The last effort to compel Zanzibar
Cheltenham, England, July 1871
AS HIS FORMER COMMODORE AND shipmate appeared before members of parliament in July 1871, Edward Meara became a father for the first time. He married less than a month after arriving back in England, and his wife had now given birth to a daughter here in his new home, Clarence House, Imperial Square, Cheltenham, an elegant villa with a broad garden square in front of it and a staff of servants.
At forty years old, Edward Meara set aside one life and began another, with trips to Bath and seaside resorts, patronising charities and attending balls. He was on half-pay, but wealthy from his father’s estate and his wife’s. He had been schooled at Cheltenham College in his early teenage years, so coming to Cheltenham was something of a return, and it all meant something of a return to being a gentleman’s son.
And it was something of a turning away from his past twenty years in the Royal Navy, where he had spent long days and nights in West African creeks clouded with mosquitos, where he had seen terror and death – towns in flame and icy wrecks and William Mitchell’s life’s blood leaving him on board Nymphe in Zanzibar harbour.
He was still occasionally badgered by the Admiralty and Treasury, directed to refund prize money because a capture was judged not to be a slaver, and to explain himself for refusing Dr Kirk’s order to re-enslave several Africans.
He had recently been called upon to explain his refusal to Consul Kirk so, sitting in Clarence House one day, Edward Meara took up pen and paper and wrote. With reference to that part of Dr. Kirk’s letter stating that I refused to give up the slaves after the decision of the court, he stated, I beg to state that I certainly did. Then, not reaching far for a justification, he wrote, For in the evidence of the slaves, they were slaves. It was the response of one who did not feel he had to explain himself because he believed in the fundamental justice of his actions. And because he was about to retire.1
Flushing, Cornwall, summer 1871
Meanwhile, George Sulivan was at his mother’s home in Flushing, Cornwall, a village that looked across the harbour to the busy quays of Falmouth. It was a modest house on narrow St Peter’s Road, which rose gently round the peninsula. The view was all water, shipping, sky.
In the house with him was his much older sister, two young maids and his mother, Henrietta, now eighty years old. Her health was failing, but her eyes were still clear. His mother had carefully tended his morality as he grew up in the form of an elementary code of conscience and justice, paired with the plainest Christian observance and aversion to sectarianism. She had spent long years worrying over him and his brother, a decorated veteran of the Russian War, a long-time shipmate of Mr Charles Darwin, whose book had made such a stir. She worried for their safety and for their integrity and conduct, but was not a worrier. A forceful character, she had been the daughter of a man rich with Spanish prize money, then she had been the daughter of a bankrupt man; she did not complain, just adjusted. She was wise enough to worry about her sons’ tact as religious nonconformists in the political arena of the Royal Navy, and wise enough to counsel a young Midshipman Sulivan that though their family carefully observed the Sabbath, he did not profane it by following orders and performing his duties on that day.
For now, she had both of her remaining sons on dry land, safe: one made post-captain and one retired with a knighthood. Though some of her children already lay in the family vault, the sailors in her family had been lucky. Her father, a companion of Nelson and Cockburn, had died retired on land at seventy-six, having very happily spent his hoard of prize money. Her husband had battled the French, Spaniards and Americans in the same wars, and he had died at home, in Flushing, at seventy-seven, without the slightest whiff of gunpowder in the air, without shot at his feet in the cold ocean.
George Sulivan was made a post-captain, but on shore with half pay. He had ascended to that place so long coveted, but now was fit for even fewer postings, fit only for the heavyweights of the Royal Navy. The Sulivan name evoked respect and kindness in that corner of Cornwall, but of all the spiders, Sulivan had the least wealth and fewest connections. He had prize money from his captures, modest bounties, but no one ever became really wealthy from slave bounties. Colomb, Meara and Heath had family fortunes, incomes, rents, office. Sulivan was connected, but only to naval forefathers, siblings, cousins, nephews. So he waited. He could not know whether a posting would come tomorrow, or whether he had seen his last command.2
Westminster, London, May 1872
The next spring, Philip Colomb was speaking at a Pall Mall club for officers of Britain’s various military services, an elegant building with an Athenian façade, columns and a suitably martial frieze.
