Sulivan tests the depths of hypocrisy while Colomb examines the fate of the African refugees
THE PORTUGUESE CROWN decreed a ban on slave trafficking by its subjects in 1836, though few took notice in Mozambique. There followed a decree in February 1869 – only made public in Mozambique in July 1869 – that called for the end of the status of slavery throughout the Portuguese colonial empire. In late summer 1869, George Sulivan witnessed just how effective was Portugal’s abolition declaration. Even if Portuguese officials in Mozambique Town had truly wanted to halt the traffic in humans in the Mozambican interior, it is doubtful that they would have had the influence to do so, Portuguese power being so weak outside the main ports. Besides, for colonial officials, a posting to one of Portugal’s colonies on the East African coast had few attractions, but the opportunity to make money by abetting the trade in engagés was one. For their ‘services’ Portuguese officials, including the governor, the attorney general, the head of customs and the governor of the port of embarkation, each received their share of engagés dealers’ fees. Other Portuguese merchants became contract procurers for the French – one entered into and fulfilled a record contract for 1,500 ‘free labourers’ one year – and they in turn stoked the local economy by employing subcontractors and purchasing vast amounts of food and trade goods.
HMS Daphne, off the Mozambique coast, September 1869
George Sulivan was back on the Mozambican coast where he found news that Portugal had recently officially abolished the slave trade in its colonies. It remained to be seen what such words meant in this abominable place.
The Daphne was anchored off a small island hiding place, not seven miles from the Mozambican coast, with tall pines crowding over white sand. It was a morning of clouds in blue sky and fresh breezes, but not a peaceful morning as Daphne’s great guns were pounding away. The crew was exercising at quarters for battle, with the marines, the gunner and his mates, bosun, gun crews, lieutenants and midshipman arrayed in their places. They hurled 64-pound shells, 7-inch, 22 pound shells, shattering case shot, and exploding percussion shells, aiming at the trees as if they were masts.
Not long after the exercise began, a lookout sighted a vessel to the south moving north up the coast towards them before a southerly wind. Not a high-prowed dhow, and no fat lateen sail, within about twenty minutes it showed itself a schooner. The gunnery exercise still going, Sulivan ordered one of the cutters manned and dispatched to perform the routine inspection. The cutter beat into the wind to intercept the schooner, which did not flee, and not long after the ship, bearing a Portuguese flag, was alongside. Sulivan examined the people on board with the interpreter Abdalla, the former assistant of the deceased Jumah. The ship was recently out of Quelimane, the Portuguese fort near the Zambesi River, and was bound for Mozambique Island. The crew was mostly Portuguese, but some men on board were Indian, born in the British territories of India, but now trading out of Mozambique Island.
On the ship Sulivan saw eight African children aged perhaps four to ten. Questioning some of them in Swahili, Abdalla repeated familiar stories. ‘Stolen … dragged … sold … brought in a vessel from the mainland … beaten.’ Sulivan and the interpreter eventually came to a clutch of the youngest of the children, boys and girls, who had holes in their lips and ears where there were once ornaments. Abdalla put the usual questions to them, but the children showed no sign of recognising Swahili, the lingua franca of the region. No one on board the Daphne or the Portuguese ship could understand them. They have recently been brought from the interior, thought Sulivan – so far in from these lands that they did not speak Swahili.
Questioned, the captain of the schooner said that none of the Africans on board were slaves. They were, using the Portuguese jargon, ‘free negroes’. He had passports for them all, purchased at the customs house on Mozambique Island. One of the men from British India kept the passports for the four small children who did not know Swahili. They were Portuguese subjects, he claimed, and were migrant labourers.
Sulivan knew that Arab slavers took the blame for the trade across the Mozambique Channel when in fact the trade was fed by the Portuguese and their allies. And it was sometimes carried on by them in this piecemeal way, a handful of victims at a time. Portuguese ship captains or owners trading up and down the Mozambican coast would make small trades for a handful of captives along with their other cargo. These they would take to the island of Mozambique. A quiet sale, then, either to dhow captains running for Madagascar, or to a private buyer on the island, or to engagés dealers. An open slave market like the one at Zanzibar was illegal on Mozambique, illegal even before the recent declaration of emancipation made in Lisbon. But shadowy market there was.
