A Falcon Flies (32 page)

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

A
dmiral 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 grown 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.

The Sultan himself fled his palace, and with most of his court took refuge in the British consulate, overlooking the harbour.

‘I am not a coward,' the Sultan explained bitterly to Sir John Bannerman, ‘but the Captain of that ship is a madman. Allah himself does not know what he will do next.'

Sir John was a large man, of large appetite. He possessed a noble belly like the glacis of a mediaeval castle and full mutton-chop whiskers around a florid face, but the clear intelligent eyes, and the wide friendly mouth of a man of humanity and humour. He was a noted oriental scholar, and had written books of travel and of religious and political appraisal of the East, as well as a dozen translations of minor Arabic poets.

He was also a confirmed opponent of the slave trade, for the Zanzibar markets were held in the square below the windows of his residence and from his bedroom terrace he could watch on any morning the slaving dhows unloading their pitiful cargoes on the stone wharf they called, with cruel humour, the ‘Pearl Gate'.

For seven years he had patiently negotiated a series of treaties with the Sultan, each one nipping a few more twigs off the flourishing growth which he detested, but found almost impossible to prune effectively, let alone root out entirely.

In all the Sultan's territories Sir John had absolute jurisdiction only over the community of Hindu traders on the island, for they were British subjects, and Sir John published a bulletin requiring them to free all their slaves forthwith, against a penalty of £100 for non-compliance.

His bulletin made no mention of compensation, so the most influential of the merchants sent Sir John a defiance which was the Pushtu equivalent of ‘The hell with you and your bulletins'.

Sir John, with his one good foot, personally kicked in the merchant's door, dragged him out from under his charpoy bed, dropped him to his knees with a full-blooded roundhouse punch, chained him around the neck and marched him through the city streets to the consulate and locked him in the wine cellar until the fine was paid and the slaves' manumission papers signed. There had been no further defiance and no takers for the Hindu merchant's subsequent, privately circulated offer to pay another £100 to anybody who would stick a knife between Sir John's ribs during one of his evening promenades through the old city. Thus it was that Sir John was still bluff and hale as he stood on his terrace puffing a cigar – his only indisposition was the gouty foot thrust into a carpet slipper. He watched the little black-hulled gunboat coming up the channel.

‘She behaves like a flagship,' he smiled indulgently, and beside him, Said the Sultan of Zanzibar, hissed like a faulty steam valve.

‘El Sheetan!' His wrinkled turkey neck turned bright red with impotent anger, his bony nose beaked like that of an unhappy parrot. ‘He sails here, into my harbour, and my gunners stand by their cannon like dead men. He who has beggared me, who has plunged my empire into ruins – what does he dare here?'

The answer that Clinton ‘Tongs' Codrington would have given him was quite simple. He was carrying out to the letter the orders given him in Cape Town many months previously by Admiral Kemp, the Commander of the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Squadron.

‘You are further requested and required to take advantage of the first opportunity to call into the harbour of Zanzibar, where you will accord to his Royal Highness the Sultan of Zanzibar full honours, while taking the advice of Her Majesty's Consul, Sir John Bannerman, as to reinforcing existing treaties between His Royal Highness and her Britannic Majesty's Government.'

Which, being translated, was an instruction to show the Union Jack against a background of thirty-two pounder cannon, and by doing so remind the Sultan of his commitments under the various treaties.

‘To teach the naughty old beggar to mind his P's and Q's,' as Clinton explained cheerfully to Lieutenant Denham with a twirl of his new golden moustache.

‘I would have thought, sir, that the lesson had already been given,' Denham answered darkly.

‘Not at all,' Clinton demurred. ‘The treaties with the new sultans on the mainland no longer affect the Zanzibar fellow. We still have to ginger this old boy up a little.'

Sir John Bannerman limped up on to
Black Joke
's deck, favouring his gouty foot and cocked a lively eye at the young naval officer who stepped forward to greet him.

‘Well, sir, you have been busy indeed,' he murmured. My God, the fellow was little more than a boy, a fresh-faced youngster, despite the cocked hat and moustache. It was difficult to believe that he had created such havoc with this tiny ship.

They shook hands, and Bannerman found himself liking the boy, despite the turmoil that he brought into the Consul's normally tranquil existence.

‘A glass of madeira, sir?' Clinton suggested.

‘Damned decent of you, I must say.'

In the small cabin, Bannerman mopped his streaming face, and came directly to business.

‘By God, you've put the cat amongst the pigeons,' he wagged his big head.

‘I don't see.. . . '

‘Now, listen to me,' Bannerman snapped, ‘and I'll explain to you the facts of life as they apply to eastern Africa in general, and Zanzibar in particular.'

Half an hour later, Clinton had lost much of his newfound bumptiousness.

‘What should we do?' he asked.

‘Do?' Bannerman asked. ‘What we do is take full advantage of the situation which you have precipitated, before these idiots in Whitehall come stumbling in. Thanks to you the Sultan is at last in a mood to sign the treaty I have been after for five years. I'll trade a handful of these utterly illegal, untenable treaties that you have made with non-existent states and mythical princes for one that will truss the old goat up the way I've wanted him for years.'

‘Excuse me, Sir John,' Clinton looked slightly perplexed, ‘from what you said earlier, I understood that you heartily disapproved of my recent actions.'

‘On the contrary,' Sir John grinned at him expansively, ‘you have stirred my blood, and made me proud to be an Englishman again. I say, do you have a little more of the madeira?'

He raised the glass to Clinton. ‘My hearty congratulations, Captain Codrington. I only wish that I could do something to save you from the fate that so certainly awaits you, once the Admiralty and Lord Palmerston catch up with you.' Sir John drank half the glass, smacked his lips, ‘Jolly good stuff,' he nodded, set the glass aside and went on briskly, ‘Now, we have to work fast and get the Sultan to sign an iron-clad treaty – before Whitehall rushes in with apologies and protestations of good faith which will put to naught all the fine work you have done to date. Something tells me that won't be very long,' he added lugubriously, and then more brightly, ‘You could have your ship's guns run out whilst we are ashore. Do wear your sword. Oh, and one other thing, don't take your eyes off the old goat while I do the talking. There is already talk about your eyes – that extraordinary colour of blue, don't you know – and the Sultan has heard about them already. As you probably know, they now call you “El Sheetan” on this coast, and the Sultan is a man who sets great store by djinns and the occult.'

Sir John's predictions as to the imminent arrival of tidings from higher sources was almost clairvoyant, for as he spoke H.M. sloop
Penguin
, with urgent despatches on board for Sir John Bannerman, for the Sultan, and for Captain Codrington, was on a fair wind, which, if it held, would bring her into Zanzibar harbour within the next two days. Time was shorter than even Sir John believed.

W
ith some trepidation, the Sultan had moved back into his palace. He had only half believed Sir John's assurances, but, on the other hand, the palace was half a mile from the harbour where that evil black ship was displaying its formidable broadside of cannonades, while the consulate was on the harbour front – or the front line of fire, depending on how one looked at it.

On Sir John's advice Clinton had come ashore with a bodyguard of a dozen picked seamen, who could be trusted to resist the temptations of the old city's red-light area, the grog and the women that seamen dream of. It was dusk when the party plunged into the labyrinth of narrow alleys, where the balconies almost met overhead, led by Sir John who despite his game leg set a good pace, picking his way around heaps of noisome garbage and avoiding the puddles in the uneven paving that looked like a cold minestrone soup and smelled a great deal higher.