by John Broich
7. ‘If it prove lawful prize’
1 See Philip Colomb on the pervasiveness of drunkenness in this period in ‘The Evolution of the Blue Jacket’, 269, 274 and elsewhere. Details from this period of refitting at Bombay, including the carpenters’ and gunner’s drunkenness, come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. Log entries from earlier months show the first lieutenant’s struggles with alcohol. Log entries also record a constant stream of accidents involving the men running the ship. 1869’s deaths and illnesses were recorded in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 45, Health of the Navy (9 Feb.-21 Aug. 1871), 261–2. On the Daphne’s engine crushing one of the men’s legs and the attempt to amputate and save the man, see Allen’s Indian Mail, 3 Mar. 1869, 198. Other details from this section come from entries during this period in Commodore Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293. The story of Daphne’s early days on her station in the spider’s web, including the freeing of the father and son and Sulivan’s personal inclination to see slavers hanged, come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 141, 201–2 and Daphne’s log from mid-March 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9582.
2 For the slave and tonnage bounties, see House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Slave trade (tonnage bounties, &c.). Return of vessels, 1864–1869, 1870 (411), 8–10; also Howell, Royal Navy, 47 n. 13; and Colomb, Slave-catching, 81. Also see Colomb, Slave-catching, 81–3, for a description of how bounty claims proceeded and how the shares were divvied up. See those pages in Colomb as well as Nwulia, Britain and Slavery, 83, for the sense that bounty inducements still did not make the slave suppression duty attractive for monetary reasons. A worker in an iron workshop who was trained in as an apprentice would get 30 shillings per week in 1867 according to Thomas Wright, Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes (London: Tinsley, 1867), 99. A footman working in a wealthy household might make 10 shillings per week, but have room and board. A worker in a textile or drapery factory might make 10 shillings per week (25 pounds per year) but get room at the factory: Tempted London (New York: A.C. Armstrong, 1889), ch. 2. Other wages are printed in a series of letters by Henry Mayhew in the Morning Chronicle in 1849. For the Treasury habitually deducting 10% of tonnage and seaman adding 10%, Howell, Royal Navy, 164–5.
3 Details from the story of the Nymphe coasting northward, Lieutenant Clarke at Keonga, and the Nymphe at Kiswara or Kiswere come from Nymphe’s log for 26 Mar. to early Apr., National Archives ADM 53/9548, also Clarke to Edward Meara, 5 Jan. 1870, and Meara to Leopold Heath, 24 May 1869 and 5 Jan. 1870, in Slave Trade Records of the East Indian Station, National Archives ADM 127/40. Great detail about the Keonga encounter comes from the records of Dr Kirk’s examination of both Nymphe and dhow crews preserved in National Archives FO 84/1307 pp. 314–24. Landscape details about Kiswara or Kiswere Bay come from US Navy, Africa Pilot, vol. II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 334–5. The details about the experience of boat work in the squadron come from G. Keith Gordon who was a young officer on the station in 1872. He also offers excellent details of captures, of the suspected role of Zanzibari Indians in the trade, sailing a captured dhow, and more; for details of boat work, see G. Keith Gordon, Seventeen Years in the Royal Navy: 1865–1881 (Bandera, Texas: Frontier Times, 1942), 38–40, 45. Further details about the Kiswere/Kiswara incident come from H.C. Rothery, Report [to Lords Commissioners, Treasury] respecting Dhows lately captured by Her Majesty’s ships Peterel and Nymphe, 21 Aug. 1869, British Library IOR, L/P&S/18/B84, 19–25. In this memo Rothery writes, on p. 22, ‘Commander Meara has confused two things which are essentially different, namely, slavery and the Slave trade.’
8. ‘Of moving accidents by flood and field’
1 For this early period of Dryad’s hunting, including the hunter’s eagerness of the crew, the concern to see dhow before dhows saw Dryad, Colomb’s use of the ‘spider’s web’ metaphor, and more, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 193–4, 196, 198, 200 and elsewhere. See also Dryad’s log for mid- to late Apr. 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9913.
2 Details of the activities of Colomb and his crew off Ras Madraka in Apr. 1869 come from Dryad ‘s log for mid- to late Apr. 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9913, and Colomb, Slave-catching, 200–7. In his memoir of these experiences, Philip Colomb changed the names of the fellow sailors that he describes. He calls his coxswain ‘Fletcher’ in his book. Throughout this book, I call the actors by their real names instead of using Colomb’s pseudonyms.
