News of their work precedes the captains to Britain, to good effect
THEIR TIME on the station up, Meara departed for England in early spring 1870, Colomb late spring, and Heath in the summer, having been successfully checked by the government. Meara and the Nymphe had released over 400 people and discovered the illegal captivity of over 200 at Majunga, Madagascar; Colomb had released over 360; Heath released 80, and Sulivan took over 1,000 people out of slave ships in his longer period in the squadron.
Heath was right about what the new rules would mean for the fight against the slave trade. From 1870 the number of the squadron’s captures plummeted; while over 1,000 people were removed from slave ships in 1869, only 302 were in 1870, with most of those freed from a single slave ship. In the next two years numerous alleged slavers were absolved and recompensed by Dr Kirk and other judges because captains could not prove the captive Africans on board were being taken for sale. In several instances restitution required delivering people back into a state of slavery.
But what Heath and his squadron did not seem to know was that, while it was being checked, the squadron’s campaign made the news back in Britain. The newspapers retold stories of rescues, desperate fights and scenes of misery, often lightly re-working Leopold Heath’s official reports to the Admiralty to look like timely correspondents’ dispatches. And making the newspapers was key: from the 1850s the number of cheap newspapers in Britain increased dramatically; the majority of the middle class could read, and the illiterate often had opportunities to hear the newspaper read. Beginning after Sulivan and Daphne’s first successful experiment with laying traps at chokepoints in 1868, the squadron made headlines, with stories multiplying greatly after the successes of the full spider’s web in spring 1869.
The stories made good copy, with their Boy’s Own action – sailors clambering over the sides of slave ships to battle villains. And in a period when newspapers began to compete with each other to offer the most provocative images, the stories provided exciting material. In their depictions of Daphne’s men boarding a slaver at sea or the crew of the Nymphe cutting out a ship in Zanzibar harbour, illustrators let their imaginations run wild so that boardings looked like battles. Stories of the squadron’s work included descriptions of the brutalised and starving African kidnapees too: both lurid and genuinely heartrending. The steady stream of stories, often reproduced across many smaller provincial newspapers at the same time and totalling around sixty over three years, seemed to appeal to national pride in both originating the abolition movement and distinguishing what readers thought of as ‘the British race’ against ‘those barbarous and backwards races’ that engaged in the slave trade.
Readers’ eyes opened to a trade that thrived after the public thought West African trade was crushed, and to the way the British and Indians were either complicit or officially uncaring. This provided an opportunity for critics of the hands-off Gladstone government. Meanwhile, the Anti-Slavery Society spread the word in its publications, reporting on the hobbling of the squadron and on the censuring of his captains for protecting escapees. ‘REBUKE TO CAPTAIN SULIVAN’, it announced, describing how the Foreign Office reproved the Daphne’s captain for rescuing Mozambican runaways. Each story painfully exposed Britain’s moral liability in tolerating the legal trade between Zanzibar and the coast opposite.
The force of these reports and criticisms was multiplied by the unexpected discovery that David Livingstone was alive in 1869 and the mission sent to find him in 1871. Livingstone served as a sort of prick to the conscience of the nation, with the Pall Mall Gazette writing that he might be disappointed to find that his country had not acted against the trade in his absence but had, in fact, officially looked the other way.1
Penny Illustrated Paper, November 1868
The horrible traffic has not yet ceased. It is an exciting chase of a slaver that forms the subject of one of our illustrations. The zealous activity of our jack tars on such an occasion is well depicted. Gratifying it is to think that their zeal has not been thrown away, but that they have succeeded in rescuing a goodly number of slaves from the hands of their barbarous gaolers.
Penny Illustrated Paper, November 1868
The Illustrated London News, February 1869
Illustrated London News, February 1869
THE CUTTER OF HMS DAPHNE CAPTURING A SLAVE-DHOW OFF BRORA
Reading Mercury, September 1869
Letters received from Zanzibar speak of the activity of the slave trade upon the east coast of Africa, and likewise mention the strenuous efforts of her Majesty’s cruisers to suppress it. The Arabs have lost a thousand slaves in the last three months …
Christian Observer, October 1869
So far as the West Coast of Africa is concerned … the African Slave Trade is a thing of the past. But while this happy result is chronicled concerning the old Atlantic Slave Trade, the annual reports of our Consul at Zanzibar, and the despatches of the naval officers in command of the few vessels which form the East African Squadron, tell a very different story. … From these reports … we learn some particulars of the … evils and misery inflicted on that hapless land.
Morning Post, October 1869
Convictions as to the safety of Dr Livingstone have now been confirmed by the intelligence received only a few days since from Bombay.
