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While researching my new book, 'Explorers of the Nile', I discovered how my great-grandfather changed the history of East Africa.
Sultan Barghash (centre) and members of his court Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Tim Jeal
7:30AM BST 13 Nov 2011
When I was 10, my mother told me that her grandfather had "rescued an Arabian Princess from a vile death". But, on the point of telling me something scarily fascinating, she had second thoughts and clammed up.
So I was left guessing precisely what kind of grisly end the princess would have suffered if my great-grandfather had not turned up in the nick of time, and why she had been facing such a fate in the first place.
Though I nagged her mercilessly, my mother held firm and within a few weeks I was back at boarding school and soon forgot the story.
My mother had been dead for 20 years when I started researching Explorers of the Nile, my new book about the Victorian adventurers who competed to find the Nile's source. Along with their journeys, I wanted to describe the genesis of the African colonial era and how the explorers' feats had shaped it.
In a chapter about Anglo-German rivalry in The Exploitation of East Africa, Sir Reginald Coupland, a rather dull historian in the interwar years, suddenly amazed me with a narrative so gripping that it led me to dig out other accounts of the same event.
During the mid-1860s, Princess Salme, a sister of successive Sultans of the island of Zanzibar, became friendly with a young German businessman, Heinrich Ruete. The flat roof of his house in the old capital, Stone Town, was a little lower than hers, so she could see into the rooms and observe his dinner parties, at which European men sat beside European women wearing low-cut evening dresses.
By contrast, Muslim women on Zanzibar were fully veiled and covered when they went out, and broke the law simply by speaking to male strangers. No woman could see the man she was to marry until the eve of the wedding. Sultan Barghash, the princess's brother, gave another sister 50 lashes as he believed she had become engaged to a suitor he disliked.
However, even as a little girl, Princess Salme had shown her fearless spirit by climbing palm trees. She learnt to shoot and ride, as well as to read and write – all rare attainments for royal women. Perhaps her self-confidence – and the ease with which she and the 30-year-old German entrepreneur were able to meet unobserved on her roof – led her to underrate the possibility of discovery. At any rate, the princess fell in love with her German friend. Then, to her horror, she found she was carrying his child.
It was a tragic situation, since under sharia law the appropriate punishment for this liaison was that both lovers should be killed, with Princess Salme being stoned to death. Heinrich Ruete escaped, but when the 22-year-old princess tried to stowaway on one of the ships owned by her lover's company, she was caught and placed under house arrest. This was in July 1866, when her pregnancy was glaring enough to make her fate inevitable.
Having read to this point without making the connection with my mother's story, I was electrified to spot the surname Pasley – her maiden name – in Coupland's text. The author described how Captain T M S Pasley, a senior officer in the Royal Navy's East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadron, was told in secrecy by the British Consul's wife, Mrs Seward, that if "Bibi" Salme (as she was familiarly known) remained on the island, she would be put to death.
The Consul had ruled out interfering in the private affairs of Zanzibar's royal family. This surely had to be the story about my great-grandfather which my mother had recoiled from telling me as a child.
I soon read that Captain Pasley, whose warship was in Zanzibar's harbour, lost no time in devising a plan for rescuing the princess. A religious festival was due to take place that required pious Muslims to go down to the beach to wash.
So, on the day itself – August 26, 1866 – a ship's cutter, manned by sailors from Pasley's cruiser, HMS Highflyer, was despatched to the shore to collect Bibi Salme and her servants from a rendezvous point previously indicated by Mrs Seward's Arab maid. Pasley intended to come in close to the shore in the captain's gig [a smaller ship's boat] to be on hand in case fighting broke out.
The British Vice-Consul wrote to his fiancée after it was all over: "Pasley has taken off poor Bibi Salme. She'd have been killed sooner or later had she remained […] As to Ruete, in more regular countries he'd get a good horsewhipping. It was hard to think that a girl was to suffer while he escaped, so I am right glad she is off."
I was sorry I'd not heard this remarkable story from my mother. All I could do now was investigate the tin box that contained her family papers. I wasn't hopeful. But among many naval maps, diaries and old press cuttings, I found some papers in Arabic and two letters in English that, to my joy, turned out to be from Princess Salme to Captain Pasley. I also found the photograph she had sent him.
In one of her letters, the princess told my great-grandfather that after he had conveyed her to Aden in his ship, she had received Christian instruction and been baptised, prior to her marriage there.
She was now Emily Ruete and signed herself as such. But her letter ended sadly. She had been "very much afflicted by the loss of little Henry [her newborn baby], between Lyon and Paris", on the way to Hamburg. She and Heinrich settled in that city and had another son, Rudolf, and two daughters.
For Emily Ruete, her new life in Germany was strange, but she had the support of her husband. Then, after three years of happy married life, Heinrich Ruete died after falling under the wheels of a tram.
Grief-stricken and almost penniless, Emily was grateful to the German government for offering financial help, not realising that one day Prince Bismarck, the German Chancellor, would expect her to repay the Fatherland.