3 Philip Colomb tells the story of Saleh bin Moosa’s background and his conversations with him in Slave-catching, 108–10.
4 The story of Bin Moosa and John Pitcher’s encounter with Omani villagers come from Slave-catching, 209–10.
5 For Daphne’s exploits off Mukalla and Aden, the crossing to the Seychelles, and visits to former refugees, see Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 195, 204–6; and Daphne’s log for Apr. to June 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9582. Details of Mukalla come from James Horsburgh, The India Directory, or, Directions for Sailing to and From the East Indies, vol. 1 (London: W.H. Allen, 1852), 364.
9. ‘Destiny unshunnable, like death’
1 For the story of Dryad and her boats taking seven dhows in tow, examinations of the captains and some crew, release of one captive boy, and Colomb’s thoughts on these occasions, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 210–25, and Dryad’s log for late Apr. 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9913. For Colomb’s racist opinion that Africans did not sufficiently resist slavery because they did not have the ‘white man’s sense of injustice’ or freedom, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 30–1. He repeats these racist sentiments at pp. 266–8 of the same source. The intelligence and ability of the Kroomen, whom he very greatly admired and credited as being ‘almost as intelligent as white men’, did not seem to overturn his racist conclusions.
2 Details of the Nymphe’s deadly encounter with a slaver in Zanzibar harbour come from British Library IOR L/PS/9/48, Secret Letters Received from areas outside India, Letter of John Kirk to G. Gonne Sec. to Government of Bombay, Political Dept., 12 Apr. 1869, 1–2; for more details see Meara to Leopold Heath, 5 May 1869 in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1870 [C.141] Class B, East coast of Africa. Correspondence respecting the slave trade and other matters, 82; and, in the same source, Clark to Meara, 16 Apr. 1869, 82–3; for details about Clark, see Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, pt. 1, 4th ed. (London: Harrison, 1862), 248; for Clark going inland following the tracks of enslaved Africans, see Meara to Leopold Heath, 5 June 1869 in the same source, 81; see also ‘The Slave Trade on the East Coast of Africa’, Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1869), 699; on the breech-loaded M1866 Snider-Enfield Mark I, see ‘The Snider Breech-Loader Rifle’, The Engineer, 9 Nov. 1866, 362. The reasons for Meara earning a reputation as a semi-pirate among the Zanzibaris will become clear but see, for two examples, John Kirk to Secretary of the Government of Bombay, 10 Apr. 1869 in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1870 [C.141] Class B, East coast of Africa. Correspondence respecting the slave trade and other matters, 49. See also Consul H.A. Churchill’s embarrassment caused by the squadron sometimes putting articles taken out of slave ships up for sale even before the dhows had been officially condemned in Memorandum by Mr. Churchill respecting Slave trade on the East Coast of Africa, no date, BL IOR, L/P&S/18/B84, 49. For more details about the shootout in Zanzibar harbour and the burial of William Mitchell, see Nymphe’s log for Apr. 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9548.
10. ‘Most disastrous chances’
1 Details about the Forte come from National Maritime Museum, Ship Plans NPB2269 and NPB2270. The National Maritime Museum also holds a painting of Forte before her slight lengthening and conversion to steam: item BHC3737. Some details about the Forte’s capture come from Scott, Fifty Years in the Royal Navy, 28. The identity of the bosun comes from Forte’s Establishment Book, National Archives ADM 115/410. For more details about Forte’s capture
of a full slaver, see Forte’s log for May 1869, National Archives ADM 53/9931.
2 The story of the dhow that ran on the beach and the effort to land and preserve as many captives as possible is told by Colomb, Slave-catching, 235–53. This section includes his sort of confession that he was not usually motivated by a sense of humanity or philanthropy, but also the sense that, upon watching the desperation of the victims of the swamped dhow, he was watching the suffering of his fellow human beings. For details about the cutter see pp.273–4 in the same source. Further details about the incident come from Colomb to Secretary of the Admiralty, 12 May 1869, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1870 [C.141] Class B, East coast of Africa. Correspondence respecting the slave trade and other matters, 79, and in the same source, Colomb to Leopold Heath, 10 May 1869, 80–1; see also Acting Lieutenant William Henn’s report to Philip Colomb, 6 May 1869, in National Archives, East India Slave Trade Records, 1869, ADM 127/40; and in the same source, Colomb to Leopold Heath, 10 May 1869, and Gunner William Wilkie to Philip Colomb, 7 May 1869. See also Dryad’s log for early May, National Archives ADM 53/9913, and Dryad’s Establishment Book, National Archives ADM 115/290.
