A return that marks the beginning of the end
Falmouth, Cornwall, June 1873
Before leaving Zanzibar, the Bartle Frere mission had interviewed Royal Navy officers on the spot asking how a ban on the slave trade might be enforced. They had told them that a base of operations would be needed at Zanzibar, a large ship equipped with many boats, some steam-powered, and a great store of supplies, good medical accommodations, a large crew and an experienced leader.
And so, in early summer 1873, the commission came. George Sulivan had a ship, a posting like none other in the world, and the fulfilment of a mission that had occupied him since he was a midshipman.
He was to prepare to meet the mammoth HMS London in Plymouth. She was a 72-gun second rate with two ranks of gun ports, two rows of stern windows, a wide poop deck and forecastle, over two hundred feet long and with 260 sailors and marines. London was almost as old as he was, a veteran of Sebastopol in the Russian War. In truth she was a giant of a bygone era, though she had been refitted with steam engines. But she was no cruiser: her role was to be the centre of operations, a stationary headquarters in Zanzibar harbour and a carrier for large and capable boats. And so George Sulivan, who had begun his work on the east coast of Africa over twenty-three years before in cramped midshipman’s berths, would return in a ship only slightly smaller than HMS Victory. His great cabin would be roomier than his mother’s house.
His mother Henrietta learned the news of the success at Zanzibar and of her son’s commission to return to his work there, but now she could rest assured that her son would not be the one running up malarial rivers after dug-in slavers. While her youngest boy’s mighty command was fitting out alongside a jetty at Plymouth, she departed this life.
HMS London, Zanzibar harbour, November 1874
HMS London in Zanzibar Harbour, 1881
London sailed from Plymouth via Madeira, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape to her new station. It was late equatorial November when George Sulivan and his great ship approached her new home, the wide harbour of Zanzibar, sounding and sounding again on the approach. The wind picked up quickly and she shortened sail. Finally, finding herself in 60 feet, she dropped anchor. The sleek new gunboat HMS Rifleman was there to greet her, and the light two-gun Nassau, whose shallow draft would allow her to patrol the bays of the coast. Sulivan’s Daphne had been busy over the summer and autumn stalking the seas around Zanzibar to enforce the treaty. She, too, would appear in the harbour in the coming months.
Soon Sulivan ordered the 21-gun salute to the new sultan, Barghash, and paid his respects in the chequered hall. Then the captain settled down to work; he had to rig a hospital and machine shop on board and set up a forge. He was going to need more men, ideally Kroomen, and more senior officers for leading boat patrols. He needed to write to the Admiralty as soon as possible. The new treaty and the arrival of the London would not end the slave trade on this coast. To bring about that end he needed to keep London focused on Zanzibar.
In November 1874 a great ship sailed into Zanzibar harbour. Its captain had been mocked in this very place by slavers eight years before as he stood helpless on the much smaller deck of HMS Pantaloon. But no longer; there were no slavers here anymore.
There were no slavers to be seen under the sun, at least. And the captain of the great London was here to keep it that way and follow them into the shadows. The trade was no longer legal, but it was not ended. The captain was there to end the beginning and begin the end. Many years of work lay ahead for Sulivan and his successors working at Zanzibar, but that beginning would not have been made without the focus and commitment of Leopold Heath, the efforts and blood sacrifice of the squadron, and the abolitionists at home who used their stories to force action in the face of those who wanted to wait for the slow workings of free trade.1
HMS Castor’s pinnace, Mozambique Channel, November 1849
A small sailed boat detached from the 36-gun HMS Castor was patrolling for slavers off the coast of Africa in the Mozambique Channel. It was deep night with no moon, though stars dimly lit the sea, quiet. The narrow boat was moving slowly up the coast on its way to the next river, the next village to hunt. Only the young man – boy, really – at the stern, Sulivan, the midshipman, was awake. The others curled in corners or on the hard planks, sleeping. Nothing but an occasional flutter of the sail or ripple of water from the cat’s-paw breeze broke the silence.
Now something drew his attention to the coast, about two miles away across the dark. The heavens above it lit up, again and again. Soon lightning poured over the entire coast in a cascade, illuminating that world over the water almost without ceasing. It was like nothing that he had ever seen before. Delirious light – supernatural, rapturous light – over Africa. And yet all silent: no rumble of thunder, no rain, reached him.
He watched for hours, never tiring of it, though after watching so long his eyes were dazzled. He thought of God. And in the awe, the elation, he felt God. It was a show of raw Godly power over Africa. This was where to look for God – not in stained glass or priestly prattle. And he remembered then how it was said that the Creator, with all the elemental power of nature, still could speak with ‘a still small voice’. The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, … and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.2
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The closure of Zanzibar’s slave market and the arrival of the great HMS London to enforce the end of the slave trade in Zanzibar waters was the beginning of the end of the East African slave trade. It was not the end, but it was a victory in a battle without which the war could not have ultimately been won. Slavery remained legal on Zanzibar and in the sultan’s dominions, while the local trade in the sultan’s terra firma territory continued.
But on the seas the immediate consequences of the new campaign were drastic. George Sulivan and the station commodore had five to seven ships well-suited to direct against the slave trade on the coast: Briton, Columbine, Daphne, Nassau, Rifleman, Shearwater and Thetis. With the London as a kind of miniature dockyard and receiving centre for released Africans, the ships engaged in the hunt rarely had to leave their work. The coast was divided into rational hunting zones, with suitable ships appointed to each on the sound basis of Sulivan’s and others’ experience (in later years one captain carried Colomb’s book as his main source of guidance), and all the while London loomed like a mother spider at the heart of the new web. There were more years of hard effort by the Royal Navy, political work bringing pressure to bear on Indian Ocean princes, and more blood sacrifice by sailors. But in the coming decade the slavers risked running the Royal Navy’s gauntlet much more rarely.
Far more often they tried to march their victims overland. The Royal Navy did send boats up rivers to try to thwart this, and investigators too. It is very hard to arrive at the numbers of East Africans marched northward during the London era, but probably some few thousands annually. Sultan Barghash declared the overland trade illegal in his dominions in 1876, which at least made his governors subject to punishment if they failed to enforce it. Meanwhile, to the south, the trade in so-called engagés continued under the French flag. This hypocrisy is reminiscent of today’s ongoing traffic in forced labour.
Of course, there was never going to be a happy solution for the disposition of kidnapped East Africans. Either their homelands were flung into chaos and hunger, or they had no homes at all to which to return. But, as George Sulivan himself had long hoped, the Church Missionary Society established a town of freed slaves on the African mainland near Mombasa in 1875. Others were released on Zanzibar in the hopes of providing an alternative to slave labour, which the sultans allowed to persist for years.
After a decade of the tropical sun’s assault, HMS London had to be broken up in 1884. Thereafter slavers immediately reappeared on the coast in force, and there followed a few slaving seasons reminiscent of the pre-Heath era, with poor attention paid by the British and poor results. But then the Royal Navy returned to the scene with a new round of fury in the late 1880s. In 1890 the British declared a protectorate over Zanzibar, and soon, at the price of greater colonial intrusion, the institution of slavery itself was abolished in 1897 by Britain’s client Sultan Hamoud. With some exceptions, the slave trade by sea from the region was over.3