The spiders spin their web, unaware of their own vulnerability
THE ROYAL NAVY had never struck such a blow against the slave trade as it did in late 1868. About a thousand East Africans were freed from slave ships. Daphne had done most of the work late in the year, though Heath sent other ships to help her as they became available after re-embarking the invasion force at Abyssinia. Daphne’s lying-in-wait at natural chokepoints along the coast had proved the strategy, and there was every reason to expect that 1869, with all the Amazon-class ships now available for duty, would be even better.
But if Daphne and supporting ships had intercepted a thousand, how many were slipping by to the north, or east to Madagascar, or to French-controlled islands? Heath and Sulivan could not know, but feared that they had rescued only a portion of the victims of slavers in 1868. Reckoning was difficult since the legal trade clouded the waters and made it difficult for British observers in Zanzibar to calculate the trade’s scale. An East African placed on a dhow headed from Zanzibar could be headed for a port within the sultan’s coastal empire a day away, or could be headed for a destination across the ocean. Still, if the rate of success was hard to calculate, it was undoubtedly unprecedented.
But what did ‘success’ mean and what did it mean to be ‘freed’ from a slave ship? What kind of success could there be for someone like Marlborough, whose town and crops were burnt, the peace of his home region overturned, his family scattered or murdered? What kind of freedom could there be for someone like young Zangora who could never go home or recapture any of his former life?
At the turn of 1869, Leopold Heath pondered these questions. So did his squadron’s officers: in the months to come, George Sulivan would track down Marlborough and see what became of his life; Philip Colomb would look into the fates of some of those he removed from slave ships. On his flagship anchored at Bombay, reviewing Daphne’s late 1868 campaign, Commodore Heath considered the matter of freedom because someone had suggested to him that the Africans’ lives as free men were no better than that promised by slavery. Freed, they would do back-breaking work in blazing Aden, the remote Seychelles, or perhaps Bombay. They would draw water as servants, or plant cane cuttings and tend to sugar boilers. Their employers would be hardly gentler or more generous than a clove plantation’s foreman. Or they might struggle desperately to find work at all, even to eat.
But Heath was not ready to accept that idea, to equate slavery and bitter economic circumstances. We’re launching them into a new world, he thought. All is strange to them. So it must be England’s duty to educate the refugees, teach them the language, provide some training. We’re launching them into a new world, but their status in that world still mattered to Heath. He distinguished between their physical and spiritual statuses. Physically, the people Sulivan had pulled from the slave ships were perhaps no better as struggling refugees in Aden than they would have been as slaves in Madagascar or the Persian Gulf. Yet he believed that morally, spiritually, at their essence, they were not enslaved. They entered a strange and hard world – their old world was irretrievably gone – but they entered it as free men.
In the first weeks of 1869, Heath had his three Amazons in Bombay harbour, and he readied them to act in unison on Daphne’s successful experiment.
There were constant signals between ships, signals to shore, boats zig-zagging with messages and men; coaling, stowing for a long campaign, painting. There was a squall of paperwork for Heath, along with the distractions of being in port and a lack of action to occupy the men. A deserter leapt from a ship and was arrested. Meanwhile, on his own flagship, Heath had to deal with a commander who was far too fond of the lash for the commodore’s taste.
Finally, Heath was ready to send his squadron out of Bombay for the full implementation of his plan to lurk at natural chokepoints and let slavers come to him. Daphne, Dryad and Heath and his flagship would prowl strategic positions off the Horn of Africa, near the opening of the Red Sea, the Arabian coast, and near the opening of the Persian Gulf. Nymphe would start her patrol near Madagascar, then later in the season, with the strengthening north-running monsoon, move up to the Arabian coast too. From the perspective of those in Zanzibar, the Royal Navy would be nowhere to be seen. By the time the slave ships were half way to their northern or eastern destinations, it would be too late for them. Philip Colomb called the squadron ‘spiders’, and in late January 1869 these spiders began to skitter from Bombay to weave Heath’s web.1
Even at this early point, with the squadron only just moving to implement his strategy fully, Heath was attracting hostility. Already imperial authorities in the Indian Ocean sphere were jolted by the commodore’s unusual moves.
Late in 1868, the British government of India took notice of Heath’s audience with the sultan of Zanzibar. Bombay had purview of East African and Arabian affairs and the governor of Bombay, Sir Seymour Fitzgerald, was the one who took unhappy notice of Heath’s activities. To his mind, Heath was not acting in unison with Bombay and presumed to meddle in policy. The cotton trade, not the slave trade, was the concern of the Bombay government. And diplomacy with native princes of India, not Zanzibar, took priority. ‘Very objectionable,’ he wrote on the cover sheet of a report on Heath’s moves, and he forwarded it on to those up the chain of command. Bombay had charge of western Indian Ocean matters; Calcutta was capital of British India; and it was there that Fitzgerald sent his complaint.
