As word of the squadron’s ‘zealotry’ spreads, so does alarm in official circles
IN LATE SPRING 1869, Leopold Heath ordered George Sulivan and the Daphne south to the Mozambican coast. It was here that a young Midshipman Sulivan had raided a pirate nest with the boats of the Castor twenty years earlier. In those days, and as recently as the late 1850s, this coast had been haunted by European, American and Brazilian slave-dealers taking abductees to the Caribbean and South America. Now, Arab, Swahili and French ships took them to Madagascar or sugar plantation islands.
The Portuguese had been involved in what is today called Mozambique since shortly after Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa in 1498. They found a thriving trade centre on an island off this coast, an independent sultanate of one Ali Mussa Mbiki, who subsequently lent his name to the region. Over the centuries, the Portuguese wrested the island from his dynasty and poached or built other trade sites at the mouths of East African rivers. Mozambique Island became a fortress, dockyard, destination for ivory and gold dust, Jesuit headquarters, and slave market. Indeed, in times when trade was good, merchant households typically held twenty slave labourers so that the enslaved outnumbered the free on the island. The Portuguese went on to become the world’s foremost slave carriers measured by voyages, and about 8% of those carried across the Atlantic to the New World were taken from these south-eastern lands.
What the Portuguese could not manage to do over the centuries was create a stable territorial empire in the Mozambique region. Wealth was made at the coast, trading the ivory that came down from the hinterlands, serving the ships that passed on their way to Goa, dealing in slaves, extracting customs from African, Arab and Indian traders; the upriver regions, meanwhile, had a reputation for malaria and war. Governors sent out from Portugal had a reputation for seeing their time there as a chance to make personal fortunes instead of working towards inland settlement.
There were some few who saw the interior as a place to make their fortune, on the other hand, people like Tippu Tip in the lands to the north. Colonial militia captains received licences to create inland fiefdoms in exchange for planting the Portuguese flag and enforcing the emperor’s peace. But peace was not very profitable; peace did not generate captives for the slave trade.
One part-Portuguese, part-African dynasty knew this lesson well and used outright warmaking as its favourite mode of production. The Mariannos’ was probably the most persistent and depraved slave duchy in the colonial period. It was begun by a half-Portuguese colonel, Paulo Marianno, who defeated his rivals and then built a vast slave labour operation and personal army. Europeans who encountered him said he had an unhurried air, and would survey his personal empire from a high balcony in his makeshift palace while smoking cigars.
But his princes had reputations for wild violence. Paolo Marianno II made a new name for himself and his father’s dynasty when, fetching a spear, he ordered forty men, captured fighters for one of his rivals in the river region, assembled before him. He approached the first and thrust the spear into him, then repeated this a total of forty times. Marianno could have made money on these prisoners; after all, his brother-in-law was the chief supplier to the French of slave labour – technically ‘indentured’ labour – for their Indian Ocean sugar plantations. Marianno could have had these men marched to the coast, but either his legendary temper forbade it or he meant to send a message to his Portuguese and African enemies: fear Marianno, tremble at his coming. In personally murdering forty men, he made a name that Marianno would pass down to his heir and grandson: Matekenya: he who makes men quake.
Matekenya built a new fortress on the Shire River as a seat for his slaving empire, a double-rowed stockade, pierced by musket loopholes and positions for four cannon, protecting a town for his followers and slave army. The war captives too young to serve in his personal army worked in the fields to feed it. His brick manor house with its tiled roof stood in the middle of the fort and fields, comfortably furnished in a European manner. His wife, meanwhile, they called a queen. The enslaved sang a song about Matekenya’s aunt Maria who always dressed in Indian fashion as if she came directly from Portuguese India, though she was African. ‘I have no mother/I have no father/I have no mother to nurse me/My mother is Maria.’
Matekenya’s brother, Bonga, the wildcat, was his top general, while Matekenya’s brother-in-law, Antonio, sent guns to Bonga, who would march into the hinterlands and trade them to the region’s chiefs for war captives. Rulers would take the guns and raid their rivals to pay for them. And Bonga and his men spread their own terror, too, burning and murdering, in order to kidnap refugees themselves. Bonga marched the captives to the sea in chains and Antonio sold them to the French, who would declare them ‘free emigrants’ and transport them to their Indian Ocean plantations. Antonio used the revenue to buy more guns, and so a decades-long cycle, a fire of war and kidnap, spread across the region.
