The Amistad Rebellion (19 page)

The Long, Low Black Schooner

On September 2, 1839, three days after the
Amistad
Africans arrived at the New Haven jail and thousands of people had already filed through to see them, the Bowery Theatre of New York began its performance of
The Black Schooner, or, The Pirate Slaver Armistead
; or
The Long, Low Black Schooner
, as it was more commonly called. An advertisement announced “an entire new and deeply interesting Nautical Melo-Drama, in 2 acts, written expressly for this Theatre, by a popular author,” almost certainly Jonas B. Phillips, the Bowery Theatre’s “house playwright” during the 1830s.
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Based on “the late extraordinary Piracy! Mutiny! & Murder!” aboard the
Amistad
and the sensational newspaper reports of “black pirates” that had appeared in the press before their capture, the play demonstrated how quickly the news of the rebellion spread, and with what cultural resonance. The title of the play came from the title of the
New York Sun
article about the
Amistad
rebellion published on August 31, 1839, which in turn had drawn on the recent descriptions of a pirate ship captained by a man named Mitchell, who had been marauding in the Gulf of Mexico.
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In 1839 the Bowery Theatre was notorious for its rowdy, raucous working-class audiences: youthful Bowery b’hoys and g’hals (slang for young working-class men and women of Lower Manhattan) and dandies, as well as sailors, soldiers, journeymen, laborers, apprentices, street urchins, and gang members. Prostitutes plied their trade in the theater’s third tier. The audience cheered, hissed, drank, fought, cracked peanuts, threw eggs, and squirted tobacco juice everywhere. During an especially popular performance, the overflow crowd might sit on the stage amid the actors and props, or they might simply invade
it and become part of the performance. The owner and manager of the theatre, Thomas Hamblin, employed a pack of constables to prevent riots, which on several occasions exploded anyway. That the Bowery Theatre was associated with a big, violent anti-abolitionist riot in 1834 makes its staging of
The Long, Low Black Schooner
all the more remarkable.
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Paired with
Giafar al Barmeki, or, The Fire Worshippers
, an orientalist fantasy set in Baghdad, the play attracted “multitudes” to the nation’s largest theater. If performed every other day for two weeks (it may have run longer) at only two-thirds capacity of the theater’s thirty-five hundred seats (it may have been greater), the play would have been seen by roughly fifteen thousand people, about one in twenty of the city’s population. Another way of estimating the number in attendance is to divide the production’s gross earnings of $5,250 by prevailing ticket prices (most were twenty-five cents, some were fifty and seventy-five cents), which also suggests roughly fifteen thousand viewers. The play therefore played a major role not only in interpreting the
Amistad
rebellion, but in spreading the news of it soon after it happened. It was not uncommon for playwrights to work with timely and controversial events in order to draw larger audiences to their theaters.
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No script survives, but a detailed playbill provides a “Synopsis of Scenery, Incidents, &c.” Set on the main deck of the
Amistad
, the play featured the actual people who were involved in the uprising. The leading character was “Zemba Cinques, an African, Chief of the Mutineers,” based on Cinqué and played by Joseph Proctor, a “young American tragedian,” perhaps in burnt-cork blackface, as was common at the Bowery.
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The “Captain of the Schooner, and owner of the Slaves” was Pedro Montes, the actual owner of four of the enslaved who sailed the vessel after the rebellion. The supercargo was Juan Ruez, based on José Ruiz, owner of forty-nine slaves on board. Cudjo, “a deformed Dumb Negro,” who resembles the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban in Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest
, was apparently based on the “savage” Konoma, who was ridiculed for his tusk-like teeth and decried as a cannibal. Lazarillo, the “overseer of the slaves,”
probably drew on the slave-sailor Celestino. Other characters included Cabrero the mate, sailors, and the wholly invented damsel soon to be in distress, Inez, the daughter of Montes and the wife of Ruez.
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Act 1 begins as the vessel sets sail from Havana, passing Moro Castle and heading out to sea. The history of Zemba Cingues, the hero of the story, is recounted as a prelude to entry into the “hold of the schooner,” where lay the “wretched slaves!” The bondsmen plot and soon take an “Oath of vengeance.” In a rising storm, also noted in the accounts of the rebellion, “The Slaves, led by Zemba Cingues” force open the hatchway, which results in “MUTINY and MURDER!” The rebels seize the vessel and reset its course, heading eastward across the Atlantic to their native Sierra Leone. “Prospects of liberation” are at hand.
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Act 2 shifts to the captain’s cabin, now occupied, after the rebellion, by Zemba Cingues, as Montes and Rues sit, as prisoners, in the dark hold of the vessel (as their counterparts actually did). The world has been turned upside down: those who were below are now above, and vice versa. The reversal poses great danger to Inez, who has apparently fallen into the clutches of Cudjo and now faces “terrible doom.” Someone, probably Zemba Cinques, rescues her, forcing Cudjo to “surrender his intended victim.” Did the audience see a black hero rescue a white woman from the hands of a black villain? This is a theme of no small significance, given prevailing popular fears of racial “amalgamation,” which had ignited anti-abolition riots.

