EIGHTY MEN, women and children were squeezed in a space forty feet long and not twenty-five wide. They were in the dark, under a bamboo deck, in airless heat – bent, crouched, huddled. Limbs welded stiff, they could not have stood even had the deck above their heads miraculously disappeared. The meagre hull moved north along the coast. Above it was dawn. But dark, always, under the deck.
In that dark was Kiada, born near the shores of the great lake Nyasa. Over a year before, war came to her village and her brother was killed. She and another brother were seized by men who made them walk uncountable miles far across hills and forests until they came to the edge of a sea, even greater than Nyasa whose shores stretched beyond seeing. She was held in a town on the edge of the sea for a year. There she was made to pound rice, removing the chaff. For some reason she was then placed on a ship to cross the water and it soon sailed the short distance to the island of Zanzibar about fifty miles from the East African coast, the island itself only sixty miles long. Then men displayed her in the slave market there. She had been purchased and packed in this dhow many days ago. She was now twelve years old.
Aminha was sixteen years old and a year before had been at home with her parents. She was abducted, forced to the coast, then transported to Zanzibar where she was made a labourer, carrying loads around the island. But even amid fear and captivity she found some consolation – a husband, another one of her master’s slaves. She loved him, but not long ago she had become desperately sick, beyond the help of her husband. Her master was alarmed, not that she was suffering but because he seemed about to lose his investment. He decided to cut his losses, selling her out of his estate and away from her husband forever.
The boy Bakaat was born at the coastal town of Kilwa to enslaved parents. He had been kidnapped from his father one year ago when he was eleven years old and sold into slavery at Zanzibar.
Mabluk, the same age, was from the country around Lake Nyasa. He had been held on Zanzibar for two years. Before that, he had been given to slavers by his own brother. The two were starving, eating grass in desperation, and when an opportunity came, his brother sent him with a slaver hoping that Mabluk, at least, would get food. The boy was held by an Indian trader in Zanzibar before being sold and stowed in this ship.
Masumamhe was terribly hungry. Fifteen years old, she had been seized in a raid on her village three years ago. Men marched her overland to a port and then shipped her across the short passage to Zanzibar, where she was made to collect coconuts. Then, in the middle of the day, while she was carrying her load, unknown men had seized her, taken her to a house and hidden her away. There were around ten others captive there and they were kept like this for many weeks. Finally the men took her out at night and packed her away in this shallow hold.
Masuk was abducted when there was war in the lands around his village. He had been just a child then. He was sixteen now, a long-time servant of a merchant in Zanzibar. Then, for some reason – he never learned why – he was taken to the slave market and sold. That had been some months ago. Then one day he learned that he was to be carried from the island on a ship to some unknown port. But when the time approached he was told that the ship had been seized and burned by foreigners. Nevertheless, after a time he was crowded into this small ship.
In the dark there were eighty men, women and children bound for a destiny unknown other than that it was a future as property – brute labour, farm work, war-making, house servant, sexual property.
The small ship moved north along the coast. Then came a noise like thunder, but not thunder – as loud as thunder, but sudden, then gone. Something was happening.1
If a country has the military power to stop an obvious evil, should it take direct action? If a foreign military murders its country’s minority children with nerve gas, tortures them to death? If nationalist revolutionaries create rape and torture camps, commit ethnic cleansing? If a powerful country that discovers such evils has the physical might to stop them, must it stop them in order to be ‘good’? Does it have, in other words, an ethical imperative? Otherwise, should it be condemned by history for having sat on its hands?
Or should the powerful country refrain from military force? Act through diplomatic channels or through market forces to employ the carrot or stick? For perhaps acting with deadly force is itself an evil, compounds destruction and pain, leads to unforeseeable consequences and imperial extension. And what begins as humanitarian intervention might degenerate into quagmire. But such diplomatic or economic approaches are often slower, indirect, or incomplete. Meanwhile, evil acts fast and ruthlessly. So it is arguable that those favouring this approach leave children to torment and death while waiting for juntas to buckle under pressure or for revolutionaries to become capitalists.
This is the story of four men for whom these were not mere ruminations, but questions that they had to answer on a daily basis, four Royal Navy officers who, in their ships, had the power to level towns. In their cannon, rifles, marines and sailors they had the power to kill, sink, burn and terrorise. Theirs was a military power unrivalled in history, let alone in their own time. And these men were faced with absolute evil – the slave trade. They looked upon slave ships full of children, their bodies cadaverous; they saw ships full of women being smuggled to a life of sexual slavery; and they saw men being carried with their sons to slave markets at which they would be separated forever – fathers whose essential purpose and meaning, their ability even to attempt to protect their children, was stripped from them.
