetrating eyes set in a straight line. Napier wore bright red, Heath dark blue. Standing on deck, Heath and the other officers could see white tents on a plain reflecting the intense sun, the advance force. There were some red coats moving about and an English flag flying. A wharf was under construction.
Annesley Bay opened onto the Red Sea at the north. Coral islands at the mouth tamped down waves blown by the perennial northern winds. The easy seas would aid Heath in his unloading. But the coral islands, narrow opening of the bay and shallow waters presented a challenge.
The British government had determined to remove the king of Abyssinia, and it was Heath’s duty, being in charge of the Royal Navy’s Indian Ocean fleet, to put the men on the ground who would remove that king. Heath was to move over ten thousand men, thousands of horses and mules, hundreds of guns, and uncounted tons of material from Bombay to the Red Sea. He had personal charge of over two hundred ships, including a hospital ship and a factory ship. He had eleven captains to direct, had responsibility for mail communications, and, most critically, was responsible for creating water for the entire operation through some of his ships’ steam distillation systems. He carried material for building a railway. He even had twenty elephants to transport.
First, to deliver the general who would shepherd war. It was early evening and the Octavia’s crew, ordered to line the yards, scrambled up and stood high above the deck. The commodore’s barge came to the side and Sir Robert descended in state. The barge pulling away, Octavia’s guns fired a salute of fifteen blasts multiplied by echoes; from shore, the smaller sound of the field guns firing a receiving salute echoed back. Napier was welcomed by an honour guard on the new wharf. This done, Heath could begin the work of delivering war to Africa with his usual efficiency.
When Heath was a far younger officer he had organised a landing under the enemy guns of Sevastopol during the Crimean campaign. He had spoken up in a meeting of vastly superior officers and convinced them to follow his proposals for landing thousands of men and guns under the eyes of the Russians. When the moment for the attempt arrived, Heath himself was ordered to take command of one half of the beachhead. He went ashore and from there carefully directed landings at his section. Thousands of men guided, massive guns transferred from the element of water to earth, steam tugs working quickly but successfully, and all in heavy waves. Meanwhile, the Russians who were encamped not far from the landing site withdrew. The success helped make Heath’s career. It also represented everything that the disastrous Lagos attack was not: it embodied order, control and execution of a sound plan. And it was this visible order, Heath believed, that had kept the Russians from attempting anything.2
Commodore Leopold Heath was in his element again. Follow the most direct route between order and execution. Turn debris into constituent parts of a coherent whole. He understood his orders, knew to whom he was responsible, and had the ships and officers he needed to complete his work. And he succeeded: he commanded the birth of a port city in a salt marsh, orchestrated port operations on a daily basis, and directed the tasks of his station squadron.
After the force was landed, but still with many responsibilities as temporary governor of the newfound harbour, Heath turned his mind to the problem of the slave trade. Before he had departed Bombay he had already collected the records and opinions of past officers and officials on the subject of fighting the trade. Old treaties made with earlier rulers of Zanzibar and Madagascar gave the Royal Navy the authority to stop slaves from being carried across the Indian Ocean. That is, while the British could not force those rulers to halt the institution of slavery in their lands, they had made it illegal for slaves from the Zanzibar market to be borne abroad beyond Zanzibari territory and for captives to be brought from the African mainland to Madagascar. But the promise of extremely high returns on investment meant smugglers pierced the blockade north and south along the coast, sped by monsoon winds, and headed to Madagascar and sugar islands nearby.
His letters to his Admiralty superiors make it clear that Heath took for granted that fighting the slave trade was the ‘undoubted duty of England’. He made clear his deep frustration with the failure of half-hearted routine that had resulted in failure on the east coast. Yet he had no more than a half-dozen ships on his small station to perform every duty demanded by London and Calcutta in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and western Indian Ocean from Bombay to the Cape. He could not possibly stop every fleeting dhow running the blockade in every direction. In previous years efforts had been haphazard and unsustained – a state of things unacceptable to the man.
He began thinking, planning. If his assignment in charge of the East Indies station were a typical length, he would have no more than a few years to correct a generation of official apathy and incoherence. He had on Octavia a young officer who was a slaver-hunter of some experience. William Maxwell had served on HMS Lyra in Zanzibar waters and Heath interviewed him. The two spoke as they explored the sage and dust hinterlands near Annesley Bay on horseback, sometimes hearing jackals’ calls.
