by Wilbur Smith
‘Pass the word to my steward to lay out my number ones and sword,’ he ordered without lowering his glass. The party on the beach was led by a portly figure in blindingly white robes and a full headdress that gleamed with gold. Behind him a bearer carried the long floating banner, scarlet and gold, of the Sultan.
‘We’ll treat him as a Governor,’ Clinton decided. ‘And give him four guns.’ With that he turned on his heel and went to his cabin to change his uniform.
The Arab climbed out of the little felucca and came in through the entry port puffing for breath, assisted by two house-slaves. As his foot touched the deck, the first gun of the salute crashed out unexpectedly, and the Sheikh let out a whinny like a wild stallion and leapt two feet straight up in the air, the high colour flying from his cheeks leaving them ashen and trembling.
Clinton stepped forward, resplendent in cocked hat, blue and gold jacket, white breeches and sword and took the Sheikh’s arm to steady him through the rest of the salute, and to prevent him stampeding back into the crazily rocking felucca where the oarsmen were in equal terror.
‘Will you step this way, Your Excellency,’ Clinton murmured and, without releasing his iron grip on the Sheikh’s pudgy arm, marched him briskly down to his cabin.
Translation was a problem, but one of the Sheikh’s entourage had a smattering of French and some English. It was almost dark before Clinton was able to see through the flowery verbiage and the atrocious rendering of his mother tongue. When it came it was like a great light filling the cabin, and Clinton found himself buoyed up with a savage, warlike glee.
The fat Sheikh, Governor of Elat, with his soft, red lips, was asking for the protection of her Britannic Majesty against the injustices and tyrannies of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
‘Dites lui je ne peux pas – oh, damn it, tell him I can only protect him if he declares Elat free of the Sultan’s dominions, comprenez vous?’
‘Je m’excuse, je ne comprends pas.’
It was tedious, especially in view of Clinton’s eagerness to remove the province of Elat from under the sway of Zanzibar.
The Foreign Office had provided all commanders of the Atlantic anti-slavery squadrons with blank treaty forms, drawn up with deference to protocol and in correct legal terminology. These were for signature of any indigenous chiefs, warlords, petty princes and native kings who could be induced to place their mark upon them.
These documents started with a declaration of mutual recognition between Her Majesty’s government and the signatory, went on in vague terms to promise protection and free trade, and ended in very specific terms with a round condemnation of the slave trade and the granting of rights to Her Majesty’s government to search, seize and destroy all ships engaged in such trade within the signatory’s territorial waters. Further it granted rights to Her Majesty’s Navy to land troops, destroy barracoons, free slaves, arrest slave-masters and do any such other act as should be deemed necessary to the extinction of the trade in all the signatory’s lands and possessions.
Admiral Kemp in Cape Town had overlooked the fact that Captain Codrington had a good supply of these documents in his possession. They had been intended for use entirely on the west African coast north of the equator. The good Admiral would have been a very worried man indeed if he had realized that he had detached his most brilliant but mercurial junior on independent patrol armed with anything so explosive.
‘He must sign here,’ Clinton explained briskly, ‘and I will give him an order on the British treasury for a hundred guineas.’ The treaty made provision for annual tribute to be paid to the signatory. Clinton considered a hundred guineas sufficient. He was not sure of what authority he had to write treasury orders, but Sheikh Mohamed was delighted. He had negotiated for life alone, and received not only the protection of this fine warship but the promise of good gold as well. He was smiling happily, pursing his red lips as he signed his long signature under his new title ‘Prince and Supreme Ruler of the sovereign possessions of Elat and Ras Telfa.’
‘Good,’ said Clinton briskly, rolling his copy of the treaty and slipping the retaining ribbon over it as he hurried to the door of his cabin.
‘Mr Denham,’ he bellowed up the companionway. ‘I want a landing-party, muskets, pistols, cutlasses and carrying combustibles, forty men ready to go ashore at first light tomorrow!’ He was grinning as he turned back and told the Sheikh’s translator, ‘It would be best if His Excellency remained on board tonight. We will see him safely installed at noon tomorrow.’ And for the first time the Sheikh felt a thrill of apprehension. This Ferengi had the cold blue merciless eyes of a devil. ‘El Sheetan,’ he thought, ‘the very devil.’ And made the sign against the evil eye.