This is the story of four men who, faced with evil, capable of murdering the murderers at a command, struggled to walk the line between direct justice and civilised restraint, having to choose between the most basic eternal law and the law of modern governments. On one side was a bloody instinct righteously to destroy the perpetrators; on the other side were their orders, which discouraged violence if possible and required adjudication. Those dispassionate edicts emanated from a government and culture wedded to the idea that the good influences of the international marketplace, of free trade, would stop such evils – eventually, given enough time. But how long did Kiada, Aminha, Bakaat and the others have?
In the late 1860s, when this story begins, the British public had reason to be proud of their country’s efforts against the slave trade. Abolitionists were a powerful political force from the late 1700s. Subjects of the British empire were banned from participating in the trade in the first years of the 1800s, and in the early 1830s parliament declared an end to the institution of slavery itself throughout the empire (in some places it was phased out over six years). To enforce their fight against slavery, the British entered into treaties with the kingdoms of Africa’s west coast. They won the right to police those waters for slave traders to the Americas. For many decades the parents of Britain sent their sons to that feverish coast to struggle and die in what most trusted was a righteous effort.
By the late 1860s the British had reason to be proud, but also to believe the matter closed. By the mid-1850s the squadron hunting slavers off West Africa was reporting fewer and fewer of them. A series of South American countries abolished slavery in the same decade, and then the United States nearly tore themselves apart over the issue in the early 1860s, with the North and Emancipation winning.
But the matter was not closed with the wind-down of the Atlantic trade or the end of the American Civil War, for there was a far less publicised trade in the Indian Ocean. There were still slave ships bearing hundreds of captives packed on pestilent slave decks, vast territories decimated by slave raiders and the wars they sparked. Slavers, many from the Arabian Sea coasts and Persian Gulf, carried African abductees to clove, coconut, millet and sugar plantations throughout the Indian Ocean, to the white-walled towns of the Persian Gulf to act as house slaves, or to Madagascar to be made soldiers or sexual property.
The Royal Navy knew about the trade, and in fits and starts roused itself to police it in the mid-1800s. But the imperial sub-capital of Bombay, charged with policing the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean, took little notice. Very few ships were ever appointed to fight the trade, and the news-reading public in Britain heard little about it. There was a brief spark of interest when David Livingstone published some affecting depictions of the murder and starvation caused by slavers on the East African mainland in 1866, but it seemed not to take hold. The abolitionists, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, knew of the Indian Ocean trade and tried to focus attention on it, but they struggled to sustain interest.
That changed when an officer took over the Royal Navy squadron at Bombay and re-energised and re-focused its anti-slaver efforts. This, however, called down the wrath of his superiors and civilian overseers on himself and his squadron. In the end, something happened to call the attention of the British public to the issue and forced the British empire to either admit to a complicity in the trade or take decisive action against it.2
Leopold Heath, George Sulivan, Edward Meara and Philip Colomb are names lost to time outside a small handful of scholarly mentions. But in a gruelling year-and-a-half campaign at sea they hastened the end of the slave trade along Africa and Arabia’s coasts as no one had before. Theirs is a dramatic story of success and despair, cat-and-mouse intrigues and desperate races. But besides the action at sea, it is a story as much about these very characters themselves, allowing us to watch four men’s different reactions to the human catastrophe with which they come face to face. They were not just any bystanders: they were individuals who had at their command the potential power to annihilate the perpetrators. When presented with this opportunity – and they were – would they remain dispassionate? Stick to Admiralty instructions that strictly limited their actions? Or cross the line into the renegadism of which some ultimately accuse them?
They represented an empire which sometimes practised blatant expansionism and avarice – typified by the Opium Wars which the Royal Navy fought and whose brutish settlements it enforced. They represented an empire that sometimes embodied wilful inequality and racial superiority, as displayed in appalling responses to the Irish potato famine and other famines in India. Yet they represented, too, an empire that spent vast treasure and sacrificed generations of sons policing the slave trade from West Africa from 1807 to 1860, prompted by figures like William Wilberforce and a religious movement that pushed for justice.