To Sulivan’s mind it was unjust that the Portuguese escaped blame. But, he thought, here was a perfect chance to expose the trade carried on by the Portuguese themselves. Now he could put their hypocrisy on display. Now he had four children with tales of kidnap and sale, and four small children who could speak no known language, who could never be claimed to be selling their labour freely. Yes, the men on the schooner held passports for them, but Sulivan was certain that he had these Portuguese caught.
So he had a choice: he could take the crew and children on board the Daphne and tow or burn the schooner, defending his action later in the Vice-Admiralty court at the Cape of Good Hope. But there was a risk that the court would accept the sham passport system. He knew that the squadron was under heightened scrutiny from civilians. Who knew how far it went? A less risky choice, he believed, was to escort the schooner into the harbour of Mozambique Island itself. Surely the governor there could not claim that these children were mere passengers who had bought passage to Mozambique Island, migrant workers. The schooner must be condemned.1
After a short passage north over flashing bright seas, the Daphne lay at anchor in the wide harbour of Mozambique Island, her prize, a Portuguese schooner, lay not far away. Having busied his people with rattling down rigging, scraping and preparing to paint, George Sulivan crossed to the pier, went down it and into the town to find the governor, Fernando da Costa Leal. That schooner, he expected, would soon be condemned and burnt, the African children borne to the Seychelles or Mauritius or perhaps to Bishop Tozer’s small school on Zanzibar. Past the flat-roofed houses and the cathedral, once grand, but wearing badly under the tropical sun, he headed for the governor’s mansion, plastered pink.
Sulivan eventually found him and an interview followed. After pleasantries Sulivan and Da Costa Leal came to the matter of the passports, properly signed by the appropriate authority in Quelimane. The governor judged these all in order, and came to a decision. He told Sulivan, assured him, that the children were not at all slaves but ‘free negroes’, as proved by the passports. Still, as he spoke, the governor slipped, saying that the children legally ‘belonged’ to the Indian merchant on board. He caught himself up: they were not property, they did not ‘belong’ to anyone. The schooner, he concluded, was a perfectly legal trader and honest transporter of free labourers.
Sulivan had not expected this depth of hypocrisy. He thought the entire institution of Portuguese colonialism on this coast a kind of fraud, thought their protestations against the slave trade were cheap, affected piety, but he had not truly believed this was possible. Yet it happened, Governor Da Costa Leal had solemnly declared the sun the moon. The children on that schooner who could not speak Swahili, let alone Portuguese, had somehow travelled to the coast of their own volition to contract with an Indian merchant for labour services and transport of their own free will.
And so now Captain Sulivan was left two bad choices: abandon those children to lives as slaves – lives, including for the girls among them, in which their bodies were forfeit to the whim of a master’s appetites; or place a prize crew on that schooner, run for the Cape and plead for a successful condemnation in the Vice-Admiralty prize court. And at the same time detonating, most likely, a diplomatic bomb since the governor here had given a clear ruling as to the legality of the passports.
Probably madness, but still he considered it. Finally, though, he decided what he could only decide given the existence of the papers, the judgment of the governor: the children were lost to captivity.2
Also in late summer 1869, the squadron – or one of its allies – suffered another blow that displayed the gap between officials’ pious words and deeds. Consul Henry Churchill, before he left for England to recover from illness, had tried to break Zanzibar’s main Indian community of their slavery habit. These Indians, many of them subjects of the Rao of Kutch and not immediately British subjects, kept slaves and Churchill suspected them of dealing in slaves alongside their other trade in ivory and copal – trades that could hardly be unlinked since revenues from one fed the other, goods traded to supply one supplied the other. Churchill had threatened the local Indians with arrest if they did not stop, had even arrested one man who had laughed off his authority to do so. But since then Dr John Kirk had taken over the consulship.
And now the government of Bombay spoke. It feared abolition would drive the Kutchees and other Indians into the arms of the sultan beyond the influence of the British. So Bombay renounced the plan, declaring that the Indians of Zanzibar, though they should not partake in the trade, should continue to hold slaves for their personal use.