… The motives which chiefly induced him … consisting in the ardent desire cherished by the great traveller to continue his crusades against the slave trade still extensively carried on in the south-eastern districts and to follow up the important discoveries made by the late captain Speke and his comrade Major Grant.
Penny Illustrated Newspaper, December 1869
A BLOW FOR FREEDOM
Our Jack Tars are happily engaged in no war with the enemies of their native land, but they have this year struck more than one good blow against the inhuman slavers who still carry on their infamous trade on the east coast of Africa. The crew of her majesty’s ship Nymph, Captain Meara, have in particular distinguished themselves.
Mission Life, January 1870
One thousand slaves have been liberated during the last three months, and the dhows containing them have been destroyed. … In the meantime, we trust that some of the entanglements at present surrounding the question (and also our efforts) may be swept away, and that the attention which our Government has centred on the abominable slave trade, as it exists in the Sultan of Zanzibar’s dominion, will not prove abortive.
Western Times, May 1870
ABORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY – The thirty-fourth annual meeting of this society was held on Wednesday evening at the London Tavern. Sir Charles W. Dilkie, Bart., M.P. presided. Mr. F.W. Chesson, the secretary, read the annual report. … Sir T.F. Buxton, Bart., in moving the adoption of the report urged that vigorous measures should be adopted for the suppression of the Zanzibar slave trade, for which purpose it was our right and duty to interfere.
Pall Mall Gazette, May 1871
We shall rejoice to welcome Dr. Livingstone back to England; but we fear that the traveller’s own joy will be somewhat impaired on learning that during his lengthened absence little of nothing has been done in the matter he has most at heart. The slave trade on the east coast of Africa flourishes in spite of the numerous despatches that have passed between the English Government and its representative at Zanzibar. It is true that we have a treaty with the sultan, but by one of its articles we have bound ourselves not to interfere with domestic slavery.
Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 1871
BRITAIN A PARTICIPANT IN THE SLAVE-TRADE
Is this to be the lamentable result of our long and arduous agitation on behalf of outraged humanity – that Great Britain shall, in this era of civilisation, be stigmatised before the nations as a co-partner with Zanzibar in this infernal work of making merchandise of our fellow-men?
Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 1871
Restricted in powers, and discouraged in their work, some of our best officials in those slave-holding and slave-trading regions seem to have lost some patience and almost all hope of witnessing the extinction of the accursed system.
We hope, however, that the Committee of the House of Commons on the East African Slave-trade may prove the commencement of a new and effective system of British legislative action. We are persuaded that the national sentiment and will on this point are unchanged; and publicity will materially aid in forming and calling forth such an unequivocal expression of this that willing statesmen will be encouraged, and reluctant statesmen be compelled, to take decisive action in the matter.2
The presiding government of the day, William Gladstone’s, was of the school that looked to commerce, Christianity and civilisation to eventually starve the slave trade. Besides, even Leopold Heath and other supporters of strong measures admitted that at their best the Royal Navy only diverted a fraction of those carried to sale from slavery. So why, multiple Liberal ministers asked, spend so much money on the blockade and the Zanzibar consulate? In its advice to Gladstone, the Treasury cited the expense of the Royal Navy presence, but also cautioned what success would require. Was Britain prepared to be a solo police force on that coast since, as it appeared, the USA and Europe were unwilling to join the effort? And if the sultan of Zanzibar and other regional rulers absolutely refused to shut down their slave markets, asked the Treasury, was Gladstone’s ‘government prepared to reduce their territories to the condition of the protected states of India, or to go even further, and absolutely annex them’? Would justice be purchased through the expansion of the British empire?
Yet in 1871 abolitionists in Britain managed to secure parliamentary hearings on the East African slave trade. Between news of the spider squadron’s success and overriding, Livingstone’s rediscovery, and the ways that the abolitionists used both, the Gladstone government felt it risked public agitation getting out of control. Best to reduce pressure on itself and make the abolitionists in parliament take responsibility for what the government considered an expensive and complicated predicament. So, with its abolitionist chairman and a number of sympathetic members on it, the committee began collecting testimony in summer 1871.3
Westminster, London, July 1871
Since the end of his assignment in the East Indies, Leopold Heath had been given a new task, joining a group of officers considering the possibilities of torpedoes for port defence. Now he entered the Palace of Westminster, stepping in from the cloudy day, almost cool. MPs were preparing to go home for the summer, but both chambers would be busy later today. He found the committee room and took a seat within; twelve MPs were already there.
