Holding the sea-lanes

      But I ain’t mocking him, much, and I’ve got a sight more use for him and his like that for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip service to delivering the heathen from error’s chain by preaching and giving their ha’pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a though for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilisation and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn’t wish for your worst enemy. I’ve even heard ‘em maligned like my old shipmate Brooke* for taking a high hand and shooting first and hammering slavers and pirates and brigands like the wrath of God. Censure’s so easy from a distance, but I’ve seen them on the frontiers, schoolboys with the down still on their cheeks doing a man’s work and getting a seedeboy’s pay¹² and damn-all thanks and more often than not a bullet for their twenty-first birthday . . .


12. Seedeboy, sifiboy, Anglo-Indian slang for an African, usually a labourer (see Kipling, The Lost Legion. “We’ve starved on a Seedeboy’s pay”). Eric Partridge points out, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the irony that the word derives from sidi, a lord. 


Flashman on the March, p.20, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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William Wilberforce and pious humbug

Why my pious acquaintances won’t believe this [African involvement in ths slave trade], I can’t fathom. They enslaved their own kind, in mills and factories and mines, and made ‘em live in kennels that an Alabama planter wouldn’t have dreamed of putting a black into. Aye, and our dear old dead Sir William Wilberforce cheered ‘em on, too – weeping his pious old eyes out over niggers* he had never seen, and damning the soul of anyone who suggested it was a bit hard to make white infants pull coal sledges for 12 hours a day. Of course he knew where his living came from. My point is; if he and his kind did it to their people, why should they suppose the black rulers were any different where their kinsfolk were concerned? They make me sick with their pious humbug.

Flash For Freedom!, pp.63-64, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

*Flashman's use of racial epitahs is a continuing problem for more enlightened, contemporary readers. The inclusion of these passages should not be taken as tacit support of his misanthropic, 19th century view of race relations.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,William Wilberforce.