ABSTRACT
AGOOD account of the Arab Slave Trade by sea at thetime of Rigby's departure from the consulate at Zanzibar is giverl in a despatch by Admiral Sir Baldwin Wake Walker, Commander-in-Chief of the Cape Station in 1863. He had recently visited both coasts ofAfrica. On the West he found the trade fast declining; on the East he found it far more extensive than was commonly supposed at home. (I)
LIBERATED SLAVES ON BOARD H.M.S. DAPHNE
Every Arab in Africa was implicated in some way or other in the ramifications of this traffic, from the Sultan (whose customs revenue in 1870 was twice that enjoyed by Seyyid Said) to the leaders of remote caravans in the interior, where a slave could be obtained for a bottle of rum, a decoy girl, Of, if need arose, with the use of musket and whip. According to Sir Richard Burton, a slave cost £1 at Kilwa, £5 at Zanzibar and anything up to £20 at Muscat-provided he or she reached that destination in marketable condition. At least twice the number that reached Zanzibar died on the way thither, and it is sufficient to quote one example of a dhow captured by the Daphne to appreciate the high mortality at sea. This particular vessel carried 156 slaves, of which 108 were women and children.(2)
To intercept this fleet of dhows, the naval officer in charge of that part of the coast had at the most six or seven cruisers at his disposal. In 1865, after Walker's retirement, the Cape Squadron was united with that of the East Indies; but this was in name rather than in fact, and two years later the two were separated again. Instead of the equator, the new dividing line between the two stations was the southern Tropic, which cuts the African coast just north of Cape Corrientes. For the next ten years the East Indies Squadron, which was now responsible for most of the coast of East Africa as well as those of Arabia, India and Burma, consisted of between seven and eleven ships, with a total complement of about 1,500 men. Admiral C. F. Hillyar, who was in command in 1866, had at his disposal seven ships, of which only four could be on station at a given time, one of them (the flagship) being usually at Bombay, and another two undergoing repairs. To blockade over 3,000 miles of coast, he placed one ship off Socotra, one off the mouth of the Persian
Gul~ while the remaining three serviceable vessels cruised between Zanzibar, Madagascar and the Seychelles. With this force Hillyar estimated that he captured one dhow for every eight which escaped. (3)
First-hand descriptions of the work of officers engaged in this task may be found in the memoirs of Captains G. L. Sulivan and Philip Colomb. Sulivan returned to the coast eleven years after his last visit as midshipman in the Castor. It will be recalled that in Wyvill's day this ship was based on the Cape for her cruise up to Zanzibar. In 1866, when Sulivan was appointed to the command of the Pantaloon, he joined his ship at Aden
and sailed down the coast as part of the East Indies Squadron. The next year he transferred to the Daphne. He probably had a longer connection with the Zanzibar trade than any other officer, for he returned to these waters in 1874 as Captain of the London. The Daphne's captures in 1867 amounted to 15 dliows with 322 slaves on board. An attempt was made to take them to Aden) but the ship could made no headway against the current off the Somali coast; so, with slaves crowding the upper deck, she had to stretch across to the Seychelles to land them. (4)
Sulivan had some previous experience of the trade; but when Colomb was appointed to the command of the Dryad in 1869 he knew nothing whatever about it, except what he had read in the books of the explorers. When he, too, joined his ship at Aden he found that no warship had ever attempted to patrol the southern coast of Arabia, and that no one knew at what point the flock of dhows coming up from the south made their landfall. As an exceptionally zealous and efficient officer, he determined to take his toll of the slavers by posting his ship off Ras-el-Madraka near the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Here the routine of slave catching began, and contrary to the received opinion he found it was not" all dash and excitement, but mainly drudgery and hard work." Entries in his journal bear this out: (5)
When the slave trading season opened, every man on board the cruiser busied himself in preparations to make his fortune by prize money. The pinnace and cutter were provisioned for a week's detached service, each boat being armed with rifles, pistols and a 12-pounder gun. The fires of the cruiser were banked so that she could get up steam in ten or fifteen minutes.
