Page 183 - Gulf Precis (III)_Neat

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CHAPTER II.
Measures against traffic in slaves by Native of India.
4. One of the deplorable facts connected with the slave traffic from East
Africa was the complicity clearly proved
Political A., October 1873, Noj. 316.320
of a large number of the natives of India
in the nefarious traffic, either directly or indirectly. The following memorandum
drawn up by Sir Bartlc Frere, long though as it is, on the subject is a most
interesting document and worth perusal:—
Memorandum regarding Banians or Natives of India in East Africa.
Of all classes connected with the trade of East Africa there is none more influential
than the natives of India generally known as “ Banians”.
History of Indian Trade with East A frica.—Greek and Roman authors describe a
flourishing commerce between India, Arabia, and East Africa, and the earliest detailed
accounts we have of this coast represent a distribution of races connected with trade very
much resembling what we now find existing, Native-African rates as cultivators, labourers,
and sometimes, though rarely, as rulers. The ruling power at ports generally in the hands
of foreigners of Arab or Persian origin, and all trade monopolized by Indians, or Arabs with
Indian connection, and having their homes and chief places of business sometimes on the
Egyptian, Arabian, or Persian Coast, but more often in India, at Tatta in Sind, Mandavie
in Cutch. the ports of Kuttyawar or the Gulf of Cambay, Surat, Calicut, and other ports on
the Malabar Coast.
Vasco de Gama* and the Portuguese who followed him found a trade relatively to the
• See "The three toyegesof Vasco de Gama.” rest of the commercial world much larger and
translated by Lord Stanley of Aldcrley for the more important than at present; but carried on
Hakluyt Society, 1869. much in the same fashion, by vessels of the same
build and character as the modern dhows, availing themselves of the regular trade-winds
to sail to and fro, between the ports on the same coasts of Africa, India, Arabia, and Persia,
and carrying artic es of much the same character as at present; aud, what is more to our
present purpose, he found all this trade in the hands of men whose homes were in India,
or closely connected with India, and he describes the traders as in dress, habits of life and
trade, character and names exactly resembling what a modern traveller would fiud at the
same ports on the same coasts. The Indian traders do not appear in his day to have
reached further south than one of the large rivers south of Sofala, where he met the 6rst
of the “ Moors" seen in his first voyage. But they were then in possession of all the best
trade at every port from Sofala northwards to Adem
This vast Indian trade seems to have been sorely crippled, and in part extinguished
by the advent of Europeans on these seas. Empire in these parts, then as now, fell to the
nation which had the greatest command of ships of war, fire-arms, and artillery. The
Portuguese were far more powerful at sea than any nation they met with on the Coast, and
speedily subdued the whole Coast, from the southernmost limit of the Indian trade to Aden
and Socotra, and by Muscat and Ormuz to the Persian Gulf, building forts at all the principal
ports and commanding points of estuaries and islands, and destroying the. Arab and
Indian Marine; their own account of their proceedings, and of the wholesale cruelties they
practised on all who opposed, or were suspected of opposing them, are sufficient to account
for the extinction of the greatest part of such trade as they found; for the bitter opposition
they met with from the Arabs, who ultimately resumed the dominion of all north of
Cape Delgado and for the sterile character of their occupation of the Coast where they
had no hold but on the fears of the natives, and thus missed the opportunity of developing
their hostile occupation into an African Empire.
At the same time during the greater part of the 17th and 18th centuries, Rovers,
English. Dutch and Arab made these Seas unsafe to all but large and well-armed vessels.
Of the proceedings of the English and Dutch some idea may be formed from De Foe's
Novels, e.g“Captain Singleton" and the 2nd part of “ Robinson Crusoe " and from the
adventures of European privateers and pirates, as related in the Tales of Buccaneers, nor
if we may judge from the sober narratives of our earlier voyagers did the Native-Indian
or Arab merchantman fare much better at the hands of the regular European trader, up
to the time when the English East India Company obtained the undisputed mastery of
Indian Foreign Commerce. The Great Company then put down English and Dutch
freebooting and piracy, at the same time as and by the same measures by which they put
down all “ free trade," as competition with their own monopoly was then called, but it was
not till the present century that much was done to check Arab piracy, which went far to
destroy what little Indian trade with Africa Portuguese misgovernment had 6pared.
Up to 30 years ago the depredations of Arab pirates in the Indian Seas, and even on
the Indian Coasts within sight of Bombay, were matters of recent memory. I have met in
my early life many men, Natives and Europeans, who had suffered from their outrages or
had taken a part in putting them down. The pirates come from all ports between Aden
and the head of the Persian Gulf, but the most numerous, active, and cruel were from the
southern ports of the Persian Gulf, where Wahabee and other forms of religiors fanaticism
gave a species of sanction to their depredations and cruelties. Their suppression was