Livingstone and his party had seen their handiwork first hand a few years before, had seen bodies floating down the Zambezi River, massacred by the wars of the Mariannos and war’s skeletal shadow, famine. George Sulivan’s friend, a missionary, had heard the people of the Zambezi River lands sing songs of the wars and evils of Matekenya. English and French travellers returned from the interior telling how Matekenya once made a sport of shooting all the Africans he could see from the door of his fine brick house.1
HMS Daphne, Mozambique Island, July 1869
It was early summer 1869, and Daphne was about to depart Zanzibar for Mozambique Island. While the men finished stowing supplies ferried across the harbour from French Charlie’s saloon, Daphne’s new surgeon reported. William Dillon was a seasoned doctor though younger than Sulivan, an Irishman, tall and athletic. He told Sulivan that Tom Hurrex, a Suffolk-man who had joined the ship straight out of a prison two years before, had died of dysentery. And, Dillon reported, he had more cases below in the sick berth.
Some days later the Daphne was at sea east of Mozambique Island, with the eastern horizon just beginning to lighten behind her, showing a sky dotted with cloud. The watch set jibs, set Daphne’s wide gaff sails. The wind blew only moderately, but steadily, coming almost directly abeam as Daphne sailed west, and drawing the air of the southern latitudes to cool the morning. Before long land was sighted, the Mozambique coast.
Later they raised Mozambique Island, a place a little over a mile long and very narrow, sitting in a bay into which three African rivers poured. Another slight turn of the wheel, up steam and down sails as the current resisted Daphne. The ship steamed into the small harbour slowly and sounded often, since the sea here hid coral all around. The pier of sixty or seventy yards came in sight and soon the men of the afternoon watch dropped anchor.
At the northern point of the small island a Portuguese fort had stood for centuries. The population of the island was about ten or twelve thousand, comprised mainly of slaves, the rest Africans, Arabs, Indians, Portuguese, and combinations thereof. It was from here that the Portuguese ruled their Mozambican territory, or were supposed to rule – George Sulivan had seen little evidence of Portuguese control beyond this fortress. As a seventeen-year-old he had fought a losing battle at the river Angoche with slavers and pirates precisely because the Portuguese could not drive them out themselves. There was another fort at Ibo Island to the north; there were posts here and there along the coast, mainly for attempting to extract customs dues; and to the south there was a garrison at the town of Quelimane at another coastal river mouth.
Other than the fort at Mozambique, Sulivan considered all of these places pathetic. The Portuguese might claim to hold the entire coast, thought Sulivan, but by what right or authority? Certainly it is not by right of conquest, since they have not yet conquered it. There were Mozambican Arab towns just across the bay from the Island of Mozambique that scoffed at Portuguese authority. Sulivan soon learned that the slave king Matekenya’s brother, called Bonga, had in recent months slaughtered a Portuguese expedition sent to tame him. And there was some fear that Bonga might put Quelimane itself to the torch to teach his supposed masters a lesson.
George Sulivan entered Mozambique Town. Everywhere were signs of former wealth and activity with its wide streets, a large palace, hospital and convent. On these streets were many white-turbaned Indian traders and crowds of East African slaves, but it was a place that had been decaying for a long time. Sulivan soon sensed that there was something unusual going on here, perceived agitation or dread. Daphne’s interpreter Jumah made inquiries and reported.
It seemed that an enslaved man – defiant or indifferent or runaway – had been publicly whipped so brutally and long that he had died. The majority slave population was terrorised. The minority slaveholders were, in turn, fearful and more vicious so that more atrocities followed. Sulivan thought death by whipping would have surprised him in nearly any other place, but not on this abominable island. He and Jumah returned to the ship.
Night fell with the barest sliver of moon under broken clouds. Some time after darkness set in completely, word was passed to the captain: a man had swum from the pier and scrambled aboard. He was a runaway from slavery, and George Sulivan had the man brought before him. He questioned him with the help of the interpreter, and the man showed Sulivan recent wounds.
So it continued for the next few days. By day, the crew of the Daphne could see Africans hiding under the pier, hiding along the shore, waiting for darkness and an opportunity to try the swim to the ship. Some came from across the bay in canoes from the Arab towns there.
Sulivan questioned them. Most came originally from the interior of the country, sold and bought in Mozambique Town or one of the towns ringing the bay. They would point to a wound, a bloody stripe on the back. One showed him an inch-thick iron bar that had been affixed to his leg, wrapped around it twice, soldered there. It dug into him, even pressed directly against the bone. His master, the man said through Jumah, had hammered it there as a punishment. The Daphne’s blacksmith, John Letten, worked gingerly to saw it off.
Soon there were ten refugees on board, then a dozen, then more. The evening before Daphne was to depart to hunt to the south, a Portuguese man of uncertain office came up the accommodation ladder. Young William Breen, who once struggled on the beach with his captain to save children from drowning, was summoned since he could understand Portuguese.
The official did not seem pleased. He had a newspaper clutched under his arm. He produced it and Breen read: Several free negroes are aboard ‘Daphne.’
‘We have no such on board. Those which we have are slaves,’ said Sulivan.
