Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (4 page)

The main slave routes ran out of equatorial Africa east and west. Whether the Africans were destined for emirs of Yemen or planters of Brazil, the conditions of their journeys were equally terrible. Captured in war or slave-raid, by Arabs or fellow-Africans, they
stumbled often for hundreds of miles through scrub and forest, chained and yoked with wooden collars, whipped and bullied mercilessly to keep them on their feet. If they were travelling east, they were shipped to Zanzibar, paraded for purchase in the great slave market there, and sold to buyers from Arabia or the further east. If they were going west, they found themselves in stockades or barracoons in the foetid estuaries of the Slave and Ivory coasts, where they were beaten for discipline’s sake and put into stock, Here they were in the hands of European renegades and half-castes, who sold them in turn to the slaving captains always cruising off-shore: and so before long they were shipped away on their last journey, by the notorious Middle Passage to Brazil, or (illegally but all too often) to the southern United States. East or west, thousands of slaves died
en
route
: on the Atlantic voyage, even as late as the 1840s, probably about a quarter of those embarked.

At first the Royal Navy tried to end the traffic by interception at sea, and a ramshackle squadron of frigates, sloops and gunbrigs, all the Admiralty could spare, pottered up and down the West African coast, or later in and out of Zanzibar, in pursuit of slavers. This was a job the Navy loathed, despite the bounty paid—
£
5 a head for each liberated slave, or
£
2 10s if he died before reaching port. The slave-ships were generally faster and better sailers than the elderly warships of the patrols, and the Navy’s captains were hamstrung by legalism. The West African station, in particular, could be a captain’s nightmare. Though there were European trading posts up and down the coast, several of them British, West Africa had no formal frontiers, or even clearly defined sovereignties, and there was scarcely a creek for 2,000 miles that did not sometimes harbour slave-ships. ‘Here we are,’ wrote one officer of the slave patrol, ‘in the most miserable station in the world, attempting the impossible.’ The sight of a slave-ship was the signal for the frigate captain to ransack his locker for the necessary regulations, for his action depended upon the slaver’s nationality. With some foreign States, Britain had reached full agreement on searches: if a ship had slaves on board, or carried equipment obviously designed for slaving purposes, like shackles, balls and chains, or whips, then she could be seized willy-nilly. With other countries, notably the United States, Britain had not been
able to conclude an ‘equipment clause’—if slaves were not on board in the flesh, the frigate captain could do nothing. Other States again had no agreement with Britain at all, so that to board a ship might be interpreted in a court of law as an act of war, or piracy.

All this made interception an embarrassing process. Often it was exceedingly difficult to overhaul a suspected slaver in the first place, so that the boarding party was received with caustic condescension. Often the slaver’s true nationality was impossible to determine. Most often of all, the unfortunate patrol commander found himself legally impotent, however many pairs of manacles or instruments of torture he found on board, and was laughed overboard by disrespectful Portuguese, or abused by Spaniards. Americans especially could be insufferable. The United States had made slave traffic illegal in 1808, and occasionally contributed a sloop or two to the slave patrols: but slavery itself was still legal in the southern States, the American Ambassador in London was a Virginian, and the Americans had never conceded the Royal Navy’s right of search, so that every interception was a diplomatic gamble. American slavers had the best ships, too—especially Baltimore clippers and New York sloops, which were among the fastest vessels afloat, and could easily outmanoeuvre the clumsy broad-beamed brigs of the patrols. One successful American slaver was the schooner
Wanderer
‚ built as a pleasure-yacht and owned by a Georgia slaving syndicate: she flew the pennant of the New York Yacht Club, and her master once entertained the officers of a Royal Navy frigate to a merry dinner on board, before packing 750 slaves below deck and sailing for home. Another was the barque
Martha
Ann
. Given chase in the Atlantic once, this exasperating vessel at first showed no colours, only hoisting the Stars and Stripes after a number of warning shots. Why had she not hoisted colours before? the British officers demanded of her captain, when at last they caught up with the barque, but the American was not abashed. ‘I guess,’ he languidly replied, ‘we were eating our supper.’