Meanwhile, a rumour circulated through the small British community at Zanzibar that suggested the sultan would not or could not prosecute those who smuggled captives illegally to foreign shores. Either he did not care about those who ran the blockade, or was too financially beholden to those who profited from that trade, or feared reprisal from the perpetrators. It seemed that the piratical Omani Arabs that had battled the boats of the Nymphe in Zanzibar harbour that bloody night had never been arrested. Word was that their tribe, their quarters, their very identities were known. But they had walked freely in the town after the incident; indeed had spent over a month on Zanzibar before embarking in a dhow for the north. The sultan had promised the British consul he would arrest them.3
HMS Dryad, at sea bound for Mauritius, September 1869
If Philp Colomb’s racial views were deeply prejudiced, though challenged or complicated by his experiences on the squadron, what were those of the squadron’s other sailors? Of course those, too, would have been complicated and varied, but the scene on the Dryad as she carried the 140 East Africans freed from Madagascar provides some clues.
The ship rounded the north side of Madagascar, then worked its way east towards Mauritius, called Isle de France when the grandfathers of these sailors took it from Napoleon. A stiff wind blew broad on the starboard bow and the sea sometimes heaved.
Philip Colomb thought of himself as particularly dispassionate or, as he considered himself, practical. He consciously watched himself for creeping sentimentalism of abolitionists, whom he tended to think maudlin. When such emotion appeared, as it had when he watched slavers’ victims drowning, it was rare and fleeting. He believed that he did not need to draw on sentiment to motivate him to take action against the slave trade in any case. He rejected sentimental conventions about Royal Navy seaman too. He knew that the popular mind held the foremast blue-jacket to be ‘a jolly tar’: simple, but brave and inherently good. Colomb knew better; he knew them in their complicated detail, ranging from ignorant, drunken devils to the almost saintly.
But as he watched his men with the Mozambicans taken from Madagascan captivity, he could not help but slip in his feelings towards the men. They were to a man gentle. Having 140 additional souls meant extra cleaning, extra feeding, meant working around the bewildered and ungainly, meant all kinds of disruptions. Bin Moosa, for example, had constant extra work to make the crew understood by the refugees. But the men were patient, often cheerful, helping to doctor the hurt, sharing out bits from their mess, mother-henning. Colomb sensed a common feeling of pity among the men, so much so that when one of their passengers got in the way they would not even speak in the tone they would use with a wayward boy in England.
If the East Africans represented nothing but a bonus payday to most sailors, the scene would not have been one of mother-henning. And Philip Colomb, who above all the captains in the squadron viewed the question of the slave trade through the lens of hard-headed economics, would have been the first to interpret the men’s little generosities as ‘preserving their investment’ or the like. Instead, in Colomb’s and others’ descriptions, the sailors tended to display a simple sympathy, if perhaps it had the flavour of paternalistic ‘handling’ of stereotyped ‘unfortunate creatures’.
There were two or three meals of rice or grain per day, and the men fitted hoses to the fire pumps on the deck to provide a daily shower with water warmed by the boilers. The first instance was confusing at best for the East Africans, but in subsequent days the shower seemed to be enjoyed, the women preserving modesty beneath wrapped undergarments. The Africans sang and clapped at night, a music Colomb found maddeningly repetitive, and he congratulated himself on his indulgence in letting it go on.
Whatever his esteem for his West African Kroomen, Colomb clearly did not consider these East Africans his equals and was quick to identify the ways they were uncivilised. He was appalled at what he deemed his passengers’ poor toilet habits, and shocked when he came upon a man and woman having sex. (Neither Colomb nor the other officers on the squadron left word whether the sailors and refugees ever had sex, but they did note that the men had their obvious favourites among them.)
On a day of beautifully moderate warmth, the Dryad steamed into Port Louis, Mauritius, and moored head and stern. The most pleasant spot on this ocean, he thought. Not just for the green and relative cool, but for the sense it gave him as European, prosperous, organised, well-governed.4
As George Sulivan did months earlier, Philip Colomb now had a look at the conditions under which he would leave the Dryad’s refugees. Most of the adults, he soon learned, would become indentured labourers. British observers, including Sulivan, railed against what they viewed as Portuguese and French hypocrisy for calling themselves anti-slavery but participating in the engagés trade, but was that fair given the British use of indentured servitude in the Indian Ocean in the same years? Like the French on Réunion and Mayotta, British growers on Mauritius and the Seychelles were perennially short of cheap labour to plant, harvest and process sugar and other crops. In both places, during French and British colonial rule up to 1833, that had meant slave labour; afterward, it meant indentured servitude and importing labour that, if not slave labour, was not free.