The man spoke in Portuguese. ‘They are not slaves, but free,’ Breen translated.
‘If so, they had a right to come on board,’ said Sulivan.
‘No! They require passports.’
Not only would they be flogged, perhaps to death, if I returned them, thought the captain, but it would be a disgrace to the flag and dishonourable.
‘They are slaves. They came on board the ship for protection,’ responded Sulivan. ‘I refuse to surrender them.’
Sulivan could not have known the official trouble – further trouble – he had brought on himself and his squadron.2
The British empire’s preoccupation with the Persian Gulf started before there was much of an empire to speak about. It began there the same way it began in India: with the seventeenth-century East India Company searching out trade opportunities and opportunities to drive off their Portuguese and other European rivals. And so, from small beachheads British influence inched inland by winning more and more concessions from local rulers, often in exchange for the services of the Honourable Company’s navy, until by 1869, with the East India Company replaced by the Raj in Calcutta, the Gulf was firmly under British naval dominion. From a sprawling colonnaded Residency in Bushire, Persia, the Indian government enforced a maritime truce hammered out with difficulty between princedoms for whom corsairing and raiding had been a way of life. It also enforced treaties against the foreign slave trade in Gulf waters and policed piracy. Meanwhile, it watched jealously the manoeuvres of the French in the Persian court and, even more so, the Russians – who might very much like a friend on the western frontier of India.
As in the Indian Ocean, various Hindu and Muslim Indian merchant communities followed the spread of British influence and established themselves in the chief ports. Under British protection they grew in influence until, as in Zanzibar, the customs of Muscat in the eastern Gulf were collected by an Indian firm. While at the western end of the Gulf, exports of pearls – the most important luxury export of the region – were in control of Hindu merchants who sent them to Bombay, whence they fed a hungry world market. That pearl industry depended on many thousands of slave divers.
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There was a row in the Persian Gulf. Lewis Pelly was Britain’s chief diplomat to Persia and tasked generally with keeping the peace in the Persian Gulf. He had spent years getting the myriad coastal powers from Muscat to Basra to observe a maritime truce, shuttling between courts, even getting a new telegraph line extended in the region to help him collect and react to news. And the news was that the Royal Navy were the ones setting fires, not adventuring Arab or Persian corsairs.
In spring 1869, at the height of the spider’s web campaign, Lewis Pelly received some alarming messages. The Persian governor of a Gulf port wrote angrily to accuse HMS Dryad of arbitrarily seizing a trading ship returning there from Dubai having sold a cargo of dates. Dryad had stolen the captain’s trade proceeds, he wrote, and burned the ship – all the while within sovereign Persian territorial waters. The governor threatened to go to coastal leaders and summon a raiding party to retaliate. Pelly suspected that the Russian and French delegations in the Persian Court at Tehran would soon fan the flames of this controversy, if they hadn’t already.
Pelly wrote to his superiors in Bombay to ask that if any of Heath’s squadron should enter the Gulf in pursuit of slavers that they first call at a Persian port to allow a Persian official to come on board to oversee things. Persia had outlawed the overseas slave trade in 1848, but the Royal Navy had no right to search for slaves in Persian waters. Only if Heath’s ships carried the right Persian official would it be legal for them to board and seize a slaver. Furthermore, Pelly should be informed of her sailing orders should any of Heath’s ships come hunting in the Gulf.3
HMS Dryad, Trincomalee harbour, Ceylon, June 1869
The alarmed Bombay government wrote to Heath who was giving the crew of the Forte some rest at Ceylon in company with Colomb and the Dryad.
Philip Colomb had not seen such living greenness as Ceylon’s in about four months. On the coasts of Arabia and Persia he and the crew had seen little more than some stunted palms; but when they steamed slowly into Trincomalee harbour, they saw carpeted layers of the colour, with trees over-hanging still waters multiplying the effect. Colomb had last visited the place as a boy on one of his first ships and this, he felt, was something like coming home again. He sensed happiness spreading aboard Dryad.
The crew needed it – crew and ship, both. Tropic-worn, both, with rotting ropes and sun-blasted canvas, empty storerooms, and withering men. The hands seemed harried and exhausted with ten men in the sick berth. Colomb himself had not felt whole for a long time.
And so followed a month of recovery, restocking and restoring; leaves for the crew, welcomed quiet for Colomb who a year before had agonised from boredom on a P&O steamer. The naval dockyard at Trincomalee was small, but neat, well-built, well-stocked. Homely, thought Colomb. There was special lodging for officers, but the commander-in-chief of the dockyard made his sprawling bungalow available to visiting captains when he could. The house was laid out like a man of war, with a captain’s great cabin, a ward room, a line of lesser cabins and a stern gallery overlooking the harbour. Here Colomb spent many nights talking with the commodore and other officers on the station.
