Daphne hunts and draws first blood
WHILE THE CAPTAINS of the Dryad and Nymphe were still heading for the Indian Ocean, Sulivan began the work of gathering intelligence, patrolling, and preparing to test his commodore’s new tactics. First, he pointed towards Madagascar.
HMS Daphne, Tamatave, Madagascar, September 1868
After busy days of working to windward south from his parting with Heath at the Seychelles, Daphne came to anchor off of Tamatave, a modest port on the eastern side of the great island. Salutes fired, salutes returned, and a boat lowered for Captain Sulivan to head for shore.
This was the station of Consul Conolly Pakenham, scion of an exalted and formidable English family, but for some reason sent here to spend his life on the opposite end of the planet in this small post. Pakenham’s main duty was to strengthen the relationship between Britain and the new government of Madagascar. After generations of struggle over the island, one Madagascar caste and dynasty won sovereignty over most of the large island early in the nineteenth century. But in the 1830s that dynasty reacted to European – especially French – meddling and missionary activity by throwing them out of the country and forcing renunciations from Christian converts.
After decades of rebuffing European and American forays, the royal court began allowing more foreign interaction around 1863. But the king who had tried opening things up was targeted by traditionalist elements of the aristocracy and eventually strangled. Madagascar had a tradition of female monarchs in addition to male, so it was natural for the king’s widow to take the throne. She ruled for the next five years and, despite the fate of her husband, continued opening Madagascar to the world, protected by a crafty prime minister.
Only months before Sulivan’s arrival, Madagascar crowned a new queen upon the death of the old: Ranavalona II, another widow of the assassinated king. For the previous five years she had been tutored by the newly arrived British missionaries. At her coronation, a gold chain woven in her hair, a Bible was on display next to her seat as she declared the state religion to be Christian – better still for the British, Protestant. This was no small thing given that the French were competing with the British for influence on the island as they had many decades before. Her royal seat was on the island’s central plateau. The court’s control of the coasts, especially the African-facing west and south, was less established than elsewhere, though officially the island was united. Pro-and anti-Europe, pro-French and pro-British cliques competed in the royal court.
The Kingdom of Madagascar was a dominion of slaves. Generations of conquest by the central capital created uncounted thousands of war captives. There was a class of masters and a larger mass of the enslaved. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, foreign slave traders, especially French, crowded the ports. But in 1865, Ranavalona II’s predecessor signed a treaty with the British declaring the trade to and from the island illegal. The institution itself, though, foully slinked on.
Slave ships still came and went in the shadows, but they were no longer visible in the ports. With little Royal Navy presence, slavers dodged and ran the paper blockade to out-of-the-way coasts. If he could catch them, Pakenham could legally demand that the Malagasy punish the slavers and recover the East African abductees. But catching the slave traders was difficult. The Africans came from the territories nominally controlled by the Portuguese, sometimes directly, sometimes through the French-influenced Comoro Islands. The French bought slaves on the African coast, declared them ‘free’ but liable for indentured servitude in exchange for the price of their purchase. They were supposed to stay in French territory, but they were taken here under the French flag with the designation of passengers or indentured workers, called engagés.
Pakenham briefed Sulivan. And when the commander parted from the consul he carried away a good impression of Pakenham. A British consul might be expected to enforce an anti-slavery treaty as a matter of duty, but Sulivan thought he could be trusted to act on principle, too. A credit to Britain, he thought, a man who would act with energy if only the Malagasy could be shown to be cheating the treaty. If only the Royal Navy could catch them at it. That was up to Sulivan and the rest of the East Indies squadron.
On the Daphne, the men worked on perennial repairs, parties went ashore to attend church in the village, others took cattle aboard. Some days later, as Daphne’s stokers summoned steam for her departure, a French man-of-war jealously looked in at the port. The implicit competition between French and British in these waters was also perennial.
