The shortest war on record was over before 10 a.m.

Sultan Hamad of Zanzibar died suddenly on the morning of August 25, 1896. Within hours his nephew Khalid had moved into the palace, and by evening he had about 2,800 armed men around it.

That was the problem. Six years earlier Zanzibar had become a British protectorate, and the agreement gave the British consul a veto over who became sultan. Britain had its own candidate. Khalid had tried for the throne once before, in 1893, and had been talked out of it. This time he did not ask.

The consul, Basil Cave, could not start shooting on his own authority. He telegraphed London to ask whether he could fire on the palace from the warships. The answer arrived the next afternoon: do whatever you think necessary, but do not start anything you are not certain you can finish. By then five British warships were anchored in a line facing the palace. The admiral gave Khalid until 9:00 the next morning to lower his flag and leave.

At 8:30 Khalid sent his last message. He would not lower the flag, it said, and he did not believe the British "would open fire on us."

At 9:02 they did. The first shot from one gunboat knocked a cannon off its mount. The palace was built mostly of timber, and the shells set it on fire.

Khalid's navy was one ship, the Glasgow. His father had ordered it as a royal yacht, decided it was smaller than what he had paid for, and left it at anchor for eighteen years. Now it fired on the British flagship. Among its guns was a Gatling gun that had been a present from Queen Victoria. The reply holed it below the waterline. The crew ran up a British flag to surrender, and British sailors came out in boats and rescued them.

The shooting stopped at about 9:40. The ships' logbooks disagree by a few minutes, which is why the war is listed as 38, 40 or 45 minutes long depending on where you look.

About 500 Zanzibaris were killed or wounded, most of them in the fire. One British sailor was wounded, and he recovered.

Khalid got out. He ran to the German consulate, and Germany refused to hand him over. British soldiers waited outside to arrest him the moment he left. Five weeks later a German warship arrived. At high tide one of its boats came right up to the consulate's garden gate, and Khalid stepped from the garden into the boat without setting foot on Zanzibari soil. Britain caught up with him twenty years later, during World War I.

By the afternoon of the bombardment, Britain's candidate was sultan. Then came the invoice. Khalid's supporters were made to pay 300,000 rupees. It covered the looting in town and the cost of the shells that had been fired at them.

The Glasgow stayed where it sank. The harbor is shallow, and its masts stood out of the water in front of the palace until 1912.