A Falcon Flies

  ‘Waai!’ The Sheikh plucked at his beard, so that long curly hairs came out between his fingers. ‘This ally makes one long for ordinary enemies.’

  Twenty-four hours later Black Joke sailed into Telfa bay, forty miles further up the coast. Nobody had thought to warn the slaving fleet that was anchored there of the new policies of the state of Elat to which the territory now belonged.

  The five dhows in the outer anchorage managed to cut their anchor cables and slip away into the maze of shallow coral channels and shoals to the north of the bay, 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 learn 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 labour 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 twenty-six – 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 Zanzibar 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 Bona-parte 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 blighter 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 single-handed 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 presaged.

  ‘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 reopen, to say nothing of the gross shortage of shipping resulting from the depredations of ‘El Sheetan’. Those ports still open to the trade were swamped with patient slaves, waiting for the dhows which were already scattered wrecks upon the reefs and beaches of the Mozambique channel, or sailing southwards under prize crews.

  ‘Nothing can save him,’ repeated Admiral Kemp, and then paused. His own career was finished also. He realized that, and he felt the deep injustice of it. For forty years he had put not a single foot wrong, and his retirement was so close, so very close. He shook off the lethargy of despair, and began to draft his orders.

  The first was to all ships of his squadron, to detach
immediately and to steam in search of Black Joke.In despair he realized that it might take as much as six weeks for his orders to reach his commanders, for they were scattered across two oceans. It might also take as long again for them to search out the errant gunboat in the maze of islands and bays along the Mozambique channel.

  However, when they did so, Captain Codrington was to be relieved of his command with immediate effect. Lieutenant Denham was to take over as temporary commander, with orders to bring Black Joke into Table Bay as soon as possible.

  Admiral Kemp was confident that he could assemble sufficient senior officers on the Cape Station to convene an immediate court martial. It might help his own position a little if he could report to the First Lord that a savage sentence had already been handed down to Codrington.

  Then there was a despatch to H.M. Consul in Zanzibar, suggesting he keep the Sultan reassured and quiescent until the situation could once more be brought under control – and until instructions could be forwarded from the Foreign Office in London regarding possible redress and compensation, although naturally at this stage, no promises or commitments were to be given the Sultan, beyond expressions of good faith and commiseration.

  Then there was the onerous task of making his report to the Admiralty. There were no words to soften the actions of his subordinate, and his own responsibility. Besides he had been a serving officer too long to make any such attempt. Yet when the bare facts were stated, even in the beloved unemotional jargon of the navy, they seemed so magnified that Admiral Kemp was himself utterly appalled, all over again. The packet-boat was delayed five hours while the Admiral completed, sealed and addressed this missive. It would be in London in less than a month.

  His last despatch was addressed to the officer commanding Her Majesty’s ship Black Joke in person. And in it Admiral Kemp allowed himself to give expression to some of his own bitterness, taking a sour sadistic pleasure in weighing the relative effectiveness of such words as ‘corsair’ and ‘pirate’ – or ‘malicious’ and ‘irresponsible’. He had his little masterpiece of venom written out in five copies to be disseminated in every direction and by every available means that might most speedily bring the puppy to heel. Yet when they were sent, all he could do was wait – and that was the worst part of the affair. Uncertainty and inaction seemed to corrode his very soul.

  He dreaded each new arrival in Table Bay, and whenever the signal gun on the hill above the town boomed its brief feather of gunsmoke, his spirit quailed and that sour ache of dread stabbed him in his guts.

  Each new despatch lengthened the toll of destruction and depredation, until at last there was a report from the culprit himself, sewn up in a package of canvas and addressed to Admiral Kemp, delivered by the prize crew of a particularly valuable dhow over eighty feet long and of a hundred-ton burden.

  The tone in which Captain Codrington listed his achievements infuriated the Admiral as much as the deeds themselves. In an almost casual opening paragraph, Captain Codrington recorded the addition of some million square miles of Africa to the Empire.

  He had the grace to admit that his action may have exceeded his orders, and he explained away the discrepancy winningly. ‘It had been my firm intention to avoid scrupulously, whilst on this service, every act of a political nature. However, I was forced to accept the cession of the kingdoms of Elat and Telfa by the entreaties of the Sheikh and the Imam – together with that of their people, who seek refuge from the inimical and savage acts of the Sultan of Zanzibar.’

  This was hard fare to serve their Lordships, especially the First Lord, Lord Somerset, who had always grudged the use of his men and ships to fight against slavery. However, much worse was to follow. Captain Codrington went on to lecture the Admiral and to deliver a few homilies for their Lordships’ instruction.

  ‘By God’s providence, an Englishman with no other force than the character of his noble nation has brought to these poor people salvation. Their Lordships must pardon me for using an unfashionable argument,’ a sneer at the Little Englanders, ‘however, it is as clear to me as the African sun that God has prepared this continent for the only nation on earth that has the public virtue sufficient to govern it for its own benefit, and for the only people who take the revealed word for their moral law.’