‘At least one-third of the cost of the candles for those ships may be saved, while the ships themselves will be much better lighted,’ said Philip Colomb to the assembled men. ‘But if not better lighted, we can give them one-third more light than is now allowed them, without calling upon Government for more money.’
He was presenting a paper on more efficient lanterns for Royal Navy ships with greater lighting power, cleaner burning, and safer.
As he had for years, Colomb was studying new technologies and techniques; not shying from the general conservatism of the Royal Navy; free with his critiques. And he had the spreading success of his signal system on which to stand. Lighting ships was not Philip Colomb’s primary study, though; the Admiralty had him working on a set of plans for coordinated fleet manoeuvres. Now that all ships-of-the-line were fitted with steam propulsion, they were capable of precise movement in almost any weather – if they could keep their boilers fed; so Colomb was tasked with creating a common guide for these, with patterns for attack and defence under varying conditions. It was the natural outgrowth, too, of the increasing adoption of his plan for flashing-light codes which allowed greater coordination at night.
But along with all this, Philip Colomb’s mind was still on the slave trade. After putting in his hours on his appointed task for the Admiralty, he worked on a book. He had scribbled in a journal when time allowed since the start of his commission in the Dryad and now he was assembling these snippets, elaborating and adding. George Sulivan shared some of the photographs that he had taken aboard Daphne with him, and the sprightly Lieutenant Henn shared some of his drawings.
The time was ripe. The public was now well aware of the trade on the east coast. Not quite a year ago, he and his commodore had appeared before the House of Commons committee. There followed a constant calendar of abolitionist meetings on the subject and Colomb wanted to contribute to the work of keeping the matter in the public eye. He wrote, always careful to present his story coolly, dispassionately; careful not to look like a hot-headed abolitionist, but engaging in an exercise in dispassion.3
Surrey, England, March 1873
Anstie Grange, a grand house of red brick and mellow stone on a hilltop above the Weald in Surrey: Leopold Heath had built the house ten years before when he was employed studying gun developments at the Royal Arsenal. His father was a lawyer, printer, ultimately a judge, and wealthy in land; so Leopold Heath was wealthy by inheritance. He had hardly built Anstie Grange on a mere captain’s pay.
But Heath was no longer a captain, he was now an admiral. With the retirement of another since Heath returned from the Indian Ocean, Leopold Heath had received his flag, the blue flag of a rear admiral. He was then fifty-four years old. That was two years ago, and he still did not have a commission – the head of a foreign station, a great ship of the line, perhaps a port.
He moved constantly between Anstie Grange and London to the northeast, attending to financial business, going to shareholder meetings and royal affairs in gold epaulettes. The government approached him, introducing the idea of joining the Board of Admiralty. That would require a parliamentary contest and a descent into party politics – an unwelcome thought. He declined.
After years in the Indian Ocean he had rediscovered his family, and he found that he liked to spend time with them: his wife with whom he liked to take long walks and go up to London to see art, and his seven children. When he had left for Bombay his eldest boy Artie was just thirteen, now he was over sixteen and Heath began to take his adulthood seriously, speaking to the boy at length about his future, explaining the operations of the estate to him, speaking with patience and describing things carefully. He played chess with him and the younger children, competing hard with the older boys and losing only rarely.
Teenage Arthur even attempted a serious philosophical discussion with his father, guided, apparently, by the writings of Herbert Spencer. Heath admitted to his son that he had not read him. Arthur argued something out of Spencer’s book about how men’s striving for selfish advantage was the great mover of society. Leopold Heath tried to dissuade his son of the idea, and hoped he succeeded.