3 For Nymphe’s time at Seychelles, including the anchorage, appearance of the island, and disposition of refugees from slavery, see the depiction by William Cope Devereux, assistant paymaster on HMS Gorgon which cruised the East African coast for slavers in 1861, in his A Cruise in the Gorgon (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 142–4. For more on Nymphe’s time at the Seychelles, including the landing of the invalided Hodgson, ship’s leave, deserters, and the influx of syphilis, see Nymphe’s log for mid- and late April 1869, ADM 53/9548, Nymphe’s Establishment Book, ADM 115/691, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 45, Health of the Navy (9 Feb.-21 Aug. 1871), 246, and the day book of John Noble, surgeon on Nymphe, York Minster Archives Add MS 130. For the Seychelles merchants’ dependence on the squadron’s business, see Mahé merchants’ petition of 24 Nov. 1869 to Leopold Heath in National Archives, East India Slave Trade Records, 1869, ADM 127/40. For prostitution at Mahé, Seychelles, see House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 45, Health of the Navy, as cited above. For the rescues of 266 and 153 captives see Nymphe’s log for mid-to late May, ADM 53/9548; see also Meara to Leopold Heath, 27 May 1869, in National Archives, East India Slave Trade Records, 1869, ADM 127/40; for Charles Hemus Hopkins, see his service record at National Archives ADM 196/73. For the appearance of the former slave depot in Aden harbour, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 262. See pp. 260–1 in the same source for the total slavers taken that spring, p. 260 for Meara’s joke that the slavers seemed to intend to discharge their captives on Nymphe, and p. 263 for the happiness at receiving their awards of tonnage and slave bounties. On the trading of charts, etc. see Meara to Leopold Heath, 27 May 1869, as cited above. On the fate of former slaves landed at Aden, see Charles Vivian, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1871 (420) Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade (East Coast of Africa) together with the proceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence, appendix and index, 5. See this source, too, for the numbers of victims ‘legally’ imported to Zanzibar, v; as well as National Archive FO 84/1292, 101–6. And for total captures in the 1860s, see Howell, Royal Navy, 45.
11. ‘Too true an evil’
1 On Viceroy John Lawrence and Zanzibar, as well as the way that Zanzibar fell in a sphere shared by Calcutta and London, and Calcutta as an imperial centre, as well as Fitzgerald’s hearty rejection of schemes for renegotiating India’s relationship with Muscat for the sake of fighting the slave trade, see Robert J. Blythe, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 43–7 and elsewhere. For the importance of the Persian Gulf to India, including how that relationship involved slave trade suppression, see Hopper, Slaves of One Master, ch. 3 and elsewhere. For Zanzibar’s importance to Bombay and India in general as a market and source of luxuries and cash, see Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 136 and throughout. For the Earl of Mayo’s reputation for thinking the slave trade question a ‘troublesome irrelevancy which diverted attention from what he considered to be the main point’, R.J. Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere Mission to Zanzibar, 1873’, Historical Journal 5 (1962), 132. For the persistence of slavery in India, Howard Temperley, ‘The Delegalization of Slavery in British India’, in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, ed. Howard Temperley (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 169–87. For the fact that an Oman-area trader could buy twenty captives in Zanzibar for ten baskets of dates bought on credit then sell them for 1,000 Maria Theresa dollars, see letter of Ibrahim bin Sultan to Majid bin Said, sultan of Zanzibar, 7 Jan. 1869, British Library, India Office Records, L/PS/9/48, 2. Sir Edward Russell’s warnings to Bombay are at Russell to G. Gonne Sec. to Government of Bombay, Political Dept., 29 Jan. 1869, in British Library, IOR L/P&S/18/B85, 9. On the Bombay government approaching Heath still in port, see, in the same source, Heath to Sir Seymour Fitzgerald, 16 Feb. 1869, 9; see also Heath to Secretary of the Admiralty, 9 Apr. 1869, 7, which includes the Advocate General of Bombay arguing that domestic slaves ought not be grounds for condemnation and Heath’s response. This response also included extracts from captured letters that proved that sometimes a dhow carrying only a few captives – ostensibly ‘mere’ domestic slaves – could be in fact bound for sale. For the sense that Heath believed it inconceivable that the squadron limit its seizures to dhows with large numbers of slaves because it would practically legalise the trade, see, again, Heath to Sir S. Fitzgerald, 16 Feb. 1869, as cited above (this includes Heath’s comment on Sir Russell’s ‘heartburnings’). The Admiralty instructions are at Secretary to the Admiralty to Leopold Heath, 12 Mar. 1869, National Archives, East India Slave Trade Records, 1869, ADM 127/40. Notes on the back of this correspondence show that Heath circulated these instructions among his captains while still in Aden in early June 1869. Enclosed with these were the letter from the sultan of Zanzibar to Consul Henry Churchill, Dec. 1868 (no day given), and Churchill’s response, 10 Dec. 1868, and the letter of Arthur Otway to Secretary of the Admiralty, 10 Mar. 1869.
