Squadron

by John Broich

  Close by, a little further forward, was the galley. Here the cook’s crew and stewards worked in the heat of a large stove to feed 150 mouths. Here there were worktables, cupboards and coal boxes. The cooks could pump salt water into a basin for cleaning, as well as fresh cooking and drinking water from iron tanks below. Provisions came up through a nearby hatch.

  Near here was the way to the infernal stoke hole. There squatted four large, dark boilers, fat devils bound to the screw shaft. Their iron skins were dark but their glowing red mouths showed their true essence as things of fire, and treacherous. They consumed as much coal as offered by their supplicant feeders, the stokers. Windsails fed air all the way down here since the fires consumed air as much as coal. From far above, too, a telegraph line led from a place near the wheel and compass on the upper deck so that the stokers could be told how much to feed the mouths. Close by were the large coal rooms, taking up one-fifth of the entire deck. Over two hundred tons of coal could fit in these – or the weight of thirty of Nymphe’s monstrous guns. Here there were condensers in which seawater could be made fresh for feeding the boilers. Then the engine room, where the steam from the boilers exploded in three cylinders, thereby shoving a piston and rod, turning a crankshaft, and finally spinning the shaft that led all the way out of the stern and the fifteen-foot screw.

  Down here on the dark orlop deck were store after store. Carpenters’ and engineers’ stores, huge spools of cable, the bread room, the spirit room. Separate, but not too far away from the brooding boilers, was the powder magazine. There was a pump here for fighting fire. Fire here would have meant cataclysm.

  At some point after salutes, introductions, inspections, Commander – now called ‘Captain’ – Meara found himself in his cabin. It was not his first command. As a lieutenant, ten years ago, he had the little Magnet serving in home waters. Magnet was no plum. She was a humble gunboat that had been rushed out of the dockyard with scores of others to serve in the ‘Russian’ or Crimean War. Some of her timbers might even have been green. Not so the Nymphe. Practically new, designed by the greatest naval architect of the age, iron-braced, very large for a sloop, fast under steam. And now Meara was in her stateroom. Relative to every other quarter in the Nymphe, it was boundless. Twenty feet at its widest, easily accommodating two wide lounges and, nestling in the stern, a curving cupboard. And a substantial table at its centre at which the captain could spread charts, examine accounts and host members of the wardroom for dinner. There were three large portholes, two on each side and one looking straight astern – gun ports, really, in the unlikely event that a gun, a stern chaser, needed to be rolled into the cabin. Above all this, a skylight. Opening on to the commander’s cabin was a bed cabin with its own desk and watercloset. A second small cabin opened on to the stateroom which could serve as a bed cabin for important passengers. Eventually, Meara slept.

  When he rose the next day, he rose an administrator. The Nymphe needed to be overhauled. Tropical seas had worn her vitality. Weed grew from the hull and dragged at her, while rope and sails rotted. Meara and his lieutenants directed weeks of cleaning down to the last corners after which the ship was painted and painted again. The crew mounted masts and yards to paint them. Chains were brought out of their places and inspected, as was rope. The men replaced gear and sail and fitted new braces, caulkers moved over the ship clicking away, and Meara had the titanic guns shifted to new positions.

  To get at the weed, the Nymphe had to be brought into a dock so her copper sheathing could be scraped. This meant the crew had to remove to reside in a hulk for some weeks. This was a massive renunciation of routine, but still the crew was frequently mustered and inspected. And kept busy: when the circumstance of a dock-stranded ship meant that the crew could not perform their usual duties, they were lent out to the dockyard for work.

  When hands were idle, the devil made tools of them. George Hill of the sailmaker’s crew was cited and marines Henry Feighly and James Hutchinson demoted for violating the Articles of War. A wardroom cook disappeared. Late one warm night a sailor spotted a body floating not far off. The officer of the watch sent some men in a boat to investigate, but the body sunk before the boat reached it. Meanwhile, the sick list grew.4

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘THE IMMINENT DEADLY BREACH’

  Daphne hunts and draws first blood

  WHILE THE CAPTAINS of the Dryad and Nymphe were still heading for the Indian Ocean, Sulivan began the work of gathering intelligence, patrolling, and preparing to test his commodore’s new tactics. First, he pointed towards Madagascar.

  HMS Daphne, Tamatave, Madagascar, September 1868

  After busy days of working to windward south from his parting with Heath at the Seychelles, Daphne came to anchor off of Tamatave, a modest port on the eastern side of the great island. Salutes fired, salutes returned, and a boat lowered for Captain Sulivan to head for shore.

  This was the station of Consul Conolly Pakenham, scion of an exalted and formidable English family, but for some reason sent here to spend his life on the opposite end of the planet in this small post. Pakenham’s main duty was to strengthen the relationship between Britain and the new government of Madagascar. After generations of struggle over the island, one Madagascar caste and dynasty won sovereignty over most of the large island early in the nineteenth century. But in the 1830s that dynasty reacted to European – especially French – meddling and missionary activity by throwing them out of the country and forcing renunciations from Christian converts.