Recently, Queen Victoria herself had made known her support for a complete halt of the slave trade by sea on the east coast – a sign that Gladstone’s government was becoming serious about the matter. And Leopold Heath publicly supported the abolition of the trade, too. But would it have to do so by force? Perhaps the way that a young Commander Heath had tried under a terrorising fire at Lagos, his shipmates killed right beside him?
Finally came the decision. The months had turned to years, and still no commission. If one came now it meant more years away from his family and his expanding interests in the business world in the City. No, it was unlikely now that Heath could advance in rank on the active list, and he shared the sense of most fellow Royal Navy officers that treading water was unseemly. It was time.
One morning he came downstairs and found his family at breakfast – all there, healthy, cared for. Only a few years ago he and the hands of the Forte had lifted stiff, skeletal bodies out of a slave ship, the bosun rigging a cradle for a motherless infant and trying to find a way to feed her. Leopold Heath came downstairs to tell his family of his retirement. He would stay with them.4
The 1871 Select Committee before which Heath and Colomb appeared issued a report strongly favouring ending the trade. The committee concluded that the trade between Zanzibar and the coast opposite – a trade left legal by Britain’s treaty with the sultan – made it too difficult to police the trade to distant ports. It provided cover for slavers to operate and too often captives first taken to Zanzibar were ultimately carried off across the sea – a point Heath and Colomb had argued. Because of that fact, the seaborne trade must be completely stopped – now, not after many years of the gradual workings of the invisible hand.
The question was how to accomplish this. In 1870, Mejid bin Said died and his brother Barghash assumed the throne. His health recovered, Consul Henry Churchill had returned to Zanzibar to convince the new sultan there to halt the trade. He had been rebuffed, the sultan pleading that if he halted the trade the rich men who relied on it would see him killed or overthrown. It would take work to get the sultan to close his market and halt the trade in his waters. Money, some other bargain, perhaps even direct force. That remained to be seen.
The wheels of parliament moved slowly and there was no immediate plan. And public pressure lessened right after the Select Committee reported in favour of action because the slave trade was thrown from the headlines by a new sensation – a story having to do with the CSS Alabama, the ship the Amazons were designed to defeat. The United States had taken the United Kingdom to court since the Alabama was built in a British shipyard before proceeding to sink over fifty American ships. At stake was the relationship between the countries which had been badly strained during the American crisis and questions about British sovereignty.
But savvy abolitionist politicians took up the matter of the East African slave trade and, armed with the Select Committee’s endorsement for action, they set off on a tour of public meetings to agitate for government action.
As he waited for a commission, George Sulivan decided, like Philip Colomb, to write a book about his experiences fighting the slave trade. Other veterans of the squadron, too, were writing letters to the editor, articles, pamphlets, and publishing drawings in the newspapers. George Sulivan had seen them, and knew the power that the rediscovery of Livingstone had contributed, knew the good work his commodore and Captain Colomb had done at Westminster. He had read about the growth of a movement to take action against the trade on the east coast, a series of public meetings led by prominent abolitionist politicians. So he would prod, too: show the fire and murder at the base of the trade, the obliteration of families, the cruelty of the slave carriers, the hypocrisy and inhumanity of governments all around the Indian Ocean. He had the photographs he had taken of starving children lifted out of slave ships. He had a drawing of a dhow collapsing in the surf on the beach, bodies tumbling out of it.5
Hawarden Castle, northern Wales, November 1872
Prime Minister William Gladstone was at his estate in northern Wales, a great pale-stoned manor house surrounded by a park, brook and wood. He was composing a note to his Foreign Secretary in Westminster. It had to do with the East African slave trade matter.
Gladstone had been dragged into the thing. It really was not his preoccupation, but the passion of those somewhat distasteful radicals his Foreign Secretary called ‘the Anti Slave Trade People’, those like Arthur Kinnaird, who had compelled a parliamentary committee on the matter; Kinnaird, whom Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary considered rather self-important. He and many others had shepherded an outcry among the people so that finally Gladstone’s government had been obliged to promise action in the Queen’s Speech last year. It was his Foreign Secretary’s opinion that the matter had become a potential weapon for the opposition in parliament.
