Squadron by John Broich

Author:John Broich [BROICH, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS0271500, HIS015000, HIS015060, HIS015050
ISBN: 9781468314007
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

‘SWELL HIS SAIL WITH THINE OWN POWERFUL BREATH’

Sulivan, Meara and Heath work to expose hypocrisy, and Daphne tries to outrun a curse

FRANCE ABOLISHED the slave trading in its empire between 1818 and 1826 and outlawed the institution itself in 1848. First the ban on trafficking, and then elimination of the status itself, left French colonies in the Indian Ocean short of labour to work their sugar operations. Thus, one day in spring 1843 a French captain crossed from the Isle de Réunion, just east of Madagascar, to Zanzibar bearing a letter to the sultan from the French colony’s governor. He asked that the French be permitted to seek indentured labourers, or engagés, on Zanzibar and the sultan’s coastal territory from among the free African population there. These ‘contract labourers’ would owe their employers fourteen years of work in exchange for their passage across the Mozambique Channel to the expanding sphere of influence in the southern Indian Ocean: the islands of Réunion, Mayotta and Nosi Be. The sultan agreed, and so began a new kind of slave trade by another name.

There were very few free Africans on Zanzibar; instead, dealers in engagés bought slaves, both at the Zanzibar market and at coastal depots. This was carried on under the conceit that the dealers were in fact freeing the captives and offering them an opportunity for work. Yet David Livingstone reported seeing a boatload of ‘free’ engagés in chains as they awaited passage to a French colony. Others reported a scene of unctuous theatre that occurred each time engagés dealers forced their ‘clients’ on board their ships for passage: a colonial official would meet the Africans as they boarded and ask them in French whether they came of their own volition. An interpreter would then purport to translate the question into Arabic or Swahili for those boarding. There is no recorded instance of the ‘free labourers’ ever responding negatively.

The French soon made arrangements, too, with Portuguese to the south of the sultan’s dominion. It was a lucrative scheme for them: a person exchanged for the price of a length of cotton in the interior by the likes of Matekenya was sold at the coast to a middleman for about 20 silver dollars; the coastal Portuguese officials collected as much as 12–18 dollars in finding fees when the engagés dealer bought them for 35–45. Roughly 2,500–3,000 East Africans were carried to the French colonies from the Mozambique coast annually under this falsehood.1

HMS Daphne, Mafamede Island, south of Mozambique, July 1869

Before departing Mozambique Island with the refugees who had swum aboard Daphne, George Sulivan received word that there was a ship flying French colours gathering slaves at the mouth of River Antonio not far to the south on the coast. If Sulivan could take her and, as reported, she truly did not have documents showing that she was a ‘legal’ carrier of engagée labour, it would show that the direct slave trade itself was carried on under the French flag. Such proof would be an international thunderclap.

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