Forces array against the squadron while Daphne approaches the realm of a slaver king
TROUBLE WAS BREWING for the squadron. While they were facing heat, disease, boredom and slavers’ guns and spears, the squadron’s most powerful opponents were beginning to muster. Between late 1868 and mid-1869, first India then London took notice of the threat of Heath and his new methods – the threat to their economic and political arrangements, not the squadron’s threat to slavers.
Britain’s relationship with the Zanzibar sultanate was the province of both the Foreign Office in London and the British Indian government in Calcutta, capital of the eastern half of the British empire, a sort of Constantinople to London’s Rome. (‘Why, this is London!,’ Kipling wrote of the city on the Hooghly, ‘This is Imperial.’) Calcutta and its sub-administrations, Bombay and Madras, concerned themselves with Britain and India’s relationship with China, with administering the vast province of Burma, with piracy in the Straits and beyond that threatened trade to Singapore and points beyond; they worried about the threat of imperial Russia near its northern borders, about difficult relationships with Afghanistan and Indian princes beyond Britain’s direct rule. High on the list of concerns was keeping tradeways open through the Persian Gulf, out of which flowed a stream of pearls and dates and other luxury goods, a place of simmering dynastic and national rivalries. Also high on the list was keeping the paths between Zanzibar and Bombay open and active. Zanzibar meant ivory and copal, chiefly; and it represented a market for cotton textiles and other trade goods and source of cash remittances from its successful Indian merchant community back to India.
For the British Indian administration, the goal of order and the flow of trade through the Indian Ocean did not jibe with zealously fighting the slave trade. The Viceroy in Calcutta, the Earl of Mayo, was in fact reported to think the slave trade question an annoying diversion from his sprawling tasks. The Indian government had never concerned itself too closely with outlawing domestic slavery in the Raj. It was technically illegal from 1843, but under the theory that it should honour local custom to avoid disrupting things, the government looked the other way unless a slave managed to find a British official and plead for release.
Keeping trade moving freely and quickly – and towards India, and not Marseilles or New York – meant keeping Swahili and Arabian rulers and Indian mercantile colonies happy and secure. To this end, India had to keep one place in particular sedate: the port capital of the Omani sultanate, Muscat, which sat right at the opening of the Persian Gulf. The sultans of Oman and Zanzibar were brothers, their father having built an empire that stretched down the East African coast similar to many European empires – a string of colonial ports for extracting the riches of the interior. When the sultan of Oman died, his eldest son claimed Muscat and the younger, Majid bin Said, claimed richer Zanzibar. A dynastic war on the high seas of the Indian Ocean loomed. Trouble in Muscat waters would have meant trouble for all trade coming out of the Gulf toward Bombay and beyond. In order to avoid chaos on the shipping lanes and in the markets, Indian officials brokered a treaty in which the Zanzibar sultanate paid the Omani sultanate an annual subsidy in acknowledgement of its richer inheritance. Zanzibar’s most reliable source of income for the paying of that subsidy was the tax it collected on imported humans. Meanwhile, a major component of the economy in the Oman region was the illegal importation of slaves from Zanzibar by blockade runners. One prince in the Gulf of Oman said that for the mere price of twenty baskets of dates bought on credit, one of his subjects could buy twenty slaves in Zanzibar whom he could then sell back in the Gulf for 1,000 silver dollars. With peace at the gate of the Persian Gulf depending on careful political arrangements – in turn, dependent on the success of the slave trade, the Bombay government made clear that it did not want any disruptions to the status quo.
Heath and his captains were doing just that, and the British Resident at Aden at the southern tip of Arabia was the first to warn Bombay. Starting with Sulivan and the Daphne at the end of 1868, then in even greater volume in the spring of 1869, shipload after shipload of refugees appeared in Aden’s harbour. With so many, Sir Edward Russell suspected that Heath’s captains must be overstepping, overzealous. This, he believed, risked wrecking long-cultivated British relationships with the princes of the Arabian coasts and Indian Ocean. Writing to Bombay and copying in Leopold Heath, the Resident warned that the squadron was condemning ships if they had any slaves on board, even a handful, even if they were the personal slaves of passengers or enslaved crewmembers. By that threshold of guilt, the squadron might burn half the shipping in this ocean, so many native merchants carried a few personal slaves. Instead, only large ‘cargoes’ of slaves should be stopped. Yes, he wrote, those carrying small numbers of slaves for sale might then be able to ‘escape …, but on the other hand a great injustice is avoided, and I am of opinion that if the wholesale destruction of dhows is permitted, the British name will be abhorred, and the minds of the Chiefs and natives will be turned decidedly against us’.