The Prime Minister was certain that he was no less sorry for the plight of the slaves than the next man, though he was sure he was not one of those, as he called them, ‘negrophilists’ who would sacrifice the lives of white men to save black. After all, those blacks were, to his mind, a less developed race and of lower capacity. Besides, maintaining squadrons to fight slavers cost money, tax money, and taxes were the bane of commerce; and commerce was the surest way to put down slavery, commerce must eventually insinuate itself into the depths of Africa creating alternatives to the trade in slaves.
But today, pushed by public opinion and the opposition he and his cabinet were experiencing, he wrote to the Foreign Office. He was working out the details of whom to send to Zanzibar to deal with the sultan, the powers to give that representative, the terms they should lay before the sultan. It seemed that they had landed on a man to send, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, who had great experience in those parts and was a favourite of the abolitionists.
Frere began his career as an agent of the East India Company and rose to become the governor of Bombay and the new British government of India. Exceptionally, he was a longstanding opponent of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. He retired from his governorship in 1867 but was still closely involved in Indian Ocean matters, especially active in publicising the ongoing slave trade in those waters. He even mounted a speaking tour after the 1871 Committee hearings at which Heath and Colomb testified did not result in immediate action by the government.
Sending Frere would appease the stirred-up ‘Anti Slave Trade People’, but Gladstone wrote that he was quite uneasy about using force to end the trade. And he wrote about his concern that forbidding the traffic in any Africans between the coast and Zanzibar might be rather too harsh. Wouldn’t this, he worried, interfere with what were called ‘bona fide’ needs for slave labour not destined for a slave market?6
Just before the Gladstone government sent its envoys to Zanzibar to negotiate the closure of the slave trade, Sulivan’s and Colomb’s books were published. They were widely reviewed in newspapers and periodicals, praised from the Athenaeum to the Pall Mall Gazette to the Westminster Review. Reviewers compared them to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called them powerful without being over-wrought. The specifically abolitionist press celebrated both books for how they were maintaining the public’s interest in the matter. They were frequently both commended for their use of woodblock transcriptions of photographs which, reviewers wrote, did more than mere words to drive home the brutality of the trade. Indeed, one of the images from Sulivan’s book, that of a skeletal little boy, accompanied advertisements for abolitionist rallies.
Then the British mission headed by Sir Henry Bartle Frere was off, its movements and progress related in the newspapers. A few weeks before, they reported that the party had arrived in Aden, then Zanzibar and a grand reception by the sultan. But recently there had been more discouraging news: that the sultan had said that he was powerless to stop the trade, that those who profited from it would see him killed before he agreed to halt it; reports that the merchants of Zanzibar had pled with the mission that halting the slave traffic would ruin the Zanzibar economy.
The new sultan, Barghash, needed to be forced if he was to keep his throne. Frere, acting largely of his own accord, agreed to force him, tearing up the old treaty allowing the transport of captives between the coast and the island. The Royal Navy presence on the coast, including the now-veteran Daphne, blockaded Zanzibar and the sultan’s coastal ports. It stopped the island’s merchant shipping, embargoing everything but American and European merchants, and the Royal Navy unleashed pent-up frustration over being hamstrung by the fine points of the legal vs. illegal trade.
It was the kind of unilateral strong-arm action and commitment that William Gladstone had wanted to avoid – especially for the sake of ‘mere’ Africans. But the blockade worked. The newspapers at home published the news with pride: facing such power and blockade, the sultan capitulated. The slave market on Zanzibar was closed, the importation of Africans to Zanzibar banned, the trade by sea in the waters of the sultan illegal. The sultan of Muscat at the mouth of the Persian Gulf agreed too, and banned the trade in his waters. Consul Henry Churchill’s effort to keep Indian Zanzibaris from holding slaves – once halted by the Bombay government – was now enforced. The Frere mission and Royal Navy promised the total ruin of the rich men of Zanzibar far more directly than the elimination of the slave trade, and it had worked.7