Stay to govern

      “And now you leave us without a king! We were born in bondage, and must die as slaves. Why do you not stay to govern?”
     I told him we didn’t want to, and ’twas up to him and his like to govern themselves.
      “You mean we must cut each other’s throats,” grumbles he. “This is Africa.”

Flashman on the March, p.279, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Something about slaves

“ . . . but I’ll tell you something about slaves: however devoted and loving and like bloody spaniels they seem, they never forgive their owners for owning ’em.”


Flashman on the March, pp.86-7, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, slavery.

Some thoughts on the cessation of the slave trade

      I think he was right; by the way, and I speak from experience, having shirked responsibility too often to count. But the Balllantynes and Legerwoods didn’t, and if the slave trade has been swept off the face of the seas, it hasn’t really been the work of reformers and statesmen with lofty ideals in London and Paris and Washington, but because a long-forgotten host of fairly feckless young Britons did it for fun. And you may tell the historians I said so.


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


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, slavery.

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.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, slavery.

Frowning judicially

      “Wot abaht the slaves, sir?” says bosun. “Them black devils is liable to cut their throats aht o’ spite if we sink her.”
       Ballantyne weighed this for a good two seconds, frowning judicially like Buggins Major undecided whether to thrash Juggins minor or set him a hundred lines of Virgil.


Flashman on the March, p.19, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Free and easy style

. . . my bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t use to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bring their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football of which they were the captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend — and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment.


Flashman on the March, p.17, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, navy.

Their great canal

They were hellish jealous of their great canal, which was then within a year of completion, with gangs of thousands of the unfortunate fellaheen being mercilessly flogged on the last lap, for it was built with slave labour in all but name.⁹


9. Work on the Suez Canal, the brainchild of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, began in 1859, and the waterway was opened to navigation in 1869. It had cost almost ₤30 million, and in 1875 Disraeli acquired 176, 602 shares for ₤4 million, giving Britain a 44% holding. The canal was indeed built by what amounted to slavery, the forced labour (corvee) of the Egyptian peasants being enforced by the rawhide whip of the overseers (courbash). (John Marlowe, The Making of the Suez Canal, 1964.)


 Flashman on the March, p.16, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, slavery.

Just nuts to them

… the Cossacks were free, independent tribesmen; they had land, and paid little tax, had their own tribal laws, drank themselves stupid, and served the Tsar from childhood till they were fifty because they loved to ride and fight and loot – and they liked nothing better than to use their nagaikas on the serfs, which was just nuts to them.

Flashman at the Charge, p.147, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman observes

You can’t make soldiers out of slaves.

Flashman at the Charge, p.147, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Stay, cruel despot!

Now, I don’t recite all these barbarities to shock or excite your pity, or to pose as one of those holy hypocrites who pretend to be in a great sweat about man’s inhumanity to man. I’ve seen too much of it, and know it happens whenever strong folk have absolute power over spiritless creatures. I merely tell you what I truly saw – as for my own view, well I’m all for keeping the peasants in order, and if hammering ’em does good, and makes life better for the rest of us, you won’t find me leaping between the tyrant and his victim crying ‘Stay, cruel despot!’…

Flashman at the Charge, p.146, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Mankind's natural condition?

And it [the emancipation of serfs] was all nonsense, anyway; the Russians will always be slaves – so will most of the rest of mankind, of course, but it tends to be more obvious among the Ruskies.

Flashman at the Charge, p.125, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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To do list

Now all that remained to be done was for me to sell a runaway slave and arrange for us to get out of town without any holes in our hides. Easy enough, you may think, for a chap of Flashy’s capabilities, and I’ll admit your confidence wouldn’t be misplaced.

