Harbor of Spies

by Robin Lloyd

  The correspondence from the Confederate agent based in Cuba, Charles Helm, revealed that he was pressing hard to persuade the Spanish to support the Confederacy, emphasizing the shared belief in continuing slavery. He made it clear how friendly he was with the British consul general, who was eager to reflag blockade-running Confederate vessels with the British flag. From his letters, I learned his job was to keep close records of all blockade-running ships, and their cargoes, and persuade the European powers that the Union Blockade was a farce.

  With regard to the British viewpoint, some of the correspondence of the British consul general, Joseph Crawford, points out how much the slave-trading issue was of paramount importance and concern. In one of Crawford’s dispatches back to London, he reported in January 1863 that a Confederate emissary had been seen in Havana who was linked with a steamship fitted out for the slave trade. That vessel was the Noc Doqui, one of the slave ships owned by the Cuban slaver Julián Zulueta, who was the primary shareholder in the Spanish slave-trading syndicate known as La Compañía. The New York Times reported in January 1863 that the US Navy had captured this steamship off the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres. By then, it had been transferred into Confederate hands. That startling detail gave me an important thread for the plot. It made sense. The Confederacy needed ships, and the slave-trading interests in Cuba, who openly favored the South, had a fleet of fast ocean-going steamships.

  The first mention I found of the African Expedition Company was a report written by retired US Navy Captain R. W. Shufeldt in January 6, 1861, about “the secret history of the slave trade” in Cuba. In the report, Shufeldt described how “an organized company exists in the city of Havana with a capital of one million dollars whose sole business it is to import Negroes into the island of Cuba.” He identified the head of the company as a well-known Spanish merchant. Julián Zulueta’s and Pancho Marty’s involvement in slave shipments is well documented in British consular records as well as in the consular reports to Washington from acting US consul general in Havana, Thomas Savage.

  Finally a book written about the experiences of one of the British diplomats living in Havana in the mid-nineteenth century, who was knifed and killed in his home, provided an essential thread for this novel. This was an actual murder that was never solved. The book, Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean by Luis Martínez-Fernández, is a well-written account of George Backhouse and his time in Havana as the British representative in the joint English-Spanish Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade. The book tells the poignant tale of this man’s struggle in Cuba to enforce the Treaty laws against slave trading, and how he was attacked by unknown assailants in his own home and murdered in 1855.

  In the collection of Backhouse letters at Duke University, I was able to read newspaper coverage about the murder as well as some of the letters to and from Grace Backhouse in the months after her husband’s death. One of the letters stood out. Mrs. Backhouse writes a poignant plea to Lord Clarendon at the Foreign Office requesting greater financial help as “her husband lost his life in the service of his country.” In that same letter she writes that his murder “may in reality have been the result of a slave dealing conspiracy.” Her pleas for more financial help from the Foreign Office were politely received, but strangely seemed to fall on deaf ears in London. She ends the letter with a heart rendering appeal. She wrote, “Were it not for my children, I would have been, not only content, but most thankful to have borne my sorrows in silence.” Another mystery was a missing journal. The letters sent from the consul general’s office in Havana to Grace Backhouse some months after her husband’s death mention that no trace of her husband’s journal could be found.

  A man’s escape from El Morro castle into the sea seemed like a good way to begin. I’d read accounts of how the Spanish authorities in the nineteenth century would hurl the bodies of prisoners, who were executed, over the walls of El Morro castle to what they called a sharks’ nest below. The bodies were also thrown down chutes built inside the fortress walls. What triggered my imagination was a story I had been told about an escape from El Morro. This story had been passed down in one Cuban family from generation to generation. As I wrote that first chapter, I was thinking of John Singleton Copley’s painting, dated 1778, now in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, of the actual rescue of a young British sailor, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbor.

  —Robin Lloyd

  July 25, 2017