  After decades of rebuffing European and American forays, the royal court began allowing more foreign interaction around 1863. But the king who had tried opening things up was targeted by traditionalist elements of the aristocracy and eventually strangled. Madagascar had a tradition of female monarchs in addition to male, so it was natural for the king’s widow to take the throne. She ruled for the next five years and, despite the fate of her husband, continued opening Madagascar to the world, protected by a crafty prime minister.

  Only months before Sulivan’s arrival, Madagascar crowned a new queen upon the death of the old: Ranavalona II, another widow of the assassinated king. For the previous five years she had been tutored by the newly arrived British missionaries. At her coronation, a gold chain woven in her hair, a Bible was on display next to her seat as she declared the state religion to be Christian – better still for the British, Protestant. This was no small thing given that the French were competing with the British for influence on the island as they had many decades before. Her royal seat was on the island’s central plateau. The court’s control of the coasts, especially the African-facing west and south, was less established than elsewhere, though officially the island was united. Pro-and anti-Europe, pro-French and pro-British cliques competed in the royal court.

  The Kingdom of Madagascar was a dominion of slaves. Generations of conquest by the central capital created uncounted thousands of war captives. There was a class of masters and a larger mass of the enslaved. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, foreign slave traders, especially French, crowded the ports. But in 1865, Ranavalona II’s predecessor signed a treaty with the British declaring the trade to and from the island illegal. The institution itself, though, foully slinked on.

  Slave ships still came and went in the shadows, but they were no longer visible in the ports. With little Royal Navy presence, slavers dodged and ran the paper blockade to out-of-the-way coasts. If he could catch them, Pakenham could legally demand that the Malagasy punish the slavers and recover the East African abductees. But catching the slave traders was difficult. The Africans came from the territories nominally controlled by the Portuguese, sometimes directly, sometimes through the French-influenced Comoro Islands. The French bought slaves on the African coast, declared them ‘free’ but liable for indentured servitude in exchange for the price of their purchase. They were supposed to stay in French territory, but they were taken here under the French flag with the designation of passengers or indentured workers, call
ed engagés.

  Pakenham briefed Sulivan. And when the commander parted from the consul he carried away a good impression of Pakenham. A British consul might be expected to enforce an anti-slavery treaty as a matter of duty, but Sulivan thought he could be trusted to act on principle, too. A credit to Britain, he thought, a man who would act with energy if only the Malagasy could be shown to be cheating the treaty. If only the Royal Navy could catch them at it. That was up to Sulivan and the rest of the East Indies squadron.

  On the Daphne, the men worked on perennial repairs, parties went ashore to attend church in the village, others took cattle aboard. Some days later, as Daphne’s stokers summoned steam for her departure, a French man-of-war jealously looked in at the port. The implicit competition between French and British in these waters was also perennial.

  Daphne then patrolled along the north-west end of the island, the most notorious for slaving. But over several days her searches produced nothing and, turning her head north before a southerly wind, she left Madagascar behind under plain sail.

  Next, to the nearby Comoro Islands, a mix of petty sultanates and kingdoms. Some of these were under British influence, while some had been grabbed by the French. All abetted the slave trade. On a warm mid-September morning the wind faded to nearly nothing. The stokers renewed the fires in the heat below, and Daphne began steaming past one of Comoros, Johanna. It had a treaty with the British allowing trade to or from the island to be inspected. But still, falsehoods under the French flag – carrying supposed ‘immigrant labourers’ – perpetuated the slave traffic, as did Arab and Swahili outlaws.

  Sulivan looked at the peak 6,000 feet above the little island, lushly emerald. And he knew it was a place of pure sweet water, fruit and sweet potatoes – a contrast to the society on the island which he found rotten and squalid, a miserable collection that passed for a town, with slave labour farms beyond it. More squalid still, the English consul of Johanna, William Sunley, had been caught using slave labour on his own sugar plantation on the west coast of the island. Retired from the Royal Navy, Sunley had set out to make his fortune as a sugar planter. He had been caught using 500 slaves. They were loaned to him from neighbouring plantations, but paying their masters for their use was supporting the trade. A visitor from the Cape made the discovery and reported Sunley to London. London, in turn, ordered him to stop using slave labour or resign his consulship. The man had the gall to refuse to quit either, and the London authorities forcibly stripped his consulship from him. Sulivan knew that Sunley was still on the island. A living slander against Britain, Sulivan thought – living, breathing hypocrisy.

  After two more weeks of skimming between the Comoros and easy sailing up the mainland African coast, the Daphne slowly approached the mouth of the Kiswara River. North-east of this shore, not far, was the island of Zanzibar. These were familiar waters to Sulivan who had hunted slavers here in years past. This coast, he knew, fed Zanzibar’s demand for forced labour.

  Darkness was falling as Daphne swam cautiously on her approach to the river mouth. Sulivan raised steam to move with even more deliberation, as men on the sides dropped the lead and line often to feel out the bottom. In the dark Daphne dropped one anchor.

