12/22/03

  Chasing Arab slave dhows on the East Coast of Africa. The capture.

On being discharged from the sick list, my leave was abrogated and I was returned to duty.  During one afternoon watch I was notified to hold myself in readiness for special duty at eight bells, and word was passed to me that the special duty consisted of taking a ten-oared cutter on patrol under secret orders. Promptly at the last tap of the bell the boat was at the gangway, fully manned with ten seamen and victual led with a keg of rum, a sack of hard tack, a bucket of salt pork, two kegs of fresh water and a washtub half full of sand in which to build a fire for cooking. The men were armed with Colt double-action revolvers and the regulation cutlass; the interpreter was unarmed, and I wore a midshipman’s dirk. In the bow of the boat was a nine-pounder, segment shell, and breach loader. The men each had a blanket, but the nights were warm and we needed little bedding. At the gangway I received an official envelope under seal, with the superscription ”Not to be opened within eight hours of departure.”

The boat was shoved off, the oars were shipped, the sail hoisted, and I gave a course of SE by S to the coxswain as we moved away in a gentle breeze from the west. Our supper consisted of hard tack, a tot of rum, and all the water the men wanted to drink. The crew whiled away the hours by singing songs, one of which had a chorus declaring the songster to be “the Demon of the sea.” The boys had a good time anyway, and when their throats gave out the blankets were spread on the bottom of the boat, and soon no one could be seen from the outside but the man at the tiller.

When I awoke the following morning, the sun was already sizzling the pork in the bucket, and when I looked at my watch I found it was long after the eight-hour limit, so I piped the men to breakfast while I gingerly broke the seals of the envelope. The contents were brief:  

“Proceed coastwise in southerly direction for 250 miles and return. Search all inlets; keep lookout without lights; capture or destroy all dhows engaged in slave trade and send slaves to Zanzibar. Francis Hope, Commander” 

The day dragged along its course with our crew straining their eyes over the horizon for the sail that did not appear. We were close in shore and turned in an inlet that looked like a hideout. We found nothing there, but picked a place near the entrance and dropped our kedge while dinner was prepared, the stove being the tub of sand and faggots of wood furnishing the heat. We had not long to wait. Before we had finished the meal, a small dhow was seen to pass the mouth of the inlet not more than five miles away, and we immediately pulled up the kedge and gave chase.

The dhow kept her course and distance, and we followed her steadily through the night. At daylight we added the oars to the sail, and in an hour were near enough to hail her to heave to, which the dhow obeyed. Stepping on board with the interpreter I demanded the ship’s papers, and while the captain was getting them from his cabin my men went below and found two slaves. When the captain returned he said he could not find his credentials, but that the slaves we had found were lawful passengers, and demanded his release, which I refused. Leaving three of my men on board we took the dhow in tow, and with the assistance of sails on both crafts soon had her in shore near a native settlement. The headman of the village said he knew the tribe to which the slaves belonged and agreed to turn them over to the British consul at Zanzibar.

An inspection of the cargo showed an assortment of rice, sugar, arrowroot, and spice, which I sold to an Arab trader for four hundred American gold dollars. When this had been removed we exchanged our mast for that of the dhow, which was a setter stick, and it was stepped in our boat. Then I made a bomb from our ammunition, towed the prize out to deep water, lit the fuse of the bomb, and lowered it into the hold, left her to her fate. The explosion blew off her upper works and also opened her planking, so that she sank while we looked on.

After the dhow had disappeared under a swirling whirlpool, I ran the cutter on the beach, called the crew ashore, and made an impromptu camp. Eight of the men went foraging for food, returning with enough provender to last us a week. There were a dozen chickens, baskets of sweet potatoes, a suckling pig, yams, oranges, mangoes, and other fruits. The crew had a feast that evening that they talked about for a month.

The next morning the men were roused from their slumber at an early hour, and after the morning meal the boat was manned and we pulled out to open water. A fresh wind from the southwest was coming up so we shipped the oars and hoisted the sail. Our course was still southerly, and estimating that we had lost thirty miles in overhauling the dhow, there still remained 150 knots to be covered before turning homeward.