There was the Quaker reformer Charles Gilpin behind a great brown beard, a driving political force in securing the Select Committee. The bald, stout Arthur Kinnaird, Scottish evangelical clergyman and long-time abolitionist. George Shaw-Lefevre, shrewd-looking, recently made Secretary to the Admiralty, and the Prime Minister’s protégé Lord Cavendish. Sir John Hay, a fellow veteran of the Russian War at the Crimea, a handsome man under his angular brown beard. Chairing the hearing, Russell Gurney, judge and MP for Southampton, possessing the aquiline nose correct for a judge, in his late sixties, but his dark wavy hair and side-burns only beginning to grey.
At one o’clock the hearing began. First summoned was Major-General Rigby, a former Zanzibar consul who had spent most of his life in India and Aden and spoke eight languages. He had worked against the slave trade diligently during his time in Zanzibar, but had limited means. He had reported to the East India Company, whose efforts against the trade were paltry. He had no squadron backing him and little support politically. He had successfully – at least for a time – stopped slaveholding among the British Indian merchants in Zanzibar and on the coast, and freed several thousands from the state of slavery. Leopold Heath could not hear everything that was said, but General Rigby predictably argued for the total and immediate halting of the trade by whatever means necessary.
In the middle of the afternoon Heath was called forward. The chairman spoke. Russell Gurney had a quiet air, but his dark eyes showed intelligence. ‘You had the command of the squadron on the East African coast?’ So the interview began. Questions followed about the suitability of the ships on the station. Heath told them that the Amazons had done their job well. Then questions about his tactics. Heath told them about his spider’s web. Questions about their rate of success.
‘No matter how many ships you have,’ said Heath, ‘there will of course always be some vessels which escape being boarded. It is quite possible that though we boarded 400 dhows during the season I have spoken of, there may have been 400 others that passed outside us.’
More questions about numbers of slavers that must evade capture.
‘You regard that as an unsatisfactory result of all our national efforts for the suppression of the slave trade?’
‘Very unsatisfactory.’
Now questions turned to potential solutions to the trade from the East African coast. If even the most diligent squadron could not stop perhaps half of all slavers, what then?
Lord Cavendish spoke. His features were as soft as Russell Gurney’s were honed. ‘You said you were for some time on the west coast of Africa?’
‘We obtained possession of the port of Lagos, did we not?’ asked Lord Cavendish.
‘Yes, I was there at that time.’ Some weeks after Heath’s nightmare raid on the town, the navy made a second, more organised assault. While this time not a rash attack, it still cost fourteen lives, with over sixty hurt – maimed men and boys, from midshipmen to marines to Kroomen to commanders.
‘Had that a great effect?’
‘I think that it has had a very great effect indeed. It has been a great encouragement to legitimate trade, and I should anticipate the same sort of result from taking possession of the government of Zanzibar.’
‘You think no efforts of our cruisers are likely to be productive of great success till the transport of domestic slaves is prohibited?’
‘That is my opinion.’ The legal trade hid the illegal while the civilian overseers further hampered their efforts.
Finally, Lord Cavendish asked, ‘Do you think the sultan would consent to the entire prohibition of all movement of slaves between the coast and the island of Zanzibar?’
‘He certainly would not do so willingly.’
‘You think pressure might be applied to him that might oblige him to consent?’
‘I think you have only to say what you want and you will have it done,’ replied Heath.
More questions followed, but it was growing late and the Commons was sitting that evening. The committee asked Leopold Heath to return for another sitting.
At the next, there were more questions about tactics, then about relations between the sultan of Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf sultans. Their approach was academic, never hounding. They seemed to sympathise with the challenge the commodore had faced with limited resources. Still, they asked about the criticism his captains had received from political authorities around the Indian Ocean and in London. Heath rose to the defence of his officers, but managed to control his temper, a temper that sometimes revealed itself in his letters to the Admiralty.4
None stoked that temper like Henry Rothery, the Treasury’s legal advisor on the slave trade. Leopold Heath thought him stupid at best, and quite possibly a perjurer in his condemnations of the squadron. In his letters to the Admiralty, Heath wrote that Rothery had a personal basis for his critiques of the squadron’s tactics; Rothery, in turn, called Heath ‘insolent and arrogant’ in his memos. Heath called Rothery’s findings ‘arbitrary’ and ‘irregular’ in his letters. Rothery was one of the men behind the committee that issued the new instructions for the squadron at the end of 1869, helping to stop the squadron’s work by essentially halting any captures except those of very heavily laden slavers, requiring that most slavers be towed to one of a few ports for adjudication or be at dire risk of being overturned.
Henry Rothery sat in this room at this very moment. Leopold Heath’s second interview over, Rothery was called forward.
‘You are legal adviser to the Treasury in all matters relating to the slave trade?’