However hard the Navy tried, the slave trade continued. As the King of Bonny had told the captain of the last English slaver, when
they bid a sentimental farewell to each other years before, ‘we tink trade no stop, for all we ju-ju men tell we so, for dem say you country no can niber pass God A’mighty’. Every kind of ruse continued to baffle the patrols—false colours, hidden decks, forged papers, mid-ocean transfers. Presently the Navy took to flushing the trade out on shore, and an archetypal imperial action was the destruction, in 1840, of a particularly notorious slave station at the mouth of the Gallinas river, in Sierra Leone. Then as now the estuaries of West Africa were among the nastiest places on earth. Flat, swampy, hot, sprawling, brackish, fly-infested, mosquito-ridden, fringed with gloomy mangroves and monotonous palms, they lay beneath the heartless sun in secretive desolation. Of them all, one of the most detestable was the estuary of the Gallinas.
1
It was hotter and swampier than anywhere, its mangroves gloomier and its swamps more awful, and among its creeks and lagoons, protected by the river bar and the Atlantic surf, a Spanish trader named Pedro Blanco had established a slave mart. Its barracoons, of reed and palm thatch, were scattered among the swamps, invisible from the sea but easily accessible by creeks from the interior. Its warehouses were full of goods for barter, cloths, rum and Cuban tobacco. Blanco himself, who was immensely rich and flamboyantly immoral, lived on an island deep in the swamp, attended by a black seraglio, and on lesser islets all around sentries with telescopes on high lookouts kept watch over the Atlantic.

This was a hideously successful enterprise. Blanco had established an alliance with the chiefs of the surrounding countryside, notably King Siaka of Gallinas, and the coastal tribes acted as his agents, paid in advance for the slaves they could catch inland. A regular trade was established with Cuba, in Portuguese, Brazilian and American slave-ships, and the barracoons were nearly always full of slaves awaiting shipment, sometimes 5,000 at a time. Two or three ships arrived each month at the estuary. Blanco imported his shackles from England, and recruited a staff of Spaniards: King Siaka dined off silver plate.

The Royal Navy knew this place well from a distance, and had
blockaded the estuary for months at a time. But it was independent territory, and until October, 1840, the British could find no excuse to go ashore. Then a black British subject, Mrs Fry Norman of Sierra Leone, was kidnapped by King Siaka’s son Manna as security for a debt. ‘I have to inform you’, Mrs Norman wrote to the debtor, a Mrs Grey of Freetown, ‘that Mr Manna has catched me on your account, and is determined to detain me until you come yourself. Between now and night all depends on good or evil heart of Mr Manna. Therefore you will lose no time in coming to my assistance on your account.’ But instead of Mrs Grey it was Commander Joseph Denman, R.N., with the armed schooner
Wanderer
and the brigs
Rolla
and
Saracen
who, in an early exertion of the Victorian imperial principle
c
ivis
britannicus
sum
, arrived wrathful and determined at the bar of the Gallinas.

Denman was the son of a distinguished abolitionist, Lord Chief Justice Denman, and had himself felt passionately about the evils of the slave trade since, as a young lieutenant, he had sailed a captured slaver across the Atlantic with 500 half-dead Africans on board. ‘I was forty-six days on that voyage, and altogether four months on board of her, where I witnessed the most dreadful sufferings that human beings could endure.’ Denman was aching to settle scores not only with Siaka, but with the Spanish traders too, and he used the plight of poor Mrs Norman as pretext for a double action.

He had no mandate for an attack upon the barracoons—Britain was not at war with the Gallinas chiefs—but he acted Nelsonically, on his own. With three boatloads of blue-jackets he rode the surf, crossed the bar and seized the biggest of the estuary islands. Almost at once, without a shot, the whole iniquitous enterprise collapsed. Hustling as many slaves as they could into canoes, the Spaniards fled up the creeks into the bush. Mrs Norman was triumphantly released. More than a thousand slaves were freed of their chains. All the barracoons and warehouses were burnt. Siaka and the chiefs signed an abject treaty of renunciation, promising to abandon the slave trade altogether, whatever the ju-ju men said, and expel all the slave traders from their territories. The Gallinas trade was extinguished, and the British consul in Havana reported a stream of anxious slave-traders, requesting his advice about future prospects.

Some years later one of Blanco’s associates at the Gallinas station, whom the Navy had rescued from his own infuriated captives and shipped away to safety, ungratefully sued Denman for trespass and the seizure of property—a familiar hazard of the slave patrols: but the judges of the Court of Exchequer, who knew the Commander’s father well, directed the jury to clear him.

