The Amistad Rebellion (8 page)

Slavers used the tried-and-true methods of the Atlantic slave trade to capture the
Amistad
Africans. Local leaders sentenced Kwong, Shule, Yaboi, and Burna the younger to bondage, the first three for adultery, the last for a reason unknown. Soldiers took another six in one of two ways: like Fuli, in grand pillage, or perhaps like Moru, in battle, in which the vanquished were seized as the spoils of war and sold to traders. King Siaka’s men captured Beri and sold him to a Spaniard at Lomboko. Debt landed three of the
Amistad
Africans in slavery. Grabeau explained that his uncle “had bought two slaves in Bandi, and gave them as a payment” for a debt of his own. When one of them ran away, Grabeau was seized by the man to whom his uncle owed the debt, as satisfaction of it. Kagne’s father left her as a pawn, a deposit against goods or credits extended by slave traders, then never redeemed her. Pugnwawni had a hard and distinctive fate within the group: “His mother’s brother sold him for a coat.” The largest number
of
Amistad
Africans were essentially kidnapped—that is, captured unexpectedly as they went about their daily business, often, as mentioned earlier, in traveling from one place to another. A few were apparently tricked—promised by traders a view of the Spaniards’ “big canoe,” the slave ship, then promptly enslaved as soon as they went aboard.
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The slave trade was so pervasive in the Gallinas region that almost everyone would have had a brush with it. Several knew others who had been shipped overseas before them. Cinqué’s own “closest brother” Kindi had been captured in 1835 or 1836, sold to the Spaniards, and loaded aboard an Atlantic slaver. The vessel was soon captured by the British and taken to Freetown, where it was condemned as a prize, and he was liberated. He eventually returned to his family in 1838, with harrowing tales to tell. Cinqué knew the African side of trade and he knew that a war involving the British surrounded it, but neither he nor others seem to have known much about slavery in the Americas.
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The geographic origins of the
Amistad
Africans illustrate the catchment area for Pedro Blanco and King Siaka. The enslaved came from near and far, and from many ecological zones. Cinqué and Shule came from “the open country,” that is, the riverain grasslands east of Lomboko. Gbatu, Ba, Ndzhagnwawni, and Burna came from a more mountainous region farther east. Others had lived in rich forested lands, where Pie, for example, had hunted leopards and other big game. The rivers and lakes common to the region were home to several others: Gnakwoi grew up on a large river where “fish are caught…as large a man’s body—they are caught in nets and sometimes shot with guns.” Ndamma lived on the Ma-le River; Bau and Shule both on the long, meandering Moa, “which runs from Gissi, passes through Mendi, and runs south into the Konno country.” Growing up amid streams, rivers, and lakes, many of the Africans were expert swimmers and knew the use of watercraft.
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The
Amistad
Africans reckoned the time in getting from their homes to Lomboko in suns and moons, roughly equivalent to days and months. The one who traveled the shortest distance was Burna
the younger, who was in transit only four days to Lomboko from nearby Bullom country. Several said they traveled “two moons” in getting to the coast. It took Shuma twice as long, four moons, to reach the factory. Yet all of the time may not have been spent in travel. It was common for traders to take a slave a certain distance, then sell him or her to another trader, who might put the person to work for a month or two before selling him or her to someone else closer to the coast. Cinqué’s path illustrated the process: he was captured by four men, who tied his right hand behind his neck to limit his ability to resist. The original captor, Mayagilalo, sold him to the son of King Siaka, Bamadzha, who carried him from Vai country to Lomboko, where he sold him to a Spaniard. The slaving zone for Lomboko ranged up to 250 miles into the interior, which is why many of the
Amistad
Africans had seen neither the sea and European sailing ships, nor white people, until they arrived at Lomboko, operated by the man most appropriately named Blanco.