Zemba Cingues then sees a vessel (the U.S. brig
Washington
) sailing toward them, and holds a council among his fellow mutineers to decide what to do. They choose death over slavery—a sentiment repeatedly ascribed to Cinqué in the popular press—and decide to “Blow up the Schooner!” (The
Amistad
rebels made no such decision, as many of them were off the vessel at Long Island when the sailors of the
Washington
captured their vessel.) Alas, it is too late as the “Gallant Tars” of the
Washington
drop into the cabin from its skylight and take control of the
Amistad
.

The end of the play is left uncertain, much like the fate of the
Amistad
captives, who were sitting in the New Haven jail not far away,
awaiting trial on charges of piracy and murder. The playbill states: “Denoument—Fate of Cingues!” What indeed will be his fate? Did the play enact his execution, an ending that many, including Cinqué himself, expected? Or did it dramatize his liberation along with all of his comrades?
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The Long, Low Black Schooner
was not an unusual play for its time. Slave revolt and piracy were common themes in early American theater. Rebellious slaves appeared in
Obi, or, Three-Finger’d Jack
, a play about a Jamaican runaway slave turned bandit, which was a staple after its American premiere in 1801; and in
The Slave
, an opera by Thomas Morton about a revolt in Surinam, first acted in 1817 and many times thereafter, into the 1840s.
The Gladiator
dramatized the famous slave revolt led by Spartacus in ancient Greece. It premiered in 1831, starred working-class hero Edwin Forrest, and may have been the most popular play of the decade. Pirates headlined popular nautical melodramas of the 1830s, such as
Captain Kyd, or, The Wizard of the Sea
, performed first in 1830 and numerous times thereafter, then published as a novel by J. H. Ingraham in 1839. John Glover Drew adapted Byron’s
The Corsair
for performance at Brook Farm in the early 1840s. The great African American actor Ira Aldridge would soon act the lead in
The Bold Buccaneer
. Slave rebels and pirates sometimes appeared in the same plays, as they did in
The Long, Low Black Schooner
: “Three-Finger’d Jack” was something of a pirate on land, and indeed had been called “that daring freebooter.” Pirates also played a significant role in
The Gladiator
.
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Like other melodramas of the times,
The Long, Low Black Schooner
featured virtuous common people, usually laborers, battling villainous aristocrats—in this case, enslaved Africans striking back against the Spanish slaveholders Montes and Ruez. “Low” characters like Zemba Cingues spoke poetic lines in honorable resistance. They were routinely celebrated for their heroism, encouraging some degree of popular identification with the outlaw who dared to strike for freedom. As Peter Reed has noted, audiences “could both applaud and fear low revolts, both mourn and celebrate their defeats.”
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The theater shaped the news of the
Amistad
rebellion as it spread it.
A sympathetic, even romantic view softened the violence of the original event. Cinqué’s poised and dramatic personal bearing during the legal proceedings earned him comparison to Shakespeare’s Othello.
⁴⁶
He was also likened to “a colored dandy in Broadway.” He clearly had the “outlaw charisma” so common to the “rogue performances” of the era. Having captured the attention of the theater world and the public at large, it was fitting that
The Long, Low Black Schooner
should be followed, in December 1839, by a production of
Jack Sheppard, or, The Life of a Robber!
, also written by Jonas B. Phillips. Like Sheppard, whose jailbreaks became “the common discourse of the whole nation” in Britain in the 1720s, and to whom the public flocked, paying admission to see him in his cell, the “black pirates” of the
Amistad
were winning in their own bid to take the good ship
Popular Imagination
. A “Nautical Melo-Drama,” based on real people and dramatic current events, was playing out in American society as a whole.
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The Struggle to Communicate