This bold little action was a foretaste of imperial manners to come, but its effect was transitory. Though it led to treaties with most of the slave-trading chiefs along the West African coast, they were seldom honoured for long. The legal complexities remained insoluble, and the movement towards Free Trade at home actually encouraged the slave traffic, for it greatly bolstered the economies of slave States like Cuba and Brazil. Though the Royal Navy liberated in all some 150,000 souls, the Atlantic slave traffic did not end until the victory of the North in the American Civil War, twenty years later. As for the Red Sea trade, it continued fitfully much longer still, with illicit shipments of boys to the pederast princelings of Arabia, or allocations of retainers to the Sultan of Muscat. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the slave patrol remained one of the Navy’s principal chores, a duty as implicit to the fact of British maritime power as guardship duty in Gibraltar, or cruiser service on the West India station.
1

No less demanding a concern of the imperial evangelists, though, was what to do with the slaves when they were liberated, for of course they could not be returned to barbarism. Fortunately the empire already possessed a haven. In the eighteenth century there had been some 14,000 slaves in Britain itself, scattered in gentlemen’s houses throughout the kingdom.
2
When domestic slavery was made
illegal in 1772 many of these people, together with ex-slaves from Nova Scotia, became the nucleus of an experiment in humanitarian imperialism—the creation of a new British colony, specifically for liberated negroes, on the coast of West Africa. It was to contribute to the ending of the slave trade everywhere, its sponsors said, by ‘civilization, Christianity and the cultivation of the soil’.

The chosen shore had been named by the Spaniards Sierra Leone, for the crouching lion-shape of the hill above its bay, and the capital of the new settlement was called inevitably Freetown, but most of the hamlets upon the peninsula were given names of ineffable Britishness, to stand as texts of enlightenment. There was Wilberforce, there was Buxton, there was Charlotte and there was Regent. Gloucester was down the road from Leicester, and the road from Waterloo to Wellington ran through Hastings, Grafton and Allen Town—all this at a time when the vast mass of Africa had never seen a white man at all, and there was not a single European consul between Freetown on the one shore and Zanzibar on the other. From the very start Sierra Leone, though its population was almost entirely negro, represented an implanted culture: a black British culture, evangelically Christian, conventionally diligent.

The colony made several false starts, for the ex-slaves proved inept colonists at first, and its early years were disturbed. As the wit Sydney Smith observed, there were always two Governors of Sierra Leone, the one who had just arrived, and the one who was just leaving. Among the new settlers there were understandable prejudices against white patronage of any kind: some citizens, after all, believed that the uniforms of the redcoat garrison were dyed with the blood of slaughtered negroes, and that British officers’ brains were developed by a potion of boiled African heads. As the years passed, and the neighbouring African peoples infiltrated the colony, and liberated slaves arrived too from the West Indies, and from captured slave-ships, some unsuspected doctrines were grafted upon the Christian orthodoxies, and distinctly heretical pieties were
pursued in the less respectable quarters of Freetown. Witchcraft was practised when the clergymen were not looking. Secret societies flourished. Streets named for statesmen, governors or eminent men of God found racier local nicknames. Yet Sierra Leone remained above all a Christian settlement upon the African shore, a ward of evangelical imperialism: spires and chapel roofs ornamented the Freetown skyline, and if Saturday nights were rumbustious in the backstreets, Sunday mornings were rich with hymns and self-improvement.

Architecturally the little town was remarkable, for here alone the Georgian style was applied to tropical Africa. Freetown was built to a grid system, partly as an image of European order, partly perhaps to make it easier to police. Some of its streets were surprisingly elegant. They were lined with deep-eaved villas three or four stories high, built of a heavily mortared yellowish sandstone, with white balconies and well-proportioned windows—comfortable, solid-looking houses, pleasantly sited on the slopes of Howe or Trelawny Streets, and made piquant by a certain naïvety of design—a gentle crudeness, which gave them a child-like charm, like rows of dolls’ houses in the sunshine. Handsome stone steps led down to the harbour of Freetown, an Anglican cathedral stood predominantly above, and the little capital kept as its fulcrum the handsome oak tree, now the hub of a cross-roads, at whose feet in 1787 the founding fathers of the colony had declared their intentions with a short and low church service.