The destruction of the Mary Anne triggered an immediate Royal Navy blockade of Berbera. For two years, British warships patrolled the approaches to the port, strangling the commerce that was the town's lifeblood. Berbera was no backwater -- it was a major node in a trading network stretching from the Ethiopian interior to the ports of the western Indian Ocean, and the blockade hit hard. In early 1827, a punitive expedition was finally assembled. Captain W.C. Jervoise commanded a squadron of three ships: HMS Tamar and HMS Pandora, both Conway-class corvettes of the Royal Navy, and HMS Amherst, a vessel of the East India Company. The squadron departed from Mocha on the Red Sea coast and arrived at Berbera on January 10, 1827. Captain James Gordon Bremer ordered the ships to open fire on Somali buggalows -- traditional sailing vessels -- in the harbor, though all escaped unharmed. It was a warning shot, literally. Bremer then sent Lieutenant John Downey ashore to arrange a meeting with the Habr Awal sheikhs.

The meeting was set for the morning of January 11. That night, Bremer sounded the harbor and found it excellent for anchoring. At dawn, as the British ships moved into the bay, the Habr Awal responded not with negotiation but with fire -- setting their own city ablaze and seizing the goods of visiting Banyan merchants who happened to be British subjects. The squadron opened fire again, this time deliberately aiming above the crowds to intimidate rather than kill. Under Captain Jervoise, 250 Royal Marines and Indian sepoys landed from HMS Amherst and advanced into a town already burning. They faced between 2,000 and 2,500 Somali fighters, who dispersed quickly before the well-armed landing force. Jervoise pushed to occupy a ridge in the center of Berbera, but a division led by Lieutenant Jeffrey Noble was counterattacked. One Royal Marine was killed, and several others wounded. Once Jervoise's force secured the ridge, the bombardment ceased and the fires were gradually brought under control. Somali fighters surrendered in small parties, and negotiations resumed.

The aftermath was a negotiation over money. The British initially demanded 30,000 Spanish dollars as indemnity for the Mary Anne, a staggering sum for a community whose port had just been blockaded for two years and whose city had burned. The Habr Awal sheikhs argued that the fires had already cost them enormously, and the figure was halved to 15,000 dollars, payable in installments over three years. The resulting treaty settled the 1825 incident and established the principle that all ships flying the Union Jack could trade safely in Berbera. It was a pattern that would repeat across the colonial world: a commercial grievance escalated into military action, which produced a treaty granting the imperial power the trading rights it wanted. For the Habr Awal, it was a bitter concession but not a surrender of sovereignty -- they remained the dominant force in the region.

The British attack did not end Somali resistance to imperial encroachment. In the 1830s, the Isaaq Sultan Farah Guled and Haji Ali penned a letter to Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi of Ras Al Khaimah, requesting military assistance and proposing a joint campaign against the British. The choice of ally was strategic. The Qasimi were among the most formidable maritime powers in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, with commercial interests stretching as far west as Mocha on the Red Sea. They maintained deep trading ties with the Somali coast, their vessels regularly attending the great trade fairs at Berbera and Zeila. The letter reveals a world in which the Gulf of Aden was not a British lake but a contested space, where Somali, Arab, and European interests collided over control of some of the most lucrative shipping lanes on earth. Whether the Qasimi responded is unclear, but the request itself speaks to the Habr Awal's determination to resist the terms imposed upon them at the point of a cannon.