The first unfree labour on Mauritius, as in much of the British Caribbean, was the system of so-called ‘apprenticeship’ that lasted for six years after the abolition of slavery there. This was really an accommodation for slaveholders and their gradualist sympathisers, meant to ease the transition from slave to free labour to lessen their economic pain. Over 600,000 formerly enslaved people in the empire above the age of six were forced to remain on their plantations and work for their former masters for forty-five hours per week for six years. Many abolitionists called it hypocrisy for the British to declare themselves liberators then deliver the supposedly emancipated into forced labour, and between their protests and those of the formerly enslaved, the apprenticeship system was halted two years early.
After those years, many former captives naturally left their captors behind and made their own way; hence the shortage of labour on plantations. First, the growers on Mauritius hoped to ‘recruit’ labour from East Africa, paying rulers on that coast ‘fees’ for the privilege, in exactly the same way that the French came to do, thereby encouraging slave-trading. The Colonial Office refused to allow it in 1840. The big growers then turned to the solution of drawing far more labourers from India, who came mostly from the north-east or south, often from a slave caste, and entered into the contracts for five years in exchange for wages, food and clothing. They were attracted by wages advertised at two to three times local rates and sometimes could receive advances that allowed them to buy themselves and others out of slavery. By the mid 1840s there were almost 40,000 Indian indentured labourers on Mauritius. By the 1860s, for every one person of free background, there were three formerly enslaved and eight indentured or free Indians in a population of over 300,000.
Though often motivated by economic desperation, at the moment of signing the contracts they did so of their own free will; this is the key difference between what the French and Portuguese were doing and what the British did. But having done so, these Indian workers had limited freedom. They were required to spend every day but Sunday on their employers’ fields. And it seems they frequently were not aware of all the handicaps embodied in their contracts. If they chose to run from their planting operations, they were often hunted down as if they were refugee slaves, subjected to savage violence. Yet they were not legally subject to any whim of their masters and were liable to be tortured or raped as a slave might be. They might also sue their employers for non-payment or other failures to meet their contract; almost 10% of indentured workers did so on Mauritius, winning their cases over 70% of the time.
In the 1860s and up until 1872 the Royal Navy brought about 2,500 African refugees to the Seychelles where they were welcomed by existing planters and merchants, who thought their islands under-populated and their economy in need of labour and consumers. In Mauritius the total number is lost, but official letters indicate they were sought after there too. This is in contrast to Aden, where at least in this period, Edward Russell did not like to see refugees dropped off; he complained that it was too hard to find them work. In Mauritius and the Seychelles, some refugees entered into a contract for five years of weekly labour in return for wages and food, while others laboured on their own terms, especially in the Seychelles where there was less industrial farming. Afterwards their fates were mixed. Some became sharecroppers, others bought their own land; others experienced poverty and limited prospects.
The East African refugees had not freely entered into a contract, of course, as had the Indian indentured immigrants. They could no sooner chose the destination of the Nymphe or Dryad than walk on water. Yet even had they been able to choose the destination, they could not have gone home. The engagés contractors or slavers would have laughed at their fortune as they re-abducted them at any port at which they might land. And in the unlikely event that the refugees reached their homelands, chances were those places had been over-swept by fire or famine when the victims were originally seized. Of course the British could not have forcibly escorted the refugees to their homes in Zanzibari or (semi-) Portuguese Africa, except by starting a war or engaging in bald colonial expansionism.5
At Port Louis, Mauritius, an immigration officer directed the landing of the refugees from the Dryad, the boats working to and from shore throughout the afternoon. Colomb was interested in seeing what became of them, seeking to compare their experience to that of the Africans set down at Aden amongst stone and airless heat. So he went and observed where they were accommodated, finding clean, airy houses, separate ones for men and women. Suits of bright cotton clothes distributed and good food provided, the Mauritius government did its work with generosity and diligence, to his mind.
But then came the question of the refugees’ fate after a brief period of recuperation. Mauritius, Colomb knew, was one great sugar factory. Sugar was all, and when market and nature were benign, all prospered. If a cyclone struck or the market was glutted, all suffered. The Africans he left there would find work on the sugar plantations usually contracted to a planter who would provide food, housing and clothing in exchange for labour obligations for five years. The planters could provide for them only as well as sugar provided for the planters. All shared the risk. And when the period of work obligation was up, what then? Compete in the labour market against the far more numerous Indian labourers on the island? And what hope for education was there? What exactly was this freedom that he, to Colomb’s mind, was thrusting upon the people he was leaving there?6