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Lomboko

Slave traders marched the
Amistad
Africans overland and ferried them by canoe around and through a hydrographic system made up of four rivers—the Kerefe, Moa, Mano, and Waanje—and large coastal lagoons. Surrounding Lomboko were thick forests of mangrove trees, whose ropy roots stood ten to fifteen feet above the waterline, fringing riverbanks and a swampy shore. Looming high above were majestic cottonwood trees, each as tall as one hundred thirty feet, with a root system that might cover five acres. Croaking frogs, grating crickets, and buzzing cockroaches created what European ears heard as a loud and disturbing cacophony. Rattling rain and flooding were the order of the day on the Gallinas Coast during the rainy season, from May to November, when the fast currents of swollen rivers caused ship captains to use two anchors when they visited the coast to trade. The Atlantic surf was so heavy that it could sometimes be heard two miles inland. The region was also given to heavy reddish fogs, which the local residents called “smokes,” and to sudden, violent tornadoes with
“vivid flashes of forked lightning” and thunder that sounded like the collision of “great metallic bodies.” By the time the
Amistad
Africans arrived in February and March of 1839, things had begun to dry out. The famous Harmattan winds swirled off the Sahara Desert, blowing sand far and wide and causing the leaves of trees to droop.
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The slave-trading Gallinas Coast lay between imperial outposts of Britain and America, formed by declared opponents to slavery. North of Lomboko lay the British settlement of Freetown, established in 1788, a bustling port of 42,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them Liberated Africans taken off the slave ships by the British anti-slave-trade patrol. People who spoke fifty different languages animated a sprawling public market where one might buy a fishhook, a dried rat, or a leopard’s tooth. The ninety-nine whites, mostly British officials, who lived in Freetown were rarely to be seen during the day, unless at the promenade or the racetrack. To the south and east along the coast lay Monrovia, a fledgling center for the American Colonization Society, which carried former American slaves back to the continent of an ancestor’s birth.
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When Fuli, Margru, Moru, and the others finally reached Lomboko, the slave traders put each of them through a careful—and demeaning—physical examination, to be sure that all were likely to survive the Middle Passage and bring a good price in the slave markets of Havana. A trader named Theophilus Conneau, who worked for Blanco for a time and soon became the second most notorious slave trader on the Gallinas Coast in the late 1830s, was an old hand in the examination and purchase of human beings; he knew the routine intimately. He left a detailed record of what those bound for the
Teçora
would have gone through.
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As the various small traders—Vai, Bullom, Temne, and Mende—arrived with their human coffles at Blanco’s place of business, they stripped every man, woman, and child “perfectly naked.” All were closely inspected “from head to foot”; no part was spared, recalled Conneau. The soundness of limbs for would-be plantation workers was crucial, so arms and legs were squeezed, tugged, flexed, and rotated. “Every joint was made to crack; hips, armpits, and groins were
also examined.” Buyers looked carefully into each person’s mouth; missing teeth would mean a reduced payment to the seller. Likewise with eyesight: a squint—or a cast in the eye such as Burna had—decreased the purchase price. Buyers even demanded that the captives speak in order to evaluate voice. They scrutinized every finger and toe, knowing that the struggle against enslavement included self-mutilation: “in order to unfit himself for service,” a man might “cut off his first finger.” Women, even little girls like Margru, were subjected to a special set of indignities. Rejects might be killed, or be sold to local masters.

Big merchants like Blanco and Conneau were wary of the tricks and treachery of the petty traders. When he was first learning the trade, Conneau was shocked to see an experienced merchant, John Ormond, known as “Mongo John,” pass on a man so big and strong he had to be double-pinioned. John’s searching eye had seen that the man was “medicated,” probably with “powder and lemon juice,” by the petty trader to disguise sickness. This was one of the “jockey-tricks practiced by a sharper to sell off a sick slave.” Men like Blanco and Conneau thus kept a close lookout for a “yellowish eye,” “swollen tongue,” or “feverish skin” and for marks of a rebellious temperament, seen in scars that might indicate previous resistance. All of the Africans who ended up on the
Amistad
somehow passed this “rigid muster,” and became residents of Lomboko while they awaited their slave ship to Havana. In Lomboko they met people of many ages, nations, and descriptions, “from the grey-haired man to the merry sportive child,” all of whom had arrived “with ropes around their necks & irons on their feet.”
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Lomboko was actually a complex of slave-trading factories, all owned by Blanco and located at the mouth of the Gallinas (Kerefe) River and on a cluster of seven small islands. A British Admiralty chart of 1839 labeled the three largest islands Kamasoun, Kambatin, and Taro, all with small rectangular marks that represent buildings. Across a channel from Kambatin, on the north coast of the Gallinas River, lay Lomboko (here called Dumbacora)—two buildings in a clearing surrounded by coastal forest. Nearby are three more buildings and a
larger rectangle denoted as the “Castle,” which was the fortified centerpiece of the slaving operation. On the south side of the Gallinas, at the mouth, is another cleared area with three buildings labeled “Pedro Blanco’s House.”