  Admiral Kemp gulped as he read it, swallowed the wrong way, and was prostrated with a coughing fit from which he recovered some minutes later to read on.

  ‘In all the foregoing I have been influenced by no personal motive or interest, by no desire of vainglory, but my endeavours have solely been to use the powers granted me to the honour of my God, my Queen and to the benefit of my country and all mankind.’

  The Admiral removed his reading glasses and stared at the glass case of stuffed songbirds on the wall opposite him.

  ‘To write that, he is either the world’s greatest fool – or a brave man or both,’ he decided at last.

  Admiral Kemp was wrong in his estimate. In fact, Clinton Codrington was having an attack of cockiness and self-importance occasioned by the sense of limitless power which this command had given him. He had been wielding this power for many months, and his judgement and good sense had warped. Yet he still truly believed that he was fulfilling, in this order, the will of God, his patriotic duty and the spirit of his orders from the Lords of the Admiralty.

  He was also fully aware that he had demonstrated superior professional ability in carrying out a series of land and sea actions, nearly always against superior numbers, without a single reverse and with the loss of only three men killed in action and less than a dozen wounded. There was only one area in which Clinton had any reservations regarding the success of the patrol up to this time.

  Huron was still on the coast, he had intelligence of her from a dozen sources. Mungo St John was trading, paying top prices for only the best merchandise, hand-picked by either himself or his mate, the bald yellow giant, Tippoo. They were taking only healthy, mature men and women fit to withstand the long voyage back around Good Hope and across the middle passage, and there was a shortage of this type of merchandise.

  For Clinton every dawn brought the hope that Black Joke would once again raise that towering pyramid of beautiful white sails, but each day the hope faded slowly with the passage of the fierce tropical sun across the heavens, to be extinguished each night as the huge red orb plunged into the sea, and to be resurrected again with the next dawn.

  Once they missed the big American clipper by a single day. She had slipped out of the bay at Lindi twenty-four hours before Black Joke’s arrival, after taking on fifty prime slaves. The watchers from the beach could not be certain if she had turned north or south, for she had made her offing below the horizon, and had been lost to sight from the shore before coming around on to her intended course.

  Clinton guessed Huron would go south, and had steamed in pursuit for three days, over an empty sea, down a seemingly deserted coast with barren anchorages before admitting that St John had sailed away from him again, and he was forced to abandon the hunt.

  At the very least he knew that if Huron had turned north, St John was still trading, and there was always a chance of another encounter. He prayed for it every evening. It was all that he needed to make this patrol a clean sweep, so that he could fly a broom from his masthead when he sailed into Table Bay again.

  This time he had the sworn and witnessed depositions of the men who had sold St John his slaves as proof positive that Huron was trading. He did not have to rely on the equipment clause, or the dubious rights of search. He had his proof and somehow he knew his chance would come.

  The tide was running at full flow for Clinton. He was imbued with a new sense of worthiness, a new, iron-clad confidence in himself and his own good fortune. He carried himself differently, chin higher, shoulders squarer, and if his gait was not yet a swagger, it was at least an assured stride. He smiled more often and when he did there was a wicked curl to his upper lip and a devilish twinkle in the pale blue eyes. He had even g
rown a full moustache, golden and curling that gave him a piratical air, and his crew, who had always respected his cold precise management of the ship, but felt little affection for him, now cheered him when he came back on board from one of his forays ashore.

  ‘Good old Tongs!’ It was his new nickname from ‘Hammer and Tongs’. They had never had a pet name for him before, but now they were a proud ship, proud of themselves, and proud of their twenty-seven-year-old ‘Old Man’.

  ‘Give ’em hell, Tongs!’ they cheered behind him, as he led them, naked cutlass in hand, over the outer stockade of a barracoon with musket smoke swirling around his lanky figure.

  ‘At ’em, the Jokers!’ they cheered themselves, as they leaped the gap between Black Joke’s rail and the deck of a slaving dhow, swinging their cutlasses, pistols popping as they drove the slavers down into their own holds and battened the hatches down on them, or chased them over the side where the sharks were cruising.

  They knew they were creating a legend. Tongs and his Jokers sweeping the slavers from the Mozambique channel, a hell of a story to tell the nippers back home, and a good slice of prize money to prove the tale.

  It was in this mood that Black Joke sailed into Zanzibar harbour, the stronghold of the Omani Sultan, little Daniel into the lion’s den. The gunners on the parapets of the fort, though they stood with the slow match burning in their hands, could not bring themselves to touch them to the huge bronze cannon as the ugly little gunboat came fussing up the Zanzibar roads.

  Black Joke had her yards manned with neatly uniformed seamen. A spectacular display, geometrical white ranks of men against the backdrop of tropical anvil-headed thunderclouds.

  Her officers were in cocked hats and full ceremonial dress, uniform, swords, white gloves and white breeches, and as she made her turn into the inner harbour, Black Joke began firing her courtesy salute – which was a signal for most of the population to head for the hills, jamming the narrow alleyways of the old city with a lamenting torrent of refugees.