The governor of Bombay himself then approached Heath while the squadron awaited its late March 1868 launch from Bombay. He shared Russell’s concerns and told Heath that he was referring the question of what constituted a legitimate slaver to Bombay’s attorney general. He was also referring the question to the India Office in London.
At the moment this seemed a squall, not a hurricane to Heath’s mind. He believed that his squadron’s instructions were clear. They were the same that had governed the West African squadron in which he had served as a younger man, that had choked the trade to the Americas. A ship carrying slaves on the open sea was forfeit, the status of the slaves did not matter. They could be domestic servants, sailors, or solely carried for sale. Besides, Heath knew that the slaves, whatever their status, could always be sold. It was nearly inconceivable that the squadron should let pass ships because they were only carrying, say, half a dozen victims. If the instructions changed to set a certain threshold below which a slaver could pass, the obvious result would be that every ship on the African and Arabian coasts would carry this many, knowing that the British could not touch them. The heartburn of the Resident at Aden would cease, imagined Leopold Heath, but at the cost of practically legalising the slave trade.
A month later, Heath received a letter from Bombay stating that it was the opinion of the Bombay government’s attorney that the squadron’s captains must have proof that any slaves on board were being carried expressly for the purpose of being sold. Ships carrying slaves must be presumed innocent of slave-trading. And so the barometer tilted left again, towards RAIN, but Heath still believed that he had his longstanding instructions on his side, whatever the view of Bombay. He also had evidence in his possession – letters taken from a captured dhow – showing that slave owners sometimes sent their victims to work on a dhow during a passage overseas with the intention of then selling that slave once that dhow reached port. He forwarded these to the Admiralty; slaves that served as crewmen could also be headed for sale, and they didn’t have to just take Heath’s word for it.
HMS Forte, Aden harbour, June 1869
On arriving in Aden for his rendezvous with the squadron after the spider’s web campaign, Leopold Heath found a letter from the Admiralty in London. It instructed him to tell his captains to tow captures to port or send them in under prize crews. Captures should, it read, be investigated by authorities in Aden, Bombay or Cape Town before official condemnation. And suspected slaver captains should be given passage to port so they might defend themselves in Vice-Admiralty court. Only if it proved impossible to reach port should dhows be burnt on the spot, and in such cases the officer must carefully detail his justification in doing so in a report to the commodore and these forwarded to the Admiralty for review. And so the barometer dropped, again.
His squadron had just completed its most successful campaign ever. That success rested on a greater focus than had ever been shown by the station and rested on a strategy of lying in wait for slavers driven before the monsoon. If his ships had to return to far-off Aden towing a delicate dhow and bearing its captain every time a cruiser made a capture, they would be constantly off their positions and slavers would slip through the web. Simply put, the strategy would fall apart.
Among the documents enclosed with the Admiralty instructions there was a complaint from the sultan of Zanzibar that his people’s dhows had been burnt by Daphne solely for carrying slave sailors or because they carried fittings suitable for bearing slaves over the sea. It was a natural defence of the sultan’s merchant subjects, to be expected. And Heath saw that the consul at Zanzibar, Henry Churchill, had answered the sultan defending the squadron. The squadron did not act arbitrarily, he said, but always took care to distinguish slavers from honest traders. Churchill’s support was a good sign. But Heath came to another letter in the bundle, clearly the one that prompted the new instructions from the Admiralty. It was from Whitehall, the Foreign Office. Bombay’s communications with London had indeed attracted attention, it seemed – and had indeed been convincing, it seemed. The Foreign Office wanted assurances that the squadron was only condemning ships on the basis of ‘ample evidence’ and that they were really in violation of treaties. And so it had asked for the new instructions ordering the slaver-hunters to tow their captures into port. Complaints coming from varied corners, from influential offices: it might be a sign that a real storm loomed beyond the horizon.1