Thus the report made its way around the tip of India and up to Bengal and Calcutta where it was also unwelcome. The head of the government of India’s foreign department was Charles Aitchison, a man of powerful build and great moustache. He was devoted to two faiths: that the Lord was returning to Earth soon, and that the best way to govern was through masterly inactivity. Zanzibar’s slave trade did not need new regulations, Aitchison thought, and it was totally improper of Commodore Heath to act on his own. He had exceeded his instructions. Was there a new policy declared in Calcutta? In London? No. Aitchison wrote his own objections in no uncertain terms on the cover of the report and addressed it to the India Office, Westminster. London must hear about this.2
In the same weeks, another complaint about Heath’s new activities arrived in Bombay. Major General Sir Edward Russell was Resident at Aden, the dusty outpost above the Gate of Lament, the mouth of the Red Sea. Aden was a valuable naval base, army garrison and coal depot; but it was not a welcoming place: hot, nearly waterless, without a trace of green.
It was a hard place and it was administered by a hard man. Russell was a veteran of bitter fighting amid sage and flint in Africa, Afghanistan and India. For the moment, however, Russell had set down his sword. Now his job was to maintain the security and health of Aden, to protect and spread the Pax Britannica. He was to keep Aden running smoothly as an entrepôt of Indian Ocean trade and the key way-post en route to Bombay. As ever, Russell knew his duty well, and the Royal Navy was interfering with it. The boys in blue jackets were stirring up trouble, raising the ire of merchants and rulers in the Indian Ocean. Russell was receiving complaints of harassment, complaints that traders were beginning to fear the sight of British ships. When a dhow was caught transporting slaves beyond Zanzibar waters, its entire cargo was condemned. The cargo was condemned whether the ship was transporting six slaves or 300. Russell thought that was not fair, out-of-line. Many ships in these waters had slave crews; if they were all condemned, their wares forfeited, the trade in this sea would be badly hurt. And that was antithetic to his mission and the beneficent global role of the British empire.
The answer, Russell decided, was that the Royal Navy should let pass ships carrying small cargoes of slaves. That way ships with slave crews would not have to fear that their goods would be confiscated, their ships condemned. He admitted to himself that this would inevitably mean some slaves would go unliberated; but it was fairer to those carrying just a few slaves. And it would preserve the good name of Britain as a promoter of peace and trade, as a good ally.
Besides, argued Russell, was it not the case that slave masters took good care of their property? They must. They had an interest in protecting their investment in property, after all. Such were the indelible laws for free trade and private property. When the British liberated the slaves and placed them in Aden or Bombay or wherever, no one could look after them.
So Russell wrote to Bombay warning the governor of the complaints he was receiving and suggesting that Heath’s squadron be ordered to limit their captures to only large slavers.3
These early stirrings of alarm among British officialdom in the Indian Ocean were just the beginning. Leopold Heath could not have truly grasped the forces he was prodding with his new campaign. The slave trade was integral to a vast economic network that tightly tied together India, East Africa, Arabia and the Indian Ocean Islands. It connected goods and natural resources and credit and people and politics in ways so far reaching that not even the most astute British India experts understood the scale of this network. And they probably could not grasp the sheer amount of wealth it generated for people with the savvy to exploit it and the willingness to shackle their fellow human beings.
There was Tippu Tip, who these days was extending a frontier of war and slavery, and lesser warlords in adjoining lands; but they committed their atrocities in the act of feeding this complicated market. And that market made it possible for these men to keep pushing their frontiers. The supplies that sustained and armed slave raiders and the trade goods that they used for bribes or exchange came from Zanzibar. Traders, the most predominant of whom were Indians, sold cotton cloth, guns, gunpowder, and wire to those heading into Africa. In return, they bought ivory, copal, other rarities, and of course slaves. The enslaved went to the Zanzibar market where they were re-sold. The cloves they were forced to farm went to Bombay and London; the dates some were forced to farm in Arabia were exported to the entire world.
To encourage trade, to keep traders from the US and all the world coming to Zanzibar, the Hindu Indian merchant community – with no religious prohibitions on usury – lent money at attractive rates. This kept things flowing in and out of Zanzibar harbour like a beating heart, and it kept East African captives flooding into the entrepôt, which sustained the slave labour farms on Zanzibar and nearby Pemba Island. As many as three out of four of those plantations were mortgaged to Indian lenders or were owned outright by Indians. And what was the most valuable and permanent form of ‘moveable value’ that borrowers could offer as collateral for loans? Their slaves.