The committee asked him about the functioning of the Admiralty courts around the Indian Ocean, about where he thought Africans taken from slavery should be settled, about prize money and bounties, and about the abuses that Rothery alleged.
‘The Admiralty instructions issued in 1870 were drawn up in consequence of reports made by you?’
‘Yes.’ Rothery explained how the squadron had overstepped its bounds and how it was necessary to keep a closer eye on it; he hinted that the captains on the station indulged in wilful ignorance of the rules for the purpose of playing pirate.
‘We had no idea that the officer commanding could have so misapprehended his instructions. The instructions are entitled, “Instructions for the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” and not of “slavery,”’ Rothery said. Perhaps, he suggested, it was because of some kind of fanaticism.
‘I may mention another instance which led to the issue of those instructions,’ he said. ‘One of our officers captured a vessel, and brought the slaves – the slaves being domestic slaves – to Zanzibar; Dr Kirk or Mr Churchill said that the vessel was undoubtedly a legitimate trader, but that officer, notwithstanding that the vessel was restored, carried off the slaves to the Seychelles.’
‘In your opinion is it exceedingly important that every protection should be given to honest trade there?’
‘I think it should be encouraged in every possible way,’ said Rothery.
‘I presume it is to the increase of legitimate trade that we may look, more than anything else, for the suppression of the slave trade?’
‘I should have thought entirely.’5
The next day Commander Colomb took his seat.
‘You were employed for some considerable time on the east coast of Africa in the suppression of the slave trade?’
‘Yes.’
Sir John Hay, the retired captain, asked him practical questions about the right ships for the duty, about how long officers should work on the station, about their preparation.
‘Did you find great difficulty owing to the fact that the home trade in slaves at Zanzibar being legal, the foreign slave trade to the Persian Gulf was able, under the cover of that, to evade the action of the cruisers?’
‘I think that made the greatest difficulty. I think that threw a great barrier in the way of dealing with the trade about Zanzibar. I think the whole state of things would be altered if all slave trade to and from Zanzibar were made illegal.’
‘Do you think it possible to stop it altogether by naval operations so long as that mode of evading it is open to the Arab dhows?’
‘No, but I should say that I doubt whether it would be possible to stop it altogether by any forcible measures. I think the stoppage of it altogether must be done by dealing with the authorities at the ports of debarkation by means of treaties.’
‘Would you anticipate any great advantage from treaties?’
‘Yes, because I think when armed with a treaty the naval force can act more efficiently. The treaty does not act so much directly as indirectly by keeping the people in fear. I would not trust altogether to the moral force of treaties in those cases, but treaties give the naval officers a great deal more power than they otherwise would have.’
More questions: about the fate of captives on the overseas trip; about where best to post patrols; about allegations that the squadron precipitously burned dhows.
The Scottish evangelical Kinnaird asked, ‘Was there any commendation for, or special notice taken of, activity on the part of any of the officers commanding the cruisers?’
‘My own experience is that it was a little the other way.’
‘You thought that no encouragement was given you?’
‘I speak, of course, of what happened to myself. I had one or two letters from the Foreign Office which were not commendatory, but the reverse.’
‘So that there was rather discouragement than encouragement, in putting down the slave trade?’
‘So far as my experience goes.’
Questions followed about the hard future ahead of people taken out of slave ships, then about whether slavers might evade a stronger naval force by going overland to the north.
‘Is there anything further which you wish to state to the committee?’ asked Sir John Hay.
‘I should like to mention that there is a trade to Madagascar which is still in a more or less flourishing state.’
Colomb had noticed that the committee members focused all their questions on the trade permitted by treaty between the mainland and Zanzibar, and the smuggling trade to the north. They had kept their hands off the matter of the trade between Mozambique and Madagascar – where both the Portuguese and Malagasy were supposed to have made it illegal.
The committee indulged Colomb in letting him describe this trade for a few minutes, but no more. It seemed as if they didn’t want to touch it. Perhaps the politicians found the matter too fraught – a tangle of international relations. The traffic across the Mozambique Channel was closely tied up with the French and the Portuguese and their trade in engagés from Portuguese colonial lands or Madagascar. The French, too, were openly covetous of Madagascar, their sugar islands surrounding the great island; aggravating the Malagasy might drive them into the welcoming arms of the French. The traffic in the enslaved to the north involved Zanzibaris, Omanis, Persian Gulf adventurers and Swahili blockade-runners. It was a situation in which the ‘enemy’ was easily distinguished by race and religion and neatly set in opposition to the side of ‘good’. For whatever reason, the Select Committee turned Colomb from the subject, then dismissed him.6