12. ‘The wind hath spoke aloud at land’
1 On Portuguese as slave carriers and the Mozambique area as the source of roughly 8% of the Atlantic trade, Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 804. The American barque Minnetonka, curiously named after a lake in Minnesota, was slaving in this region as late as 1857: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers LXI (Dec. 1857-Aug. 1858) 29, Slave Trade, 222. On early modern Mozambique Island, Malyn Newitt, ‘Mozambique Island: The Rise and Decline of a Colonial Port City’, in Liam Matthew Brockey, ed., Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), ch. 4 and 117–19, especially. For general information on the Portuguese in Mozambique in the 1800s, including details on Matekenya (Paul Marianno Vas dos Anjos I and II and III) and Bonga, see M.D.D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambezi: Exploration, Land Tenure, and Colonial Rule in East Africa (New York: Africana, 1973), 275–81 and elsewhere. For impressions of the first Paul Marianno, see Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia, 1821–1826, I (London: Richard Bentley, 1835), 270. For Kirk witnessing the handiwork of Matekenya’s war-making and famine, see John McCracken, A History of Malawi, 1859–1966 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), 34. For Bishop Tozer hearing songs of Matekenya, see Edward Steere, Swahili Tales as Told by Natives of Zanzibar (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), viii. For songs about Marianno’s line, see Leroy Vail and Landeg White, ‘Plantation Protest: The History of Mozambican Song’, Journal of Southern African Studies 5 (Oct. 1978), 21; also, for Matekenya’s wife, Kathleen E. Sheldon, Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 48. And finally, on Matekenya and his family, see Owen J.M. Kalinga, Historical Dictionary of Malawi 4th ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow, 2012), 286–7, and David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Za
mbesi, 24–6, 449–50. On Quelimane and a description of Mozambique Island in the nineteenth century, see Frederick Lamport Barnard, A Three Years’ Cruise in the Mozambique Channel for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 51, 71–2, 110–11.
2 For French Charlie’s shop and provision procurement business, see Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 207–12. Details for William Dillon come from a portrait and family letters and Dillon’s abbreviated diary described in descendant Julia Turner’s Dr. William Edward Dillon: Navy Surgeon in Livingstone’s Africa (British Columbia: Friesen Press, 2014). As always, details of navigation, weather, and activities on board Daphne, including the sad case of Tom Hurrex, come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. The resistance of wind and current are also documented in Sulivan to Leopold Heath, 11 Oct. 1869 in Slave Trade Records of the East Indian Station, National Archives ADM 127/40. Historical moon phases are available from nasa.gov. On Jumah Jin discovering the root of the terror in the town, see a letter of Sulivan quoted in ‘Reports from Naval Officers’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1871, 171. Other details, including Africans seeking refuge on board, come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 219–45; and also Sulivan to the governor of Mozambique, 31 Aug. 1869, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 8 Feb.-15 Aug. 1876, vol. 28, Fugitive Slaves, 178; and Sulivan to Heath, 11 Oct. 1869, in the same source at p. 178.