  Before sunrise the next morning, Sulivan ordered the small dinghy lowered into the dark warm water. On this day he and the Daphne’s doctor would go exploring. Above, a mix of star and cloud, and a light, swinging wind. Sulivan took the oars while Surgeon Mortimer, a veteran of many ships and seas, descended in the dark. After two rifles had been passed down to the boat Sulivan started pulling towards the river’s mouth and into living Africa. Miles passed, and dawn showed a world of green, a gently rolling land of grass and mounds of trees. Behind these were gradually rising hills. Eventually Sulivan chose a spot on the lightening riverbank to pull the dinghy up.

  The two men walked and, as the sun emerged fully from the Indian Ocean it was gentle for a change. They aimed up a hill to look around the country. More miles, and they found the summit and their view: a broad valley with a small stream running through it, and woods on the valley’s opposite end. It reminded Sulivan of the best views of England, though something was missing. Had this been England, part of the composition would have been cultivated land, but there was none here. That probably meant that slavers had been here. When slave-raiders came through a country, Sulivan knew, people could only abandon their fields. If lucky, they could hide until the hunters passed from the country. If unlucky, there came war and kidnap. In any case, crops went unplanted or rotted in the fields and livestock starved. Grass and forest reclaimed villages.

  The captain and surgeon kept walking. At the far end of the valley they surprised a pair of women who ran upon seeing them. As they ran they shouted a warning to people somewhere ahead whom Sulivan and the doctor could not see. The two men followed and eventually came upon a small collection of little mud-brick houses with closed doors. The captain guessed that this was a kind of retreat; a place where the villagers felt isolated from other populations; a place too small and out-of-the-way for raiders or kidnappers. The two called out, doing their best to communicate to the hidden villagers that they were no threat, making a patient effort at explanation, conveying peace, somehow, in an alien language. Finally, a sole elderly man emerged from his house. After more effort and patience the old man eventually communicated back.

  Alarm subsided, and those barred in the other little houses emerged, most of them women. They very closely examined the Englishmen, their gear, clothes, rifles. Now, still more confident, they began feeling the material of their clothes. Sulivan was unsettled at the centre of a clutch of women feeling his clothes, but did not stop them. He imagined their hands were very dirty, but stayed still. The women spoke earnestly to one another. Sulivan imagined they were stating their opinions of them. Preparing to go, Sulivan did his best to let them know that Englishmen were their friends. They seemed ultimately to understand and communicated friendship.1

  What if Sulivan and the surgeon had stumbled upon Dr Livingstone that day? David Livingstone, after all, was not so very far away from them in the interior at that moment. Heath’s squadron might have experienced a far different fate had the famous explorer’s observations of East Africa been published at the beginning of their campaign.

  In those same days, Livingstone was exploring the country three or four hundred miles into the continent in the Lake Nyasa region. As a younger man, Livingstone had been a typical missionary, but he had become impatient with preaching among known communities in familiar lands and left known tracts behind. To him, it seemed an army of missionaries clung to familiar beachheads until every possible convert had long since been won. Besides, he had an idea for sparking the conversion of the whole continent: by suffusing it with European influence by way of commerce. Livingstone himself would explore and identify river highways – ideally, a river that would link south-east Africa to the Nile – that would lure those with wares to sell in the interior and those who hoped to extract ivory and other rarities. The presence of traders, the attraction of ‘civilised’ wares, and a ready outlet for resources was supposed to allow civilisation and Christianity to flourish while undermining the slave trade both morally and economically.

  While George Sulivan witnessed the waste and fear that slave raiders caused near the coast, Livingstone witnessed first-hand the slavers’ murderousness. At the moment Sulivan and Dr Mortimer were exploring, Livingstone had lost contact with Britain. But he recorded his experiences in a journal published in London a few years later. He would frequently come across parties of killers and kidnappers or sometimes just their abandoned victims:

  27 June 1866

  Today we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks [very heavy yokes] on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.

  Slave raiders accepted such
losses because the returns on their masters’ investment were so high. An individual kidnapped for free or for some length of cotton on the mainland sold for roughly 11–14 silver dollars (£2- £3) at Zanzibar’s slave market; while a child might re-sell for eight to ten times that amount in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere. The men who did the actual murder and kidnapping were often members of slaver-barons’ personal armies. Alternatively, these men might visit a local ruler offering guns, alcohol, or cloth and suggest that he make war on his neighbour to produce slaves to trade, and then sit back and let them do the work.

  The most valuable abductees to their masters were children who fetched the highest prices, and slave-raiders tended to invest more in keeping them healthy.

  28 July 1867

  Slavery is a great evil wherever I have seen it. A poor old woman and child are among the captives, the boy about three years old seems a mother’s pet. His feet are sore from walking in the sun. He was [traded] for two fathoms [of cloth] and his mother for one fathom; he understood it all and cried bitterly, clinging to his mother. She had, of course, no power to help him; they were separated at Karungu afterwards.

  Livingstone frequently clashed with the Europeans in his exploring party and his East African porters and guides frequently left him. Shortly after seeing the three-year-old boy taken from his mother, Livingstone himself was desperately hungry, with nothing to trade and his party fast dwindling. That is when he encountered one of the most powerful slavers of East Africa. In fact, the man probably saved his life.