According to Sir Reginald Coupland, Captain Pasley's action had momentous
consequences. In March 1885, Bismarck authorised Dr Karl Peters, a trigger-happy explorer and imperialist, to establish a German "protectorate" over the territory extending from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika. To force Sultan Barghash to accept this confiscation, the Chancellor sent a squadron of German warships to Zanzibar.
But the German admiral possessed a weapon more devastating than gunfire. On board one of his vessels, the Adler, were Emily and her 15-year-old son, Rudolf.
Bismarck informed the Sultan that unless he surrendered his mainland empire to Germany, the Imperial Navy would flatten his palace and install his nephew as sultan.
Rather than risk being succeeded by a half-German infidel, Sultan Barghash gave in to German demands. So Captain Pasley's chivalrous act had inadvertently helped the Germans to claim the lion's share of East Africa at his own country's expense.
Mission accomplished, the battle squadron sailed away – but not before Emily had asked to meet her brother. He sent an uncompromising note: "I have no sister; she died many years ago."
Captain Pasley was spared the upset of witnessing the German seizure of Tanganyika. He died in 1870 from the complications of malaria contracted chasing slave dhows along the African coast.
After Bismarck had grabbed the larger chunk of the Sultan's empire – the future Tanzania – he handed Britain the future Kenya as a consolation prize. Uganda, and the source of the Nile, however, seemed likely to fall into German hands.
And if that happened, Downing Street feared the Kaiser might dam or divert the Nile and force Britain to abandon a waterless Egypt and the Suez Canal.
But happily for prime minister Lord Salisbury, his nation owned something the Kaiser was desperate to get his hands on. This was the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea, a British naval base, which, if it became German, the Kaiser believed would prevent seaborne attacks on Germany's new and strategically vital Kiel Canal. Knowing this, Lord Salisbury offered Heligoland in exchange for Uganda and Zanzibar, and was not surprised when the bait was swallowed whole.
Were there any more personal consequences of the rescue? Captain Pasley's early death meant that my mother's father lost his father at the age of seven, causing him to inherit his grandfather's baronetcy as an immature 20-year-old. This probably explained why he became snobbishly impervious to the increasingly egalitarian world around him, and why my mother spent a lonely childhood denied the company of "unsuitable" children.
Later, when my mother took singing lessons and was offered parts in opera, her father, by now a widower, sabotaged her career, because singers were "common".
This led her to rebel and marry my father, whose family was "utterly obscure" and "in trade". Without Captain Pasley's premature demise, my mother might well have made a "suitable" marriage, and I would never have been born!
'Explorers of the Nile' by Tim Jeal (Faber, £25) is available from Telegraph Books for £23+£1.25 p&p. To order, call
Sultan Barghash (centre) and members of his court Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Tim Jeal
7:30AM BST 13 Nov 2011
When I was 10, my mother told me that her grandfather had "rescued an Arabian Princess from a vile death". But, on the point of telling me something scarily fascinating, she had second thoughts and clammed up.
So I was left guessing precisely what kind of grisly end the princess would have suffered if my great-grandfather had not turned up in the nick of time, and why she had been facing such a fate in the first place.
Though I nagged her mercilessly, my mother held firm and within a few weeks I was back at boarding school and soon forgot the story.
My mother had been dead for 20 years when I started researching Explorers of the Nile, my new book about the Victorian adventurers who competed to find the Nile's source. Along with their journeys, I wanted to describe the genesis of the African colonial era and how the explorers' feats had shaped it.
In a chapter about Anglo-German rivalry in The Exploitation of East Africa, Sir Reginald Coupland, a rather dull historian in the interwar years, suddenly amazed me with a narrative so gripping that it led me to dig out other accounts of the same event.
During the mid-1860s, Princess Salme, a sister of successive Sultans of the island of Zanzibar, became friendly with a young German businessman, Heinrich Ruete. The flat roof of his house in the old capital, Stone Town, was a little lower than hers, so she could see into the rooms and observe his dinner parties, at which European men sat beside European women wearing low-cut evening dresses.
By contrast, Muslim women on Zanzibar were fully veiled and covered when they went out, and broke the law simply by speaking to male strangers. No woman could see the man she was to marry until the eve of the wedding. Sultan Barghash, the princess's brother, gave another sister 50 lashes as he believed she had become engaged to a suitor he disliked.
However, even as a little girl, Princess Salme had shown her fearless spirit by climbing palm trees. She learnt to shoot and ride, as well as to read and write – all rare attainments for royal women. Perhaps her self-confidence – and the ease with which she and the 30-year-old German entrepreneur were able to meet unobserved on her roof – led her to underrate the possibility of discovery. At any rate, the princess fell in love with her German friend. Then, to her horror, she found she was carrying his child.
It was a tragic situation, since under sharia law the appropriate punishment for this liaison was that both lovers should be killed, with Princess Salme being stoned to death. Heinrich Ruete escaped, but when the 22-year-old princess tried to stowaway on one of the ships owned by her lover's company, she was caught and placed under house arrest. This was in July 1866, when her pregnancy was glaring enough to make her fate inevitable.