‘Sir, may I speak?’ Mr Denham, Black Joke’s First Lieutenant looked puzzled in the light of the binnacle. It was an hour short of sunrise and he glanced down at the ranks of armed seamen squatting on the foredeck.
‘Speak your heart,’ Clinton invited him magnanimously. Lieutenant Denham was not accustomed to this jovial mood from his captain, and he expressed himself cautiously. In essence Lieutenant Denham’s views came very close to those of the Admiral in Cape Town.
‘If you would like to make a protest against my orders, Lieutenant,’ Clinton interrupted him cheerfully, ‘I will be pleased to enter it in the ship’s log.’
Thus absolved of responsibility for having been party to an act of war on the territory of a foreign ruler, Lieutenant Denham was so relieved that when Clinton told him, ‘I am taking command of the landing party. You will command the ship in my absence,’ he shook Clinton’s hand impulsively.
‘Good luck, sir,’ he blurted.
They went ashore in two boats, the whaler leading through the pass in the reef and the gig following two lengths astern. The moment the keel touched, Clinton sprang knee-deep into the blood-warm water and the rush of armed men followed him ashore. He drew his cutlass and his shoes squelched as he led his team of five men to the nearest dhow at a dead run.
As he jumped down from the ladder on to the dhow’s heavily canted deck, an Arab watchman ducked out of the stern cabin and aimed a long jezail at Clinton’s head. The range was point blank and Clinton struck out instinctively in an underhand parry, just as the gun’s lock clicked and smoke and spark shot from the pan under the steel and flint.
His blade clashed against the steel barrel, deflecting it upwards as the jezail roared an instant after the snap of the lock, and a blinding billow of smoke and burning powder struck his face and singed his eyebrows, but the chunk of beaten potleg howled inches over his head. When his vision cleared the watchman had thrown his empty weapon aside, leaped over the side of the dhow and was hopping and hobbling across the sand towards the grove of palms.
‘Search her, and then put fire into her,’ Clinton ordered brusquely.
It was the first chance he had had to look across at the other dhows of the fleet. One of them was already on fire, the flames bright in the early light, rising straight up with little smoke. The furled mainsail was blackening like a dried leaf, and he could hear the crackle of the tinder-dry timbers of the hull and stern cabin. His seamen were spilling out of her and straggling across to the next vessel.
‘She’s aflame, sir,’ his boatswain panted, and a hot gust of air struck Clinton’s cheek at that moment and a quiver of heat hung over the main hatch.
‘We’d best be getting on,’ he said mildly, and scrambled down the ladder on to the packed damp sand. Behind him the flames roared like a cageful of wild animals.
The biggest dhow, a two-hundred tonner, lay ahead of them and Clinton reached it fifty paces ahead of his men.
‘Make sure there is nobody below,’ he ordered, and one of the seamen came back on deck carrying a rolled silk prayer rug under his arm.
‘Belay that!’ snapped Clinton. ‘There’ll be no looting.’
Reluctantly the seaman dropped the precious burden back into the hatchway, and the flames sucked up in a hot breath to accept it as
though it was an offering to Baal.
By the time they reached the tree line, all eight of the stranded vessels were burning fiercely, the stubby masts collapsing as they burned through at the base, the furled sails disappearing in bright explosions of flame. In one of the burning hulls a keg of powder went up with a thunderous crash of sound, and a tall column of dark smoke hovered over the beach for a few seconds, shaped like a gigantic grey octopus before it drifted slowly out across the reef, leaving the dhow shattered, its timbers scattered across the sand, the flames extinguished by the shock wave of the explosion.
‘Was there anybody aboard her?’ Clinton demanded quietly.
‘No, sir.’ His boatswain was panting beside him, redfaced with excitement, and with a bared cutlass in his hand. ‘All accounted for.’
Clinton hid his relief behind a cool nod, and spent a few precious minutes drawing his men into an orderly formation, giving them time to regain their breath, and getting them well in hand again.