It was about five bells in the afternoon when the lookout called, “Sail on the port bow, sir,” and there, almost hull down, appeared a dhow with a spread of canvas as big as the “Glasgow’s” mainsail, and whose bulk I estimated to be in excess of 400 tons. She was evidently keeping a sharp lookout, for she changed her course to SW by W, hoisted another sail at the stern, and was making a run for it with a bone in her teeth. All we could do was to tighten our halyards, bring the cutter a little closer to the wind, and help along with the lee oars.

A lull came and the breeze died down, allowing us to gain on her temporarily with the oars, during which we bombarded the fugitive with our nine-pounder. We could see the Arabs along her taffrail as they dodged when the gun was fired, but when they discovered they were out of range their thumbs went to their noses in derision. The wind again freshened and the slaver had no difficulty in maintaining her distance. It was a stern chase sure enough, and we prayed for a more favorable breeze as night came on. As we were using only the starboard oars I put the men on two-hour watches, and in the moonlight we were able to keep the big dhow in sight.

Daybreak showed us to be in the same position as the night before, and with the rising sun the wind died down for an hour, which enabled us to creep a little closer to our prey but not enough to get the gun within range. So far as our speed was concerned, it was apparent we were evenly matched, but my men were playing out for the loss of sleep. I was just about to give up the chase when a black object appeared on the horizon, and through the glass I made out the outlines of our ship’s pinnace, bowling towards us under a stern wind. Twilight was coming on, and I kept the cutter on the course just the same, as I knew that the pinnace was a faster boat and would quickly overhaul us, as it did shortly.

Sub-lieutenant Treloar was in command of the pinnace, and our consultation was brief. His boat immediately mounted her rocket tube on the gunwale, shipped a Hale’s rocket into place, primed it with a friction tube, and pulled the cord. With the roar of a dozen elevated railroad trains the projectile, which combined three separate charges, described a brilliant arc of fire from the boats to the dhow, lighting up the slave ship so that we could see the panic aboard. The sails dropped with a crash; she lost way, and was drifting to leeward when we came up. We saw that the Arabs were going to make a fight for it, and Treloar shouted to me that he was going to board her on the starboard quarter and for me to take the port bow. The Arabs were rushing about the deck, battening down the hatches, and all of them were armed with the long, flintlock rifles of long ago. Our men had Colt six-shooters and cutlasses that were sharp enough to shave with. The Arabs had the chance of their lives to rake us fore and aft, but for some reason they withheld their fire.

Quickly our oars were shopped and with a line the boat was lashed to the dhow. Then our men with drawn cutlasses slung to their wrist, and I with my dirk in my teeth, swung onto the deck. As I cleared the rail an Arab brought his rifle down in line with my ear only three paces away, but before he could get the spark a member of my crew made a leap throwing the gun out of line, so that it exploded in the air, and made a slashing cut with his cutlass at the Arab. As the blade was descending, a slave boy, running around in terror, slipped between us, and the sword dropped on his rear anatomy. The boy gave a blood-curdling yell and leaped into the sea. We both jumped on the Arab, who tried to use the butt of his gun as a club, but we bore him to the deck and tied him up with one of the loose ropes.

On looking around I saw that the men from the pinnace had cleared up the after part of the ship and had the enemy bound to the bitts. Leaving a guard to watch, we opened the hatchway to see what was below. The clearance between the two decks was not more then four feet, and when we waited a few minutes for the fresh air to dissipate the stench that was wafted up through the hatch, the commander of the pinnace, myself, and the interpreter went below. The lanterns we had found above cast a sickly light over a scene that was horrifying in the extreme. Ranged in rows, sitting each one between the other’s legs, we counted three hundred and fifteen wretched slave or captives. Some were dead, others in the last throes of some dreadful disease, and all wallowing in an accumulation of filth that was indescribable. On the deck below that living mass of horror was stored the dhow’s cargo of rice, arrowroot, dates, and sundries.

No more captives were found, and after a consultation we decided to put a prize crew on board and send her to the hip as quickly as possible. Two men and the coxswain were selected from my cutter and four men from the pinnace, this being deemed sufficient as three of the Arab crew were dead and only four were left to take care of. The prize crew were given instructions to throw the dead overboard, feed the living, and guard the four Arab prisoners, after which they were ordered to proceed to the ship at Zanzibar without delay. As both the pinnace and the cutter were still under patrol orders we left for our stations after seeing the dhow under way. That was the last ever seen of our prize or her human cargo. It was believed that the Arabs scuttled her during the night and escaped in the only boat she had, leaving the white crew and slaves to drown.