The Empire of Necessity (13 page)

After reading Delano’s lengthy memoir, one gets the feeling that the Duxbury captain would have recoiled in horror from such a scene. Not because of Puritan sexual repression. He doesn’t present himself as particularly chaste.
*
Rather, as someone obsessed with self-creation and self-mastery, Delano would have been repelled by the sense of self-abandonment that the passage conveys. It is hard to imagine him plunging into a mass of blood, sinew, smoke, or, for that matter, organizing it into a profitable venture.

Amasa was too self-aware, too preoccupied with his efforts at improvement and with why those efforts never amounted to much. He was steeped in natural law, yet there was something artificial, or estranged, about his relationship to the world. He thought too much while at the same time not enough.

*   *   *

An episode that took place during Delano’s earlier commission with the British East India Company reveals the depths of his isolation. Delano liked his fellow officers on the opium-trading
Panther
. They were “all North and South Britons by birth,” educated in “good schools in England and Scotland” and possessed, he thought, of a “liberality of mind.” And he liked to think that they liked him. They called him “Brother Jonathan,” a nickname