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Because Blanco worked for the infamous Havana-based House of Martinez, one of the biggest slave trading operations in the world in 1839, above the factory buildings he flew white flags emblazoned with the letter M. Blanco’s chain of forts stretched 150 miles over the Windward Coast, which enabled him to shift slaves from one place to another according to the policing practices of the British Royal Navy. His international network was even larger: he had connections in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Havana, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Texas, New Orleans, and Freetown (to buy back condemned vessels).
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Pedro Blanco—tall and slender, clean-shaven, “with small, black, piercing eyes,” a dark complexion, and “an easy gentlemanly deportment”—had arrived in Africa as a bankrupt, it was rumored, in 1824 or 1825 and began to build business operations and create local alliances that would soon make him the most powerful man on the coast. Determined to rebuild his “shattered fortunes,” he initially organized a slaving voyage from the area and accompanied the ship to Cuba. Success allowed him to return to the Gallinas, settle, and expand operations. He “opened an extensive correspondence, received consignments of vessels and cargoes, and loaded and despatched cargoes.” His run of good fortune continued, and he slowly built a small empire that linked African kings (notably Siaka) and a cadre of European adventurers much like himself, to the House of Martinez. Gallinas “soon became, not only the centre of an extensive and lucrative traffic, but the theatre of a new order of society and a novel form of government, of all of which his excellency, Don Pedro Blanco, was the head, the autocrat.” By the early 1830s, “his authority was absolute, acquired and maintained, not by his wealth alone, but by his will, energy, ability and address; for Pedro Blanco was no common man. He was a well-born, high-bred, Spanish gentleman, and in all save his profession, a man of honor—yea, of strict integrity, whose word was his bond.”
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Living, as one visitor said, as a combination of European gentleman and African king, with a “seraglio of wives” for each part, Blanco became the stuff of legend. A story that circulated along the coast concerned a trip he made to Sherbro, where he was, at that time, unknown. He “approached the hut of a native with a view of taking rest and refreshment,” and soon asked for fire with which to light his Cuban cigar. When the man “bluntly refused,” Blanco took a gun from one of his attendants “and shot him dead upon the spot.” This man of “strict integrity”—and extreme violence—would not tolerate such an insult to his aristocratic sense of honor.
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The illegality of the slave trade, and the British patrol vessels that scoured the coast trying to enforce the law, made Blanco’s business secretive, dangerous, and urgent. Blanco had his own African (Kru) canoemen paddling up and down the coast, and as far as forty miles out to sea, to gather intelligence. “Watch-boxes,” or lookout posts, were built into the towering cottonwood trees. Here his employees, shielded from the sun and rain, scanned the ocean with telescopes to discern the comings and goings of slave ships and anti-slave-trade patrols. Captains who wanted to bring their vessels ashore to load signaled with lights to the lookouts, who responded in kind. One light meant the coast was clear. Two lights conveyed, proceed with caution. Three lights, flashing, indicated danger. The ultimate signal to stay away was a bonfire, into which were thrown bags of gunpowder, producing explosions that could be seen twenty miles offshore.
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When a ship came to the bar at the mouth of the river to receive its human cargo, a fleet of canoes and boats burst into action, for the slaves and their food had to be transported and loaded quickly, before British vessels could arrive and turn the voyage into a catastrophe for any and all merchants—European, American, Brazilian, Cuban, or African. Dr. Thomas Hall, a Maryland colonizationist who visited all ten of Blanco’s factories in 1837, believed that as many as “1,000 slaves could be shipped in four hours, all things favorable.” A ship the size of the
Teçora
might therefore have been filled in a mere two hours. Loading was a dangerous time for both the canoemen and the people being shipped. The rivers, lagoons, and
waterways surrounding the islands teemed with sharks, schools of which were aptly called “shivers.” They followed the watercraft in great numbers and preyed on any that overset in the rough surf. In this way, “many a boat load of poor wretches becomes food for sharks.”
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