There were rides in the country, hunting, cricket, rockets on Coronation Day. It was hot here – the highlight of one hunting trip was long hours spent cooling in a clear stream – but the heat was less brutalising here where at least there was shadow to be seen. Philip Colomb visited some of the ancient irrigation works of the island; some of their reservoirs drew wild menageries, and he saw elephant, boar, buffalo, apes, pelicans and cranes.
But with the complaints of the Persian Gulf diplomat and Bombay, Colomb could not rest the entire time; Heath ordered him to draw up a formal response to the Persian charges. Colomb wrote a statement explaining that there had been a boy obviously trafficked for sale on the ship in question. And that ship, in fact, flew no colours – Persian or otherwise – and had no papers. It was taken three miles from shore, not close to Persian territorial waters. It was burned, but its burning was judged legal after the fact by the Vice-Admiralty court in Aden. He drew a chart showing the location of the capture, collected affidavits from his officers testifying the same, and swore a statement before the Trincomalee justice of the peace. He collected all of these and delivered them to Heath, who dictated his own backing of Colomb and sent the packet on.
Weeks passed and between leaves the hands cleared, cleaned, whitewashed, restored and stowed. Rattled down and re-rigged; caulked, scraped, painted, watered and coaled. After these weeks, Colomb received orders from the flagship. You are to proceed to Tamatave and place yourself in communication with Mr. Pakenham, Her Majesty’s Consul for Madagascar. It appears from a communication from that gentleman that there has been some misunderstanding between Commander Meara of the ‘Nymphe’ and the Commandant at Majunga.
Not long after, late on a warm afternoon with rumbles of thunder and threats of squalls, the Dryad steamed out of Trincomalee harbour pointed south for Madagascar at the other end of the ocean. Philip Colomb would see what his old shipmate Edward Meara had stirred up in Madagascar.4
HMS Forte, Trincomalee harbour, Ceylon, July 1869
In these same weeks, in green Ceylon, Leopold Heath received a folder from the Zanzibar Residency. The ally of the squadron, Consul Henry Churchill, was in England recuperating from a tropical ailment. His temporary replacement was Dr John Kirk, a physician, botanist and explorer well-known as a long-time companion of Dr Livingstone. He had more knowledge of the interior of this coast than nearly any other Englishman (or, as he was, Scotsman). Kirk worried for his colleague Dr Livingstone, still somewhere in East Africa looking for the source of the Nile. Rumoured to be murdered, rumoured to be found, supposedly murdered again. Kirk and Livingstone shared a faith: they believed that the slave trade could be ended, and all East Africans uplifted, through commerce. The Nile or another great African river must be mapped and commercial ports planted. This would tie East Africa into the market of the British empire, a market that demanded ivory, maize and cotton, not slaves. So went the hymn of Free Trade. Onward, Christian soldiers.
In the packet was a copy of a complaint from Dr Kirk to the Bombay government about the interpreters sailing with the squadron. They were incompetent, he said, at best; scoundrels at worst. Kirk claimed an incompetent, perhaps even illiterate, interpreter on board Nymphe led Commander Meara to burn an innocent dhow at Keonga on the east coast. The interpreter, Kirk wrote, could not have made out the dhow’s papers. The Indian authorities agreed with Kirk.
Then a complaint had arrived from the chief British representative at Madagascar, Conolly Pakenham. Again, a charge of over-zealousness, a threat to Britain’s relationships with Indian Ocean kingdoms. The consul relayed Malagasy authorities’ complaints that Edward Meara and the Nymphe had more or less made personal war on the town of Majunga, even raided the town for slaves, hurried them on board, and fired a shot at it. The diplomat was not ready to believe such a tale in its details, he wrote; but he insisted that the captains of the squadron should appeal to him if they thought a treaty was being violated before jumping headlong into the middle of international relationships.
Such a tale Heath had to investigate. If true, if Meara really had fired upon the town, the diplomatic consequences would be dire, could easily lead to the French stealing a diplomatic march on the British there.
First Heath ordered Colomb and the Dryad to Madagascar to ascertain things. Heath sent along a message for the consul: whatever his complaints of overstepping, Pakenham could not deny that the illegal trade in his sphere of responsibility was as active as ever. And it was only Commander Meara acting on duty and conscience that led to the discovery of the illegal importation of Mozambicans, and decidedly not the conscience of authorities at Majunga who never mentioned it to Meara until he discovered it himself on the information of two runaway slaves.
Then Heath ordered Forte to ready for sea. He would go to the Seychelles to speak to the escapees from Madagascar whom Meara had landed. On the flagship’s broad quarterdeck the officer of the watch directed Forte’s departure from Trincomalee. In mid-afternoon the men turned the capstan as a wind began picking up which would hurry their way. But on the wind came clouds.5