Amid the explosion of images and newspaper articles, and the enormous number of visitors to both jail and theater, the
Amistad
Africans struggled to tell their own story to their American captors and allies. Yet they could communicate only through sign language and Burna’s few words of English. The Africans spoke at least fifteen languages, but none of these could be understood by the people in whose hands their collective fate now rested, especially after Antonio, who had translated during the freedom voyage, had been separated from them. The Reverend Joshua Leavitt noted with sadness that these unfortunate persons, facing trial for their lives, could not speak for themselves. As noted earlier, they could and did say plenty for themselves; the problem was, no one could understand them.
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Leavitt and others quickly grasped the necessity of communicating with these strangers who had made it to their shores as well as the larger significance of allowing the rebels to tell their own stories about how they got there. Dwight Janes and other antislavery activists on
the scene in New London had written Leavitt and Lewis Tappan, asking that they “find some old Africans in your vicinity, who can speak the native language, so that you may learn the facts from them.” When Leavitt visited the
Amistad
Africans in the New Haven jail on September 6, 1839, he took with him “an old African man,” a sailor who spoke the Congo language, but the captives “all say they are not Congoes.” The correspondent of the
New York Sun
had reported in error that they were Congo, probably because he misunderstood when a few described themselves as “Kono.” Leavitt added, “Many of them say Manding, whence it is supposed they are Mandingoes,” but this too reflected confusion, for what they had said was “Mende.” He did grasp, correctly, that “it is not unlikely there are persons of several tribes among them.”
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The same day, Tappan brought three more Africans, who spoke different languages, into the jail, hoping that they could communicate with the prisoners. He found to his disappointment that they could not. Undeterred, the next day he brought two more. So zealous were his efforts that the
New York Morning Herald
resorted to racist ridicule, noting that every time Tappan came into the jail, he did so with a “black tail”—“a great number of negroes of all ages and sizes, and colors, and speaking all languages from the Monshee down to the Mandingo.”
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Success appeared in the form of James Ferry, a Kissi man about thirty years of age whose own dramatic international odyssey of slavery and freedom began when he was kidnapped in southern Sierra Leone as a child and ended when he was “liberated in Colombia, by Bolivar,” probably around 1821. The path Ferry took to the New Haven jail eighteen years later is unknown, but when he arrived, new understandings of the
Amistad
case became possible, even though there were no Kissi people among the prisoners. It turned out that Ferry also knew Vai, called Gallinao (after Gallinas) by Tappan, as did the Mende man Bau. Tappan wrote, “You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!”
Ferry thus made possible a formal interview, the first full account any of the
Amistad
Africans had offered about what had happened to them. Antonio was also on hand to help out with translation, because both he and Ferry spoke Spanish. Lawyers, professors, law enforcement officials, ministers, and activists all gathered round to get the story. Communication remained difficult, however, as Ferry translated Tappan’s questions into Vai, which was his and Bau’s second (or third) language, and Bau then translated them into Mende so that Cinqué and others could answer by the same circuitous linguistic route.
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Amid the search for better means of communication, and at the end of a week of wildly popular fascination with the case, abolitionists formed the Amistad Committee on September 4, 1839. Tappan, Jocelyn, and Leavitt made an appeal to the “Friends of Liberty” to rally around “thirty-eight fellow-men from Africa,” who, “piratically kidnapped from their native land,” were “transported across the seas, and subjected to atrocious cruelties” before being “thrown upon our shores, and are now incarcerated in jail to await their trial for crimes alleged by their oppressors to have been committed by them.” They added that “they are ignorant of our language, of the usages of civilized society, and the obligations of Christianity,” thereby setting an abolitionist cultural agenda for the future. The committee announced several immediate tasks for itself: to acquire and distribute clothing among “these unfortunate men”; to find and employ interpreters in order to understand them; and to hire attorneys who would help to “secure the rights of the accused.”
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