Heath began to envisage a kind of trap laid for the slavers running up the east coast for destinations in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Once the campaign in Abyssinia was over he would be able to test it. Finally, six months after landing, the army marched back victorious from the Abyssinian interior to another naval salute at Annesley Bay. Not long after, Octavia left the Red Sea for the Indian Ocean and the commodore’s new undertaking.3
HMS Daphne, Plymouth, June 1867
At steamy Annesley Bay Leopold Heath had with him another navy officer with experience of hunting slavers on the east coast of Africa: George Sulivan. And Commander Sulivan captained a new ship that held special promise for executing the kinds of tactics that were revolving in Heath’s mind. (Heath and others had pleaded with the Admiralty for better, faster ships for this squadron.) A year before this Sulivan had been in his ancestral country of Cornwall, where he one day found his heart’s desire in the post.
It was June 1867 when, after a few months on land on half-pay, George Sulivan received a letter from the Admiralty, a light-blue paper coveted by every commander. It was a new commission. He was to get a brand new sloop ready for sea, and was hereby required and directed to cause the utmost dispatch to be used. He was ordered to take her to Bombay, the Royal Navy’s East Indies station, but there was a world of work to be done first.
So to Plymouth and to the dockyard on its west side, Devonport, with its rows of workshops and sheds, pools and slips; the great sorted stacks of timber; the long ropery, forges, and over all of it coal smoke. There he first saw Daphne: black, much larger than his previous ship Pantaloon, longer and higher in the water, a bit under 190 feet long and 36 feet broad at mid-ship. She was bluff and brawny at the waterline like a larger man-of-war, and would force her way through the water rather than cutting it as had the sleeker Pantaloon. She had three raking masts, and when they were properly rigged they would be adorned with some square and some triangular sails. This was known as being ‘barque-rigged’. She would thus wear some square sails for being pushed before the wind, and some triangular for being pulled forward by a wind cutting across her or even somewhat in her face. It was a kind of compromise rig. Beneath the waterline she concealed a massive engine and boilers to drive a fifteen-foot screw when the wind failed.
Sketch of Dryad drying her sails in the harbour of Zanzibar
Daphne was one of the new Amazon class, and she and her sisters were the largest commander’s commands in the Royal Navy. The great line-of-battle ships were hard ironclads, but the new Amazons wore no armour, though they hid iron deck beams, upright stanchions, and other iron reinforcements. Nor did the Amazons show long rows of gun ports: four only for them. But they were powerful guns, persuasive, with carriages set on tracks to pivot.
The new class was created as an answer to the CSS Alabama. In 1862, the rebellious southern states of America had purchased a fast yet hard-hitting ship from a Liverpool shipbuilder. The Alabama proceeded to wreak havoc on United States shipping throughout the world. The Admiralty imagined what ships like the Alabama chasing down British trade might do in a future war, so they set out to match her. Alabama had eight guns, including two heavy long-range guns on pivoting carriages like the Amazons. And she was quick, up to thirteen knots under sail and steam, while the Amazons could make twelve.
The role of the Amazons was to match the pace and striking-power of an Alabama, but also to put an end to arguments before they got too heated and settle things from a distance. The Amazons could be sent into the harbour of this bloody pirate or that rebellious chief, then – pridefully, deliberately – level a fort, explode a magazine, or ruin city walls. The Amazons embodied a rather insistent style of diplomacy.
It was not the Amazons’ style to brawl at close quarters, but they possessed one experimental weapon meant to be delivered as directly as possible: a ram. Daphne’s gently curved ram evoked the rams of ancient Greek triremes: metal-reinforced, sweeping forward at the waterline. The Greeks painted theirs like sea monsters; not so the Royal Navy. The thinking was that in a fleet action in which ironclads were hammering each other ineffectually, a fast ram-bowed ship might be sent in under full steam to charge the enemy. The 1862 US Civil War ‘Battle of Hampton Roads’ between the iron Monitor of the North and Merrimac of the South seemed to provide an illustration: the two had exchanged hammer blows to no avail for three hours. Many ironclads lay precariously low in the water, and ramming them, some thought, might bear them down. The low, heavy Monitor was indeed eventually fated to sink in heavy seas. Reinforcing the enthusiasm for rams, meanwhile, was the 1866 Battle of Lissa in which the Austrians successfully used the tactic against the Italians.
On a bright June day Sulivan went aboard Daphne, finding her mostly empty. No crew, no one to whom he could read his commission, per ancient tradition. About an hour later the master hurried on board. He would take most responsibility in navigating her and had good experience of piloting a gun vessel in Chinese waters. The next afternoon came Sulivan’s first lieutenant, aged twenty-four, a man who had flitted quickly from ship to ship in his career. He had never run a ship like Daphne and it remained to be seen whether he could handle it.
It took weeks to assemble the ship’s complement. Twelve men from the recently broken-up old Cambridge; seventeen from Indus, guard ship of Plymouth harbour; twenty-four men from the antique French prize, Canopus. A great many of these were receiving-ship men, raw recruits. A contingent of marines joined from the Plymouth division. They had just returned from Ireland where they had been hunting a phantom Fenian uprising – supposedly stoked up by American Civil War veterans – that never materalised.
Sulivan and his lieutenants not only had to make one crew of the men and boys, but transmute many a landsman into a sailor. Hammocks were issued, the crew was drilled at fire stations, new sails bent and stowed, and rifles, pistols and swords counted and locked away. They hoisted aboard their new boats, painted white. They fitted one of these boats with a six-pound gun, and carefully filled the Daphne’s magazines with shot, shell, and – in its fire-proof room – powder. They heaped ton after ton of coal in the many chutes that dotted the ship’s weather deck. They fitted a new capstan for raising the anchor.
A speed trial of the new engine took place a month after Sulivan took her in hand. On the baptismal day Daphne demanded a blood sacrifice. In the rush of work to get the maximum speed out of the ship a bag of coals came crashing down on the head of stoker Dick Osborne. He never rose again. It was far from the last sacrifice Daphne would demand.4
HMS Daphne, West Africa, September 1867
After some adjustments to her machinery and rigging, Daphne parted in late summer from England for Africa. Thus, on a bright, warm September mid-morning, Daphne was sailing eastward just above the equator to Sierra Leone with topsails and topgallants high above on iron masts that approached 100 feet. The wind was light, and Daphne was reaching for all she could. She should raise the crouching-lion hill above Freetown in a few hours. George Sulivan ordered the men mustered as he wanted to read the Articles of War before anchoring in the harbour. The Articles were a warning and ward, and every port had its lures. He read:
All persons in or belonging to His Majesty’s ships or vessels of war, being guilty of profane oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness, uncleanness, or other scandalous actions, in derogation of God’s honour, and corruption of good manners, shall incur such punishment as a court martial shall think fit to impose, and as the nature and degree of their offence shall deserve.
By noon they had sighted the hills and cape. The officer of the watch shortened sail, the leadsman cast his lead-weighted line to sound out the bottom, and a few hours later Daphne lay at single anchor in the deep water of Freetown harbour. Her captain meant to keep Daphne in port as briefly as possible, but there was much to do in that time. There were well over 100 tons of coal to be dumped in the pitch-black vaults down below, damp sails to be loosed to dry against mouldering, and all the other tasks and business after a long passage.
Most important, Sulivan would complete his complement: he needed Kroomen. Sulivan was in luck. An old and trusted shipmate from the Pantaloon, John Bull, was in the Kroo-Town section of Freetown. Bull had spent years doing hard service on Africa’s east coast. Sulivan made Bull Head Krooman, responsible for bringing on seven more Kroomen. They came on board bringing their log canoe. Then Daphne’s Amazonian sister Nymphe glided into Freetown harbour shortly after Daphne to take on the usual contingent of Kroomen. After just three days, Daphne steamed out of the harbour against the wind and bucking the current. Next, to lonely Ascension Island, then Cape Town, and around the Cape for East Africa.
A day beyond the Cape the wind rose and rose. After long hours with Sulivan refusing to leave the watch, a sail tore away in a gust and he ordered braces adjusted to reinforce the straining yards. The waves were contrary and growing and Daphne started rolling on the heaving sea. Some hours before dawn an extraordinary sea threw itself high over the bulwarks and bashed the ship’s boats. There was an explosion of masts, yards, blocks, stanchions and oars. Two steel boathooks went flying as if to murder. The long cutter was flung from its high place on its davits but saved from the sea by the scrambling men. Sulivan commanded the struggle to right the chaos. Finally, still before sunrise, he relinquished the watch and withdrew to his cabin.
More restless hours passed with the cross-seas constantly shoving Daphne until a titanic wave hurled itself onto her. It hammered the ship so forcefully that securely latched iron ports on the bulwarks blew open. The water tore nettings that enclosed railings from their places. The upper deck was a sea that gushed down hatchways to the decks below until it covered them. In his cabin under the poop deck Sulivan was unaware of the deluge – in fact none of the officers were fully aware of what had happened. After a couple of minutes Gardner, the first lieutenant, came up the companionway and managed to reach Sulivan’s door. He told the captain of water sloshing around the deck below. Should he batten down?
Something was wrong. The sub-lieutenant, Richard Orton, was stationed up on the iron conning bridge that spanned the ship port to starboard above the bulwarks. From there, Orton should have raised the alarm when water started pouring in the ports and hatchways, but there had been silence. Just then the bosun’s mate who had been on deck came hurrying aft. Man overboard. The force of the monstrous wave, the blind swing of a reeling titan, had hurled Orton from high on the bridge and the sea took him in.
Alarms and a rush of orders; the wheel yanked around; Daphne’s head straining to come about as close to the wind as possible. Someone sighted Orton already half a mile astern. It had taken too long to raise the alarm. Still, Orton swam, strong, at twenty-one-years old. The men flung life-buoys.
Daphne managed to slow, at least, the rate at which Orton was drawing away from her. Sulivan ordered the fires built in the cold boilers below, but it would be at least two hours before he could call for power from them. Orton, Sulivan measured, had a matter of minutes in such waves. Sulivan had saved several sailors from drowning in his time, but diving into such seas was self-murder. First one man, then another, asked – begged, even – to be allowed to lower a boat and pull for Orton. But Sulivan knew that lowering a boat in such wind and seas meant losing both a boat and that boat’s crew. If you men won’t consider your death, Sulivan thought, then I must. Sulivan knew that Orton was a capable swimmer, but there was no hope, regardless. He must sink, thought Sulivan.
Soon the youth was lost to sight. After an hour in the cold darkness, far longer than the boy had life, Sulivan gave the order to abandon the fight against wind and waves. Resume course. The order given, despair – a sorrow he could never after put into words – took him. He turned and left the deck.5
HMS Daphne, Mahé Island, Seychelles, August 1868
HMS Daphne arrived at the East Indies Station in Bombay just in time to join the massive flotilla for Annesley Bay. After some repairs, she took a factory ship, a floating workshop, in tow. She took her position in the amassed fleet and sailed west. For months she took her turn as guard ship and ran errands to and from Aden on the bottom of the Arabian peninsula up to Suez where the canal was being built, up and down the Red Sea. She carried messages, shipped pay, bore passengers. Whatever the flagship Octavia signalled, Daphne jumped to do.
After the troops marched back from the interior of Abyssinia, the commodore released Daphne from the Red Sea. Now she was gliding between the islands of the Seychelles, drawn on by a steady light wind under bright blue skies interspersed with cloud. It was midday, with a southerly wind, 75 degrees, and seas the same temperature. This was a reprieve from far hotter days at berth in Annesley Bay. There, unsteady, weakly winds faintly gasped as weed grew on Daphne’s belly.
The passage had not been easy. The day she set out from the Red Sea, seaman George Young fell from a main yard. Icarus’s neck was probably saved when he glanced off the Kroomen’s canoe hung in its place, so that he splashed into the sea instead of crunching onto the oak deck. They got Young out of the waves alive. Weeks later in the crossing, Daphne cracked the same main yard when she was surprised by a rogue blast of wind. Meanwhile, the sick-room list grew to twenty.
Soon Sulivan hoped to raise Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles chain. A healthy island, Sulivan thought, which can’t be said of any other part of most islands in this sea or the African coast. At two o’clock the lookout raised the island and the officer of the watch gave orders. The Daphne’s crew trimmed sails, set the tall, trapezial gaff mainsail, and cast the lead and line as the sandy beach began to rise under her keel. With equatorial evening falling, the sloop approached her anchoring place off the marked approach to the port. There lay Commodore Heath’s flagship, the long Octavia. Orders to fire a rocket and burn a blazing pyrotechnic light, furl sails, and drop anchor. Night fell fully with a few passing showers meandering across the Indian Ocean.
The morning’s sun showed a variety of green on the island. Here and there a brown cliff broke through the cover. A peak of several thousand feet rose beyond the little port, green to the top. Sulivan paid his duty to the commodore on board the flagship and reported on the passage. He made a point of telling the commodore how young Midshipman Stuart and Head Krooman Bull had worked together to save George Young from drowning after he glanced off a canoe. And he had to ask the commodore for a new main topsail yard out of Octavia’s spares, though a great yard was a precious thing half an ocean away from the nearest dockyard store. The request was granted.
There was work to do, but Sulivan also wanted to give his men leave since they would not be in such a green, benign place for a long while. So one watch went ashore while the other took on water, coaled, and rattled down yards. Then they switched. Boats were repaired, the ship cleaned, the new yard hauled up and fitted. Four days of leave, and the sick-room began to empty.
After a week, before they were to part, Octavia signalled Sulivan to dinner. The commodore’s orders were ready. Sulivan was to patrol the African coast, Madagascar, and the south-west Indian Ocean islands. First he was to call on the British consul in Madagascar to show the flag and learn what slave trading was going on there. Heath would sail directly to Zanzibar to speak to the sultan and visit the slave market.6