Having read to this point without making the connection with my mother's story, I was electrified to spot the surname Pasley – her maiden name – in Coupland's text. The author described how Captain T M S Pasley, a senior officer in the Royal Navy's East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadron, was told in secrecy by the British Consul's wife, Mrs Seward, that if "Bibi" Salme (as she was familiarly known) remained on the island, she would be put to death.
The Consul had ruled out interfering in the private affairs of Zanzibar's royal family. This surely had to be the story about my great-grandfather which my mother had recoiled from telling me as a child.
I soon read that Captain Pasley, whose warship was in Zanzibar's harbour, lost no time in devising a plan for rescuing the princess. A religious festival was due to take place that required pious Muslims to go down to the beach to wash.
So, on the day itself – August 26, 1866 – a ship's cutter, manned by sailors from Pasley's cruiser, HMS Highflyer, was despatched to the shore to collect Bibi Salme and her servants from a rendezvous point previously indicated by Mrs Seward's Arab maid. Pasley intended to come in close to the shore in the captain's gig [a smaller ship's boat] to be on hand in case fighting broke out.
The British Vice-Consul wrote to his fiancée after it was all over: "Pasley has taken off poor Bibi Salme. She'd have been killed sooner or later had she remained […] As to Ruete, in more regular countries he'd get a good horsewhipping. It was hard to think that a girl was to suffer while he escaped, so I am right glad she is off."
I was sorry I'd not heard this remarkable story from my mother. All I could do now was investigate the tin box that contained her family papers. I wasn't hopeful. But among many naval maps, diaries and old press cuttings, I found some papers in Arabic and two letters in English that, to my joy, turned out to be from Princess Salme to Captain Pasley. I also found the photograph she had sent him.
In one of her letters, the princess told my great-grandfather that after he had conveyed her to Aden in his ship, she had received Christian instruction and been baptised, prior to her marriage there.
She was now Emily Ruete and signed herself as such. But her letter ended sadly. She had been "very much afflicted by the loss of little Henry [her newborn baby], between Lyon and Paris", on the way to Hamburg. She and Heinrich settled in that city and had another son, Rudolf, and two daughters.
For Emily Ruete, her new life in Germany was strange, but she had the support of her husband. Then, after three years of happy married life, Heinrich Ruete died after falling under the wheels of a tram.
Grief-stricken and almost penniless, Emily was grateful to the German government for offering financial help, not realising that one day Prince Bismarck, the German Chancellor, would expect her to repay the Fatherland.
According to Sir Reginald Coupland, Captain Pasley's action had momentous
consequences. In March 1885, Bismarck authorised Dr Karl Peters, a trigger-happy explorer and imperialist, to establish a German "protectorate" over the territory extending from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika. To force Sultan Barghash to accept this confiscation, the Chancellor sent a squadron of German warships to Zanzibar.
But the German admiral possessed a weapon more devastating than gunfire. On board one of his vessels, the Adler, were Emily and her 15-year-old son, Rudolf.
Bismarck informed the Sultan that unless he surrendered his mainland empire to Germany, the Imperial Navy would flatten his palace and install his nephew as sultan.
Rather than risk being succeeded by a half-German infidel, Sultan Barghash gave in to German demands. So Captain Pasley's chivalrous act had inadvertently helped the Germans to claim the lion's share of East Africa at his own country's expense.
Mission accomplished, the battle squadron sailed away – but not before Emily had asked to meet her brother. He sent an uncompromising note: "I have no sister; she died many years ago."
Captain Pasley was spared the upset of witnessing the German seizure of Tanganyika. He died in 1870 from the complications of malaria contracted chasing slave dhows along the African coast.
After Bismarck had grabbed the larger chunk of the Sultan's empire – the future Tanzania – he handed Britain the future Kenya as a consolation prize. Uganda, and the source of the Nile, however, seemed likely to fall into German hands.
And if that happened, Downing Street feared the Kaiser might dam or divert the Nile and force Britain to abandon a waterless Egypt and the Suez Canal.
But happily for prime minister Lord Salisbury, his nation owned something the Kaiser was desperate to get his hands on. This was the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea, a British naval base, which, if it became German, the Kaiser believed would prevent seaborne attacks on Germany's new and strategically vital Kiel Canal. Knowing this, Lord Salisbury offered Heligoland in exchange for Uganda and Zanzibar, and was not surprised when the bait was swallowed whole.
Were there any more personal consequences of the rescue? Captain Pasley's early death meant that my mother's father lost his father at the age of seven, causing him to inherit his grandfather's baronetcy as an immature 20-year-old. This probably explained why he became snobbishly impervious to the increasingly egalitarian world around him, and why my mother spent a lonely childhood denied the company of "unsuitable" children.
Later, when my mother took singing lessons and was offered parts in opera, her father, by now a widower, sabotaged her career, because singers were "common".
This led her to rebel and marry my father, whose family was "utterly obscure" and "in trade". Without Captain Pasley's premature demise, my mother might well have made a "suitable" marriage, and I would never have been born!
'Explorers of the Nile' by Tim Jeal (Faber, £25) is available from Telegraph Books for £23+£1.25 p&p. To order, call
