where Black joke could not follow.
However, there were another six smaller vessels on the beach and four magnificent double-decked ocean-going dhows lying in the inner anchorage. Clinton Codrington burned two of them and seized the four newest and biggest vessels, put prize crews into them and sent them south to the nearest British base at Port Natal.
Two days later, off the beach at Kilwa, Clinton Codrington exercised his ship at gunnery practice. Running out his thirty-two pounders, and firing them in broadsides which set the surface of the lagoon seething and dancing with foam and white fountains of spray. The thunder of gunfire burst against the far hills and rumbled back across the sky like cannon balls rolled across a wooden deck.
The Sultan's local Governor was reduced to a quivering jelly of terror by this display of might, and had to be carried bodily into Black joke's whaler to be rowed out to a conclave with the gunboat's Captain. Clinton had the treaty forms already filled out and ready for signature when they carried the Governor aboard to team that he was heir to a kingdom to which he had never aspired, and a title which he knew was too grandiose not to bring with it certain retribution from somebody whose name he did not dare to breathe aloud.
Admiral Kemp, sitting in his study in the magnificent mansion of Admiralty House, overlooking the wide smoky-blue haze of the Cape flats to the far mountains of the Hottentots Holland, hopefully dismissed the first reports as the wild imaginings of some crazed subordinate who had served too long in the godforsaken outpost of Port Natal, and who was suffering from the bush madness of 'El Cafard' that sometimes affects a person so isolated.
Then the details began to arrive with every despatch from the north, and they were too graphic to be lightly dismissed. An armada of captured prizes was arriving in the bay of Port Natal, twenty-six sizable dhows to date, some of them loaded with slaves.
The Lieutenant-Governor of Port Natal was desperate for the Admiral's advice as to what should be done with the dhows. The slaves had been taken ashore, released and immediately been contracted as indentured labourers to the hardy and hopeful gentlemen who were attempting to raise cotton and sugarcane in the wilderness of the Umgeni valley. The shortage of tabour was critical, the local Zulu tribesmen much preferred cattle raiding and beer drinking to agricultural labour, so the Governor would be delighted to receive as many freed slaves as the Royal Navy wished to send him. (The Admiral was not entirely certain of the difference between indentured labourers and slaves. ) However, what was the Lieutenant-Governor to do with twentysix, no, the latest figure was thirty-two captured dhows.
A further flotilla of six vessels had arrived as the Governor was dictating his report.
Two weeks later, one of the captured dhows, which had been purchased into the Colonial Service by the Lieutenant-Governor, arrived in Table Bay bearing a further batch of despatches.
One of these was from Sir John Bannerman, H. M.
Consul on the island of Zanzibar. Another was from the Sultan of Omani in person, with copies to the Foreign Secretary in London and, quite remarkably, to the Governor-General in Calcutta. The Sultan evidently believed that as the representative of the Queen of England the Governor-General would have some jurisdiction in the Indian Ocean, which was virtually his front garden.
Admiral Kemp split the seals on both packets with a queasy feeling of impending doom. Good God! ' he groaned, as he began reading, and then, Oh sweet merciful Jesus, no! ' And later, 'It's too much, it's like some sort of nightmare! ' Captain Codrington, one of the most junior post-captains on the Admiralty list, seemed to have taken powers unto himself which would have made a Wellington or a Bonaparte pause.
He had annexed to the British Crown vast African territories, which hitherto had formed part of the Sultan's dominions. With a high hand he had negotiated with various local chiefs and dignitaries of dubious title and authority, pledging recognition and good British gold. Good God! the Admiral cried again in real anguish, What will that brighter Palmerston have to say. ' As a staunch Tory, Kemp had no great opinion of the new Whig prime minister.
Since the troubles in India, the sepoy risings of a few years previously, the British government was very wary of accepting further responsibility for overseas territory and backward peoples. Their orders were specific, and Captain Codrington's recent activity went far from the essence of those orders.
The scramble for Africa was still in the future, and the spirit of the Little Englanders motivated British foreign policy, of this Admiral Kemp was very painfully aware.
Daunting as this was, yet it was far from the entire story, Kemp realized, as he read on into the Consul's despatch, his breath rasping hoarsely, his colour rising steadily, and his eyes behind the gold-wire framed reading- glasses swimming with tears of rage and frustration.
When I get my hands on that puppy-' he promised himself.
Captain Codrington seemed to have declared singlehanded war upon the Sultan. Yet even in his outrage the Admiral felt a prickle of professional appreciation for the scope of his subordinate's operations.
There was a formidable list of over thirty separate incidents recited by H. M. Consul. The puppy had stormed fortified castles, raided ashore to burn and destroy barracoons, released tens of thousands of slaves, seized slaving vessels on the high seas, burned others at their moorings, and wreaked the kind of chaos worthy of a marauding Nelson himself.
The Admiral's reluctant admiration for Codrington's technical conduct of the campaign in no way lessened his determination to exact vengeance for the disruption of his life and career that those actions presented. Nothing can save him this time. Nothing! ' the Admiral rumbled, as he turned to study the Sultan's protest. This was obviously the work of a professional letter-writer, and every paragraph began and ended with incongruous and flowery enquiries after Kemp's health, between which were sandwiched cries of anguish, screams of outrage, and bitter protest against the broken promises and treaties of Her Majesty's government.
At the very end the letter-writer had not been able to resist adding a prayer for the Admiral and the Queen's prosperity and health in this life, and happiness in the one to follow. This detracted a little from the tone of injury in which the protests and demands had been couched.
The Sultan assessed his losses at over fourteen lakhs of rupees, almost a million of sterling, in plundered shipping and released slaves, and that did not take into account the irreplaceable damage to his prestige, nor the break-down of the entire trade along the coast. The confusion was such that some ports might never again be opened to the trade. The system of gathering slaves in the interior of the continent and the network of routes to the coastal ports had been so sadly disrupted that they might take years to re-open, to say nothing of the gross shortage of shipping resulting from the depredations ofEl Sheetan'.
Those ports still open to the trade were swamped with patient slaves, waiting for the dhows which were