At the top of this pyramid of finance on Zanzibar in these years was one Jairam Sewji, the Hindu Indian master of the customs house and a man of fabulous wealth. Over the 1840s to 1870s, Sewji paid the sultan of Zanzibar a fixed fee in silver each year for the privilege to extract import duties on everything entering Zanzibar. The income that Sewji made on extracting customs dramatically outstripped the fee he paid the sultan for the right; he made roughly 200,000 silver dollars (£40,000) clear profit annually in the 1860s. And that profit was only a small fraction of the total wealth he commanded. The price of ivory, meanwhile, rose each year with the rise of the American, British and European middle classes which sought out ivory for jewellery, toys, pianos, and a thousand other things. And dealers believed East African ivory some of the best for its close grain and tendency to remain white rather than yellow with time. Sewji also kept his own personal fleet of merchant dhows moving ivory and other goods between Zanzibar and Bombay; and he opened a trade and finance firm there that linked him with China and elsewhere in the wider world, and another office in London. The more the import of slave-labourers and ivory from Africa expanded, the more the import of gunpowder and cotton from India and manufactured goods from the US grew, the wealthier he became. Thus he promoted the easy availability of loans.
And the man deepest in debt to Jairam Sewji was the sultan of Zanzibar, Majid bin Said. The sultan relied on the Indian Sewji for his power, while the security of Sewji’s wealth and head depended on the Pax Britannica as enforced by the Royal Navy. Sewji was not the sole Indian or Arab trader and financier on Zanzibar whose business linked him to India, the wider Indian Ocean, or the world; he was just the most powerful. All of them relied on the Pax Britannica, while the traders of Bombay and London, the cotton manufacturers of Manchester, and the ivory and clove consumers of New York and Edinburgh were in their debt too.
So what might it mean to the merchants and financiers of Zanzibar and all those of so many countries whose wealth was linked to the Indian Ocean trade network if one critical strand thereof – the slave trade and forced labour – were threatened by Heath and his squadron?4
Not only was Heath beginning to threaten thousands of purses at the beginning of 1869, his ally on Zanzibar, the British Consul Henry Churchill, was inviting trouble, too. Churchill’s own view was that the status of slavery should be abolished, by force if necessary, in the dominions of the sultan of Zanzibar. On his own he could do no such thing; but he did think he had the right as a representative of the Crown to forbid Indians from having anything to do with the slave trade. To his mind they were subjects of the Queen, after all. Yet many of Zanzibar’s Indians were slaveholders; some of Zanzibar’s Indians were slave dealers; and some were linked to slaveholding by lending to slave labour operations with the enslaved named as collateral.
So Churchill acted, posting in the public places of Zanzibar notices addressed to ALL NATIVES OF INDIA IN THE DOMINIONS OF THE SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR. It promised their summary ruin, even imprisonment, if they engaged in the trade. Their domestic slaves must be registered immediately, and these would be liberated in a short time. But among the several thousand Indians on Zanzibar were natives of Kutch in western India. Their prince was allied with the British, but the Kutchees were not directly British subjects. Those on Zanzibar claimed to be beyond the prohibition of slavery among British subjects. And, beyond that, they claimed to be under the inviolable protection of the sultan of Zanzibar.
Soon after making his proclamation, a message arrived for Henry Churchill. A Kutchee man was selling slaves in the Zanzibar slave market. Churchill had him brought to the consulate and told the man that he would be tried as a slave dealer. But the Indian laughed. ‘I do not deny it,’ the man said. But, he added, ‘I ignore your power to punish me.’ Henry Churchill considered it a confession and, as promised, made summary judgment. He ordered a large fine and confinement in the sultan’s fort awaiting expulsion to India.
No one was laughing now. Churchill had the attention of Zanzibar’s Indians, many of them quite rich and influential. How far would he go? What business in Zanzibar did not touch, however remotely, on slave trading or slave labour? And Churchill had the attention of the sultan who relied on the taxes that the Indians generated through their ocean-spanning trade.
The sultan sent direct, sharp words to Churchill. The Kutchees were under his protection, he insisted, and Churchill must not arrest them no matter what he alleged. Anger seethed among some of the island’s Indians, and on top of that the focused malice of the Persian Gulf traders who relied on Indian slave dealers. There were rumblings of riot and treason.
Into this threatening atmosphere sailed Edward Meara on HMS Nymphe, much to the relief of Churchill who worried for the safety of the several hundred British residents on the island and possibly the security of the sultan’s throne. The timely arrival of Nymphe, of her 64-pound guns, of her marines, brought tranquillity for now. But Churchill’s offensive against Indian slave-dealing on Zanzibar was far from decided: Bombay would soon weigh in on it.5