‘Check your muskets,’ he ordered, and there was the click of the locks. ‘Fix bayonets.’ Metal rattled on metal as the long blades were fitted to the barrels of the Enfield rifles. ‘If there is resistance we’ll find it in the town, I fancy,’ and he ran an eye down the uneven ranks. They were neither marines nor lobster-backs, he thought with quick affection. They might not be perfect in drill, but they were men with spirit and initiative, not parade-ground automatons.
‘Come along then.’ He waved them forward into the dusty street between the mud-brown flat-roofed buildings. The town smelled of wood smoke and raw sewage, of rice cooked with saffron and of ghee, clarified butter.
‘Shall we burn ’em?’ His boatswain jerked a thumb at the buildings that flanked the deserted street.
‘No, we are here to protect them,’ Clinton told him stiffly. ‘They belong to our new ally, the Sheikh.’
‘I see, sir,’ the boatswain grunted, looking mildly perplexed, and Clinton took pity on him.
‘We are after the barracoons,’ he explained, as they trotted up the street in compact formation. They halted where the road branched left and right.
The heat was oppressive and the silence menacing. There was no wind and the coconut groves had stilled the eternal clatter of their fronds. From the beach far behind them, came the faint popping of burning timbers, and overhead the ubiquitous pied crows of Africa circled and cawed raucously, but the buildings and dense coconut groves were deserted.
‘I don’t like this,’ one of the men croaked behind Clinton. He could understand the man’s point of view. A seaman always felt awkward when parted from his ship, and there were a mere forty of them, out of sight of the beach and surrounded by thousands of unseen but none the less savage warriors. Clinton knew he must keep the momentum of surprise rolling through the town, yet he hesitated a moment longer until he realized that the amorphous sacklike shape lying on the edge of the right hand street was a human body, naked and black and very dead. One of the slaves trampled in the previous day’s panic and left where he had fallen.
That way must lie the barracoons, he decided. ‘Quiet!’ he cautioned his men and, cocking his head, listened with all his attention to the faint sussuration on the still air. It might have been the wind except there was no wind, or the flames, except that the flames were behind them. It was the distant sound of human voices, he decided, many voices, thousands of voices.
‘This way. Follow me.’ They went forward at a full run, taking the right fork and running immediately into the ambush which had been so carefully prepared for them.
The volley of musket fire crashed out from both sides of the narrowing track, and powder smoke rolled out towards them and hung like a thick, pearly curtain amongst the palm boles and the cashew nut trees.
Through the smoke danced the ethereal robed figures of the attackers, brandishing the long-barrelled jezails or swinging the half-moon-bladed scimitars, with wild shrieks of ‘Allah Akbar, Allah is great!’
They rushed down on the little band of seamen, caught in enfilade on the narrow track. There were at least a hundred of them, Clinton judged instantly, and they were pressing in determinedly. Those scimitars were glittering – bright bare steel has a particularly chilling effect.
‘Close up,’ Clinton shouted. ‘We’ll give them a volley then take the bayonet to them, through the smoke.’
The first rank of racing Arabs were almost on top of the levelled Enfields. Incongruously, Clinton noticed that many of them had tucked up the skirts of their robes, leaving their legs bared to the thighs. Their skins varied from the colour of ivory to tobacco, and there were wrinkled grey beards in the front rank, screaming and howling with rage and battle-lust. They had just seen their livelihood burned to heaps of ash upon the beach. All that remained to them of their wealth was the contents of the barracoons set back amongst the groves of cashew nut and coconut trees.
‘Fire!’ roared Clinton, and the solid blast of sound deafened him for a moment. The gun smoke wiped out all vision ahead of him and then hung on the windless morning in an impenetrable fog bank.
‘Forward!’ howled Clinton and led the charge into the smoke. He stumbled over the body of an Arab. The man’s turban had unwound and come down over his eyes, soaked with blood like the sultan’s scarlet banner which Clinton could see waving ahead of him above the smoke.