Flash For Freedom!, p.208, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Glory days

She paused for a moment, and then said in a whisper almost: ‘ “Whoever stands on British soil, shall be forever free.” It’s true isn’t it?’
   ‘Oh, absolutely,’ says I. ‘We’re the chaps, all right. Don’t hold with slavery at all, don’t you know.’
    And, strange as it may seem, sitting there with her looking at me as though I were the Second coming, well – I felt quite proud, you know. Not that I care a damn, but – well, it’s nice, when you’re far away and don’t expect it, to hear the old place well spoken of.

Flash For Freedom!, p.205, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Never can tell

If ever you have to run slaves – which seems unlikely nowadays, although you never can tell what may happen if we have the Liberals back – the way to do it is by steamboat.

Flash For Freedom!, p.156, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Strange talk

   ‘Your conscience is troubling you,’ says someone.
   ‘By thunder, there is no lack of people determined to make my conscience trouble me,’ says Lincoln. ‘as though I can’t tend my own conscience, they must be forever running pins into it. There was this gentleman the other day, a worthy man, too, and I was ill-advised enough to say to him much what I’ve said tonight: that nigras, while deserving our utmost compassion and assistance, were nevertheless, a nuisance. I said they were the rock on which our nation had been splitting for years, and that they could well assume, the proportions of a national catastrophe – through no fault of their own, of course. I believe I concluded by wishing the whole parcel of them back to Africa. He was shocked: “Strange talk this,” says he, “from the sponsor of a bill against slavery.” “I’d sponsor a bill to improve bad drains,” says I. “They’re a confounded nuisance, too.” A thoughtless remark, no doubt, and a faulty analogy, but I paid fro it. “Good God,” cries he, “you’ll not compare human souls with bad drains, surely.” “Not invariably,” says I, but I got no further, because he stalked off in a rage, having misunderstood me completely.’

Flash For Freedom!, p.129, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Disciples of Jesus

‘I tell you, sir, to listen to some of our friends, I could believe every plantation and barracoon from Florida to the river is peopled by the disciples of Jesus. Reason tells me this is false; the slave being God’s creature and a human soul, is no better than the rest of us. But if I said as much to Cassius Clay he would try to prove me wrong at the point of his bowie knife.’

Flash For Freedom!, p.129, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Strange in the twentieth century

I also carried away from that table an impression of Mr Lincoln’s views on slaves and slavery which must seem strange in the twentieth century since it varies somewhat from popular belief. I recall, for example, that at one point he described the negroes as ‘the most confounded nuisance on this continent, not excepting the Democrats’.

Flash For Freedom!, p.128, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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A look at hell

My stomach doesn’t turn easy, but I was sickened. If it had been left to me, there and then, I’d have let ‘em go, the whole boiling lot of them, back to their lousy jungle… when you’ve looked into the hold of a new-laden slaver for the first time, you know what hell is like.

Flash For Freedom!, p.90, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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A miserable anthem

     It’s not that I’m an abolitionist by any means, but by the end of the day I’d had my bellyful of slaving. The reek of those musky bodies was abominable; the heat and stench grew by the hour, until you’d have wondered that anything could survive down there. They howled and blubbered, and we were fagged out with grabbing brown limbs and tugging and shoving and nudging them up with our feet to get the brutes to lie close. They fouled themselves where they lay, and before the job was half done the filth was indescribable….
     I looked down at it just before the hatch gratings went on, it was an indescribable sight. Row upon row of black bodies, packed like cigars in a box, naked and gleaming, the dark mass striped with glittering dots of light where the eyes rolled in sooty faces. The crying and moaning and whimpering blended into a miserable anthem that I’ll never forget, with the clanking of chains and the rustle of hundreds of incessantly stirring bodies, and the horrible smell of musk and foulness and burned flesh.

Flash For Freedom!, p.89, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Human trade

With our second mate dead and our third apparently dying, I found myself having to work for a living. Even with men who knew their business as well as these, it’s no easy matter to pack six hundred terrified, stupid niggers* into a slave deck; it’s worse than putting Irish infantry into a troopship.

Flash For Freedom!, p.86, 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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