In their individual personalities the four officers embodied these divergent things: in Sulivan an evangelical sense of equality and justice like that of Wilberforce; in Colomb a faith in white racial superiority and a belief in the overriding importance of the role of market forces in ending the trade; in Heath a frustration with limits imposed on Royal Navy power and independence; in Meara a rather black-and-white view of right and wrong and the conviction that he was the right judge thereof. Of course, as complicated humans, the four were never as consistent as these thumbnail sketches suggest; their attitudes were challenged and inconsistent.
In their personal and professional backgrounds, as veterans of Crimean and Chinese actions and Arctic adventures, the commodore and captains personified much about the make-up of the Royal Navy of Victoria’s heyday. Two had brutal experience of what was involved in the dogged effort to rid the west coast of Africa of the slave trade, a hallmark of service among those who enlisted in the early and mid-1800s.
That effort to check the trade in the enslaved was perhaps the most expensive humanitarian campaign the world has known. It lasted over half a century, consuming hundreds of thousands of pounds a year – about 0.3–1.3% of Great Britain’s annual national expenditure in direct costs alone. And the African blockade cost the lives of about one in ten to twenty of a rough average of 2,000 sailors on the patrol each year. Yet it diverted around 150,000 people bound for slavery in the New World from the Middle Passage.
The effort grew out of a sense of British complicity in the trade before 1808, along with evangelical humanitarianism in Britain, but it also aimed at other countries’ trades. It hunted American slavers – a US law barred its ships and sailors from the trade in 1808 – and Portuguese, Swedish, French and Spanish slavers as each country banned the trade over the next couple of decades. Even after the traffic in kidnap victims to the US and other American countries was outlawed, adventurers continued to run the blockade, tempted by prices that skyrocketed after the bans. And just because the trade was outlawed did not mean that countries like the US had the will or military power to enforce the bans. Even in Britain the will to police the illegal trade was difficult for abolitionists to sustain in the face of high costs in treasure, sweat and blood.3
One group of slaver fighters deserves special mention here as a community of men almost entirely lost to history except among a small group of scholars. Their service exemplified something profound. West African sailors served in the British suppression squadron from its earliest years in a crucial role. Called ‘Kroomen’ after the Kru coast east of what is today southeast Liberia, these African men – many descended from the enslaved and some of them former slaves – had a reputation for sobriety, courage and experience – often they were far more experienced and far more sober than the British sailors and even officers with whom they sailed. And, many captains believed, Kroomen’s constitutions protected them from the malarial miasmas that plagued this part of the world. Their strength was renowned, as was their skill at using a canoe, which they seemed to be able to pilot in any kind of sea. They usually brought their own distinctive canoes on board with them, using them for bearing messages, running quickly ashore, or saving men who had fallen overboard. Some were tattooed with a broad blue-black arrow from hairline to nose, and many wore tattoos of former ships, a kind of history on the skin that grew over the years. Veteran Kroomen knew the landscape, could withstand the promised physical and mental trials, and understood the challenge; every ship on the Bombay station carried them. The Kroomen had a saying, ‘An Englishman goes to the Devil, a Krooman goes with him.’
When a Royal Navy ship arrived in Sierra Leone to take its place in the anti-slavery squadron its captain typically made his way to Kru Town to take on a complement, usually offering pay equal to that of an ordinary seaman. He would seek out an experienced ‘Head Krooman’ responsible for bringing on half a dozen or more Kroomen. The Head Krooman would vouch for the others, instruct them, and intercede between them and their officers. This avoided problems: the Kroomen were often extremely practised sailors, sharing a well-earned sense of professional pride; but a novice seaman or even officer might treat a Krooman with ignorance and abuse. Having the Head Krooman responsible for correcting his own division helped avoid such instances. The alternative, and it happened, was for an ignorant teenage midshipman or bosun to curse or strike a Krooman vastly his superior in merit – and then for all of the Kroomen to disappear at the next port.
When a young Leopold Heath led a bloody raid under the guns of Lagos, a Krooman was shot down not far from him on the beach. And when a young midshipman, Edward Meara, boarded a boat and pulled up a wide African river to attack slavers, Kroomen boarded too. As this story will show, the service of the Kroomen in Commodore Heath’s East African campaign was critical. The Royal Navy’s fight against slavers was not simply a story of white men trying to save black men. African men like King Kosoko and his minions were slavers; African men like the Kroomen hunted them.4