A figure loomed ahead of him, and he heard the fluting whistle of a scimitar blade, like wild goose wings overhead. He ducked. The sharp breeze puffed a loose strand of hair into his eyes, as the blade passed an inch from his forehead, and Clinton straightened from the knees and put his whole body into the counter-lunge.
The point of his blade went in with a dead, soggy feel, sliding grudgingly through flesh until the point grated on bone. The Arab dropped his scimitar and clutched the cutlass blade with bare hands. Clinton leaned back and jerked the cutlass free of flesh. As the blade slid through the Arab’s nerveless fingers the tendons parted with a faint popping sound, and the man went down on his knees, holding his multilated hands up in front of his eyes with a look of amazement on his face.
Clinton ran on to catch up with his seamen, and found them scattered in little groups amongst the grove, laughing and shouting with excitement.
‘They’ve run like steeplechasers, sir,’ the boatswain called. ‘Grand National, ten to one the field!’ He snatched up the fallen banner of the Sultan and waved it furiously over his head, completely overtaken by excitement.
‘Did we lose anybody?’ Clinton demanded. He also felt the dizzy euphoria of battle. The killing of the Arab, far from sickening him, had elated him. In that moment he was quite capable of turning back and taking the man’s scalp. However, the question sobered them.
‘Jedrow caught one in the belly, but he can walk. Wilson got a sword cut in the arm.’
‘Send them back to the beach. They can escort each other. The rest of you, come on!’
They found the barracoons a quarter of a mile further on. The guards had fled.
The slave-pens stretched out for a half mile along both banks of a small stream that provided both drinking water and sewage disposal for the inmates.
They were unlike the barracoons that Clinton had captured and sacked on the west coast, for those had been built by European traders with the white man’s orderly eye. There was no resemblance in these sprawling compounds built of rough, unbarked forest poles, bound together with rope made from plaited palm fronds. Behind the outer barricades were open godowns with thatched roofs in which the chained slaves could find some shelter from sun and rain. The only thing the same was the smell. An epidemic of tropical dysentery had swept through the barracoons and most of the sheds contained the decomposing bodies of the victims. The crows and buzzards and vultures were waiting patiently in the palms and cashew trees, misshapen, dark silhouettes against the hard bright blue of the morning sky.
Clinton met the new ruler of the state of Elat, Sheikh Mohamed, at the water’s edge and escorted him up the beach.
The incoming tide was dousing the piles of smouldering ash that marked the last resting places of eight fine dhows, and the Sheikh tottered uncertainly, like a man in deep shock, relying for support on the sturdy shoulder of one of his house-slaves, looking about him with lugubrious disbelief at the carnage that had overtaken him. The Sheikh owned one third shares in every one of those smoking piles of ash. He had to rest when they reached the tree line above the beach. A slave placed a carved wooden stool in the shade, and another waved a fan of plaited palm fronds over his head to keep off the flies and to cool his heated brow that was dewed with the heavy sweat of despair.
His misery was completed by the lecture in broken French and pidgin English which ‘El Sheetan’, the mad British sea captain with the devil’s eyes, was relaying to him through the shocked and incredulous interpreter. Such things could only be repeated in a hoarse whisper, and the Sheikh greeted each new revelation with a soft cry of ‘Waai!’ and the upturning of his eyes to heaven.
He learned that the village blacksmiths had been dragged out of the bushes and were already knocking the fetters off long rows of perplexed slaves.
‘Waai!’ wailed the Sheikh. ‘Does the devil not realize that those slaves have already been purchased and that the tax has been collected.’
Comfortably Clinton explained that once the slaves were freed, they would be marched back into the interior, and the Sheikh would send guards with them to see them safely home, and to warn any slave caravans that they encountered on the down-route that all the ports of Elat were now closed to the trade.
‘Waai!’ This time the Sheikh’s eyes actually brimmed with tears. ‘He will beggar me. My wives and children will starve.’
‘El Sheetan counsels you to enlarge the trade in gum-copal and copra,’ explained the interpreter in a sepulchral voice. ‘And as your closest ally, he promises to call upon you regularly with his great ship of many guns, to make certain that you heed this advice.’