Daphne then patrolled along the north-west end of the island, the most notorious for slaving. But over several days her searches produced nothing and, turning her head north before a southerly wind, she left Madagascar behind under plain sail.
Next, to the nearby Comoro Islands, a mix of petty sultanates and kingdoms. Some of these were under British influence, while some had been grabbed by the French. All abetted the slave trade. On a warm mid-September morning the wind faded to nearly nothing. The stokers renewed the fires in the heat below, and Daphne began steaming past one of Comoros, Johanna. It had a treaty with the British allowing trade to or from the island to be inspected. But still, falsehoods under the French flag – carrying supposed ‘immigrant labourers’ – perpetuated the slave traffic, as did Arab and Swahili outlaws.
Sulivan looked at the peak 6,000 feet above the little island, lushly emerald. And he knew it was a place of pure sweet water, fruit and sweet potatoes – a contrast to the society on the island which he found rotten and squalid, a miserable collection that passed for a town, with slave labour farms beyond it. More squalid still, the English consul of Johanna, William Sunley, had been caught using slave labour on his own sugar plantation on the west coast of the island. Retired from the Royal Navy, Sunley had set out to make his fortune as a sugar planter. He had been caught using 500 slaves. They were loaned to him from neighbouring plantations, but paying their masters for their use was supporting the trade. A visitor from the Cape made the discovery and reported Sunley to London. London, in turn, ordered him to stop using slave labour or resign his consulship. The man had the gall to refuse to quit either, and the London authorities forcibly stripped his consulship from him. Sulivan knew that Sunley was still on the island. A living slander against Britain, Sulivan thought – living, breathing hypocrisy.
After two more weeks of skimming between the Comoros and easy sailing up the mainland African coast, the Daphne slowly approached the mouth of the Kiswara River. North-east of this shore, not far, was the island of Zanzibar. These were familiar waters to Sulivan who had hunted slavers here in years past. This coast, he knew, fed Zanzibar’s demand for forced labour.
Darkness was falling as Daphne swam cautiously on her approach to the river mouth. Sulivan raised steam to move with even more deliberation, as men on the sides dropped the lead and line often to feel out the bottom. In the dark Daphne dropped one anchor.
Before sunrise the next morning, Sulivan ordered the small dinghy lowered into the dark warm water. On this day he and the Daphne’s doctor would go exploring. Above, a mix of star and cloud, and a light, swinging wind. Sulivan took the oars while Surgeon Mortimer, a veteran of many ships and seas, descended in the dark. After two rifles had been passed down to the boat Sulivan started pulling towards the river’s mouth and into living Africa. Miles passed, and dawn showed a world of green, a gently rolling land of grass and mounds of trees. Behind these were gradually rising hills. Eventually Sulivan chose a spot on the lightening riverbank to pull the dinghy up.
The two men walked and, as the sun emerged fully from the Indian Ocean it was gentle for a change. They aimed up a hill to look around the country. More miles, and they found the summit and their view: a broad valley with a small stream running through it, and woods on the valley’s opposite end. It reminded Sulivan of the best views of England, though something was missing. Had this been England, part of the composition would have been cultivated land, but there was none here. That probably meant that slavers had been here. When slave-raiders came through a country, Sulivan knew, people could only abandon their fields. If lucky, they could hide until the hunters passed from the country. If unlucky, there came war and kidnap. In any case, crops went unplanted or rotted in the fields and livestock starved. Grass and forest reclaimed villages.
The captain and surgeon kept walking. At the far end of the valley they surprised a pair of women who ran upon seeing them. As they ran they shouted a warning to people somewhere ahead whom Sulivan and the doctor could not see. The two men followed and eventually came upon a small collection of little mud-brick houses with closed doors. The captain guessed that this was a kind of retreat; a place where the villagers felt isolated from other populations; a place too small and out-of-the-way for raiders or kidnappers. The two called out, doing their best to communicate to the hidden villagers that they were no threat, making a patient effort at explanation, conveying peace, somehow, in an alien language. Finally, a sole elderly man emerged from his house. After more effort and patience the old man eventually communicated back.
Alarm subsided, and those barred in the other little houses emerged, most of them women. They very closely examined the Englishmen, their gear, clothes, rifles. Now, still more confident, they began feeling the material of their clothes. Sulivan was unsettled at the centre of a clutch of women feeling his clothes, but did not stop them. He imagined their hands were very dirty, but stayed still. The women spoke earnestly to one another. Sulivan imagined they were stating their opinions of them. Preparing to go, Sulivan did his best to let them know that Englishmen were their friends. They seemed ultimately to understand and communicated friendship.1
What if Sulivan and the surgeon had stumbled upon Dr Livingstone that day? David Livingstone, after all, was not so very far away from them in the interior at that moment. Heath’s squadron might have experienced a far different fate had the famous explorer’s observations of East Africa been published at the beginning of their campaign.
In those same days, Livingstone was exploring the country three or four hundred miles into the continent in the Lake Nyasa region. As a younger man, Livingstone had been a typical missionary, but he had become impatient with preaching among known communities in familiar lands and left known tracts behind. To him, it seemed an army of missionaries clung to familiar beachheads until every possible convert had long since been won. Besides, he had an idea for sparking the conversion of the whole continent: by suffusing it with European influence by way of commerce. Livingstone himself would explore and identify river highways – ideally, a river that would link south-east Africa to the Nile – that would lure those with wares to sell in the interior and those who hoped to extract ivory and other rarities. The presence of traders, the attraction of ‘civilised’ wares, and a ready outlet for resources was supposed to allow civilisation and Christianity to flourish while undermining the slave trade both morally and economically.
While George Sulivan witnessed the waste and fear that slave raiders caused near the coast, Livingstone witnessed first-hand the slavers’ murderousness. At the moment Sulivan and Dr Mortimer were exploring, Livingstone had lost contact with Britain. But he recorded his experiences in a journal published in London a few years later. He would frequently come across parties of killers and kidnappers or sometimes just their abandoned victims:
27 June 1866
Today we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks [very heavy yokes] on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.
Slave raiders accepted such losses because the returns on their masters’ investment were so high. An individual kidnapped for free or for some length of cotton on the mainland sold for roughly 11–14 silver dollars (£2- £3) at Zanzibar’s slave market; while a child might re-sell for eight to ten times that amount in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere. The men who did the actual murder and kidnapping were often members of slaver-barons’ personal armies. Alternatively, these men might visit a local ruler offering guns, alcohol, or cloth and suggest that he make war on his neighbour to produce slaves to trade, and then sit back and let them do the work.
The most valuable abductees to their masters were children who fetched the highest prices, and slave-raiders tended to invest more in keeping them healthy.
28 July 1867
Slavery is a great evil wherever I have seen it. A poor old woman and child are among the captives, the boy about three years old seems a mother’s pet. His feet are sore from walking in the sun. He was [traded] for two fathoms [of cloth] and his mother for one fathom; he understood it all and cried bitterly, clinging to his mother. She had, of course, no power to help him; they were separated at Karungu afterwards.
Livingstone frequently clashed with the Europeans in his exploring party and his East African porters and guides frequently left him. Shortly after seeing the three-year-old boy taken from his mother, Livingstone himself was desperately hungry, with nothing to trade and his party fast dwindling. That is when he encountered one of the most powerful slavers of East Africa. In fact, the man probably saved his life.
Hamed bin Mohammed el Marjebi, who went by the name ‘Tippu Tip’, was part trader, part warlord, part agent for the sultan of Zanzibar, and fast becoming a slaver king. He was Swahili-Arab: born on Zanzibar, descended from East African and Omani forebears. After becoming a successful trader on the island, Tippu Tip plunged into East Africa with a company of mercenaries and slaves. There he murdered and battled rival strongmen; set up protection rackets and extracted tribute in ivory; hunted elephants for their tusks; bought influence with guns; and kidnapped people en masse. He began building an empire to the west and north of Zanzibar – around today’s Tanzania and Kenya – by creating and filling power vacuums, bringing ruin to countries and enslaving their people.
Tippu Tip
But he was not simply murderous, he was politically adept. When word reached him of the near-starving Scots explorer wandering and measuring the countryside he saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Europeans. Not only did he give Livingstone food and tradestuff, but he invited him to stay and travel with him, which the desperate man did gratefully. And though Livingstone truly reviled Tippu Tip’s slaving, he admired his regal bearing and his famous hospitality. When Livingstone left Tip’s entourage, he gave the man a warm letter of introduction to the European community based on Zanzibar.2
Nearly all trade in the western Indian Ocean depended on the coast-skimming dhow. A large triangular sail is what made a dhow a dhow. This sail, called a ‘lateen sail’ hung from a yard that ran more or less straight down the length of the ship, ‘fore and aft’. While this sail could be pushed by the wind, it propelled the ship fastest when it acted as an aerofoil: when wind flowed over it, that is, pulling the ship like a wing. (Most European ships, especially warships, relied on square sails, which did best when the wind was behind them.) Dhows often shared other characteristics such as a high poop in the back of the larger ones and a dramatically up-turned stern at front. But the wide lateen sail was its animating spirit. The captains of Heath’s squadron called any Arab lateen-rigged ship a ‘dhow’ as a generic term, though the proper word for larger ones – those with multiple masts – was ‘baghlah’.
The new Amazons – Daphne, Dryad and Nymphe – were well-suited to this coast because they borrowed the dhows’ ancient technology. The two forward masts mainly carried square sails; while the rearmost, called the mizzenmast, tended to carry triangular sails for helping the ships sail into the face of the monsoon winds. They were a kind of hybrid.
And the monsoon ruled this ocean. From roughly November to February the prevailing winds in the ocean swept down out of the northeast, while from about April to September the winds shifted and blew out of the south-west. The movement of captive East Africans depended on these winds. The pattern was for traders to bring northern wares down the East African coast in the winter months, then await the shift in the monsoon, purchase slaves at Zanzibar or Kilwa on the coast south of Zanzibar, and run for the north with their victims in the spring and summer.
A sketch of a dhow, probably by Zanzibar Consul John Kirk, c. 1872
In former years, when any ships were ordered to police the trade in these waters at all, they tended to be stationed at Zanzibar or patrolled its waters checking licences. But Leopold Heath decided that could not be effective since a dhow heading north from Zanzibar could simply plead that it was heading to a coastal town to the north that was within the sultan’s dominions; that is, perfectly within the treaty rules. That hopeless routine was about to end.
In his study of reports and letters from former British officials based on Zanzibar and his talks with other Royal Navy officers, Heath began to develop a plan. He considered keeping his ships away from Zanzibar. Instead, he hoped that by positioning them at natural chokepoints where features of land, sea and current would force the dhows through a relatively small passage, his Amazons could take advantage of their barque rigs and powerful engines to descend on the slave dhows against the monsoon – while the dhows themselves would be at the mercy of wind and current forcing them into the Royal Navy’s awaiting hands.
HMS Octavia, Zanzibar harbour, September 1868
The tall masts of HMS Octavia lording it over the harbour, her many commissioned officers made the short pull to the beach and the sultan’s palace. Two whole goats were roasting and a lavish feast was set. The sultan sat before the array as his secretary of state personally waited on Commodore Heath.
Later, from his flagship, Heath sent a letter to his Admiralty superiors in London on the eve of launching an experiment with his new stratagem. ‘For 25 years we have followed the same dull routine,’ he wrote, ‘capturing a few dhows here and there.’ He announced that he would end the routine and commit unparalleled effort. He asked for more ships, perhaps being redirected from the West African coast where slave trade suppression was winding down. But going beyond matters over which he had responsibility, Heath also recommended an overhaul in political and diplomatic efforts against the slave trade: that permanent anti-slave trade commissions be set up in the chief ports of East Africa; that British India should police the Persian Gulf to smother the trade at the point of demand; that the government itself in London commit to finally ‘erasing’ all trade in humans from East Africa.
I trust their Lordships will not think that I have given my opinion in too free a manner [he wrote] … If I have presumed to indicate the steps which I think should be taken … for finally attaining that object, it is because I feel that although what we have hitherto done may have annoyed and harassed the Slave Traders it has had no effect towards suppressing the Trade.
Heath would eventually learn to his cost that many in India and London indeed took exception to his free manner.
HMS Daphne, Zanzibar harbour, October 1868
The letter sent on its long voyage to London via the Red Sea, Heath issued orders to Sulivan, the man on the station with the most experience in East African waters: it was time to experiment with the chokepoint tactic. In October 1868, Sulivan’s Daphne lay at single anchor in the harbour of Zanzibar. The crew scrubbed, mended and, as ever, coaled, like Sisyphus labouring under heavy bags of coal that turned to ash almost as soon he stowed them. The captain surveyed a crowded harbour. It was nearly November and the monsoon was hanging on, still blowing from the southwest. On this wind depended slavers carrying their abductees north. But the monsoon would expire soon, returning in the spring, and many of the dhows were preparing for the last northerly run.
In the coming days, Sulivan gathered what news he could find. There was a war on the African coast to the west and north. Some slavers preferred to march their captives north up the coast to some isolated landing place before boarding them so as to evade any over-zealous British captain stalking Zanzibar waters. In these days of war slavers could not march their victims here. Zanzibar and its sister island Pemba, covered with clove plantations, were particularly crowded with slaves waiting to run the blockade for the north. Some large dhows at Zanzibar, Sulivan learned, were crowded with East Africans. The dhows had licences for sailing for Lamu Island – a place within the sultan’s territory. He also learned that some dhows intended to run the gauntlet for the north beyond the treaty limit, to make a run for the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf.
Commodore Heath and Sulivan knew that most smugglers would stay in harbour with Daphne watching. This gave them an opportunity to run up false colours. In the next couple of days, as he moved about Zanzibar, Sulivan let slip that he had orders to sail directly for Bombay on the aged monsoon. Soon, some of the Indian merchants in the town came to ask whether he would bear some goods there. They want to test whether we’re really going there or not, guessed Sulivan. He gladly agreed to carry their things. But he was not bound for Bombay. He would point Daphne conspicuously toward Bombay, but instead of heading north-east he would head north-west to the coast. The dhows, not made for the open ocean, hugged the coast all the way to their destinations in the north. At a point on the coast where they would be exposed, Daphne would lie in wait, her whaler, her speedy sailed cutter spread out to help corner the slave ship. The monsoon’s last breezes and the current would carry the dhows into the awaiting trap whether they liked it or not, while the Daphne could set barque sails and raise steam to carry her into the face of the wind, leaping down on the slavers.
A few days later, and the Daphne was almost ready to weigh. There was a muster at quarters early in the forenoon watch, then the order for stokers to raise steam. The circling men at the capstan weighed anchor and Daphne edged through the traffic of the harbour in broad daylight. She pointed her head north-north-east, unmistakably for Bombay. The next day she let her boilers cool and set most sail in front of a reliable wind out of the south. To any passing craft she looked as if she were truly bound for India. Meanwhile, Sulivan had the men of the forenoon watch exercising at the great guns and the afternoon watch drilled at cutlasses.
At a point thirty miles east of the coast and out of sight of the coastal traffic, Daphne turned back west. Sulivan’s stalking ground was near a town called Brava on the Somalian coast, a natural calling point for dhows bound north. Some small islands just off the coast formed a bottleneck here that should hem in traffic. There she stalked over several days. One late night Sulivan emerged from his cabin to have a look at things and found the midshipman on duty asleep. On a Sunday morning at single anchor Sulivan read to his crew from the Bible under bright skies and the lingering south-westerly breeze. Up boats, down boats; raise steam, bank fires.
It was a frustrating wait: nearly November, and they had yet to see one of the large dhows crammed with victims that they had seen tarrying suspiciously in Zanzibar harbour. Until, one day, after a morning of rain and cloud, the air cleared and showed a sail on the southern horizon off the starboard bow. The crew turned the clicking capstan and the stokers built steam. It was now mid-afternoon and she would have plenty of daylight for a chase. Steam up and, working against wind and current, Daphne began her descending run at the sail. An hour passed and the sail kept coming north, close to the shore. Another half hour’s approach confirmed that she was a large dhow and George Sulivan ordered the whaler and another boat equipped and armed and the boats’ crews to stand by. Soon the men hoisted out the whaler and lowered it to the sea.
The dhow, it seemed, knew then what kind of a ship Daphne was, but it could not easily turn and run against the five-knot current bearing it up the coast. It would not turn east and risk the open sea. Instead it turned toward the shore, slicing through large rolling seas, and ran headlong towards rock and beach. It could only mean that the captain meant to wreck, for just one terrible outcome was possible in such seas. The men on the Daphne could only watch since, while the slave ship was not far away now with Daphne steaming fast toward it, Daphne could not intercept it. It was about to strike. It crashed. The hull shattered. The men on the quarterdeck saw some figures immediately moving up the beach away from the disintegrating ship. The slavers, it appeared, would escape. Some captives ran before them up a hill into the tree line. Other bodies were in the water, and some were obviously trapped in the heaving, collapsing wreck.
Sulivan had no choice but to watch the dhow break on the beach, but he would not abandon the survivors to drowning as he had been forced to abandon young Orton in the cold waves under Africa. He moved, ordering the small lifeboat dropped. The waves that were pounding the dhow to fragments would also pound any boat that he sent in a rescue attempt. He would go but he would not order anyone else to go. Before he could pull away, young William Breen, only just made a midshipman, slid down the lifeline into his boat. Then the ship’s carpenter, Jim Richards, slipped down. Rifles handed down, the three men in the boat pulled away.
Into the heavy waves, now, and not far from the wreck, Sulivan could see dark bodies in the water more clearly. The heaving breakers started pouring onto the lifeboat from behind. A steep wave violently flung the stern. Sulivan leapt for a line above the rudder to weigh the stern down and succeeded in keeping the boat right-side-up. Waves continued to strike the boat from behind, violently swinging at the men. But hard as the waves attacked, they also shoved the boat quickly towards the beach.
In a few minutes they were there, hurrying through the water, scrambling among wood and bamboo fragments. Bodies, many bodies, and most beyond rescue. A woman – a mother? – struggled to get a child out of the collapsing wreck of the dhow. They ran to her and found that there were other children there. They seemed too exhausted to climb out of the broken hull, to pull themselves out of the waves. The men found one who was paralysed in a balled-up position, then another; there were seven children in all, about six years in age or younger. These were the only survivors other than those whom the slavers had taken away. Captain, carpenter, midshipman worked in the waves and ruin to extract the children.
Eventually, the three men and the surviving woman carried the children to the boat. They could not stay on the beach with an uncertain number of slavers at an uncertain distance. They moved quickly to help the children in, placed doubled-up children carefully down low among the ribs. Then, where was the woman? Vanished in wave and chaos.
Suddenly, men broke out of the tree line far up the beach. Ten. Twenty. Some with guns, some with spears. Sulivan guessed they were local men drawn to the shore by the noise. With such uneven numbers, this was not time for diplomacy. He raised his rifle. He waited until they were about two hundred yards away, then aimed at a spot fifty feet in front of the leading man. He fired, and the Somalian men flung themselves to the ground. They rose, but did not take another step forward. Nor did they step backward: they would wait and see.
Sulivan turned to the boat and ordered his companions to shove off. The men pulled hard for the breakers. It was the most resolute wall of waves Sulivan had ever seen in a long career at sea. From where he had stood on the Daphne he could not see the see the inner face of this unyielding wall, but now he saw it for what it was. In former days he had seen seven shipmates drowned by surf less high than this, and there were miles and miles of this barricade stretching up and down the coast. When the wave drew in the water of the beach, the inhaled sea nearly left the boat aground on coral. And darkness was coming on.
But they heaved on the oars. One dash at the breakers. Repelled. A second run for it. Repelled. Behind, on the shore, the Somalian men still watched.
Haul up the boat and try to survive the night on the beach? Sulivan wondered.
Then, a slight lull in the waves. It’s now or never.
Again, they pulled hard and aimed the bow to cut through the wall. The wave blasted the boat and poured through it stem to stern. They were through, but the children? The men counted them. They were all there. A miracle, Sulivan was sure.
Heath’s tactic was proven. From that day, slaver after slaver was borne by wind and current into Daphne’s trap. She spread her ships out to coordinate in penning slavers – two cutters, the captain’s gig, the broad whaler, the dinghy – even the Kroomen moving between boats in their distinctive canoe. Boats chasing in all directions. Sulivan rewarded Midshipman Breen with the captaincy of one of the boats. Daphne fired her monster guns to try to bring suspect dhows to. Sometimes they stopped, sometimes they darted.
Amid all of this, Sulivan worked with his trusted interpreter Jumah, his old shipmate from the Pantaloon, to learn about the children he and his men lifted from the wreck.
‘What is your name?’ Jumah asked one of the children, a small boy.
‘Zangora.’
Jumah asked how long he had been marched from his home to the coast.
‘From when the corn was young to when it was cut. About three moons.’ His village was well inland. More questions, and Sulivan and Jumah estimated that he had been taken off the coast at the island harbour of Kilwa, the busy slave depot.
‘How many slaves were in the dhow with you?’
‘A great many,’ he said. ‘Some were drowned.’
They had been at sea for about a week, consistent with a departure from Zanzibar. They had been packed under the deck. The entire dhow had been crammed.
Two of the children, who had seemed paralysed, had been crammed in so tightly with their heads between their knees that they could not straighten their bodies to try to save themselves from drowning in the wreck. One of the children reported that when the Daphne had appeared, issuing coal smoke, the slavers had told the Africans that the big ship was a cannibal ship, the fires for cooking children. They would wreck not to drown the Africans, but to save them. Once on land they should run for the trees. Sulivan and Jumah spoke with the others and heard nearly the same story. ‘Fighting … murder … a long journey … cruelty … impossible ever to return to my own land.’
November, and constant activity continued: Daphne running down ships; the boats boarding. There were many legitimate traders and many slavers – some escaping when there were insufficient boats to chase, others running aground. Royal Navy policy stated that the slaver crews themselves must not be harmed if it could be helped; they should be offered passage to the nearest port. But naturally they always declined to spend much time on the Daphne among their former victims and officers who loathed them; they usually asked to be landed immediately or placed in passing dhows. Their dhows, though, were almost always burnt at sea.
One day, an experienced sub-lieutenant, William Henn, had command of one of the sailed cutters. He chased a slave ship, taking care to keep the cutter between this dhow and the shore. The dhow gave up the chase and Henn’s crew boarded. The deck was clear other than the crew of ten or so, but it was a big dhow. What was below?
One of the Amazons attempting a rescue and depicting the slaver running aground
Sub-Lieutenant Henn and his men looked beneath the deck. At the very bottom, along the keel, were stones laid for ballast. Crouched on these were twenty-three women and two infants. There was no room to sit upright because three feet above the keel was another deck of bamboo on which the men were held. Some few feet above them was another deck packed with over fifty children. Altogether there were 156 men, women and children squeezed into the ship.
The next day, Sulivan saw this dhow towed to the Daphne and hauled alongside. As the men helped the refugees on board a woman, terribly weak, came up. She held a baby, tiny, perhaps one month old. But something was terribly wrong. Jumah spoke to her and she said that the previous day, amid alarm and hurry, her newborn child had started to cry. A man had come down and struck him with a ballast stone. The man had feared, it seemed, that the approaching British would hear. The infant’s heart had beat on for hours before stopping. Still, as she came on board the Daphne his mother held him, quiet now, beyond fear and hunger. It was a Sunday, and Sulivan almost never failed to read the Bible to the men and boys on that day, but not today. They hauled off and burnt the slave ship.
Drawing by Midshipman Frank Fauwell, “Section of a dhow showing the manner of stowing slaves on board,” in his log for HMS Forte, 1869
More slavers caught, and more men, women and children brought on board, many starving, and many ill. A slaver made minimum investment in his captives and received a high return. He could afford to lose some to illness and starvation and against his expected return he weighed the cost of rice – usually, a handful of rice and a half-coconut shell of water per day. He weighed capture by a British cruiser – perhaps embarrassment for a master in Zanzibar or Oman – and total loss versus running aground and preserving a minority of his slaves, especially women and children who brought higher prices at northern ports. There they would be domestic slaves, sexual chattels, children trained for fighting, pearl diving, date farming, and other work. To the south, the French, Anglo-Indians, and the Madagascar Malagasy took more males for plantation labour.
One day, about noon, the masthead lookout hailed the deck. Man in the water. The ship was anchored two miles off the shore, but someone was swimming to her, an African, already well over a mile from shore, and he was fighting a quick current. Sulivan sent a boat to pick him up. Soon the men helped him aboard. Questioned by Jumah, he said he was of the Monhekan people and had been enslaved. He was clearly, to Sulivan’s mind, a hero of a man to have attempted the feat. They called him ‘Marlborough’, their best transcription of his real name, which they could not manage. Marlborough was a leader, and in the coming days and weeks the officers gave him more and more responsibilities for tending to the other former slaves, keeping peace, dealing out provisions, directing duties.
Soon there were 200 refugees on board, then 300, then more. And fifteen slavers destroyed. The crew of the Daphne tried to make the newcomers as comfortable as possible, but the ship was a tight fit for her crew alone, let alone over 300 more. They had to shelter on the open deck, though the men rigged awnings above them. A hose was arranged to provide a shower of steam-heated water. A vast kettle boiling away in the open air provided meat stew, with Sulivan buying rice from passing merchants. The captain noted that the people tended to cluster by kindred or tribe, of which he thought some were handsome and smart, others dull and ugly.
A one-year-old with good sea legs moved about the upper deck, making it his own. The crew named him Billy and someone made him clothes, but he refused to wear anything. When the bosun’s mate Tom Balmer was on duty, Billy could regularly be found in his arms. Perhaps he had left his own children far behind in England. At some point it struck Sulivan that the one-year-old adventurer never cried.
Emaciated child refugees from slavery on board HMS Daphne. Photograph by George Sulivan, 1868
Dr Mortimer and his assistant Samuel were busy treating the ill. Some of the refugees were beyond help, exhausted beyond the ability to hold on to life. Some came on board suffering from dysentery; some had ulcerous wounds. Among the crowded refugees, many exposed to the virus for the first time, smallpox appeared. One morning two of the East African men died within hours and the next day a woman died. Ultimately, sixteen men, women and children succumbed to illness or to the malnutrition they suffered under the slavers. These were given a correct burial in the world of sailors, shrouded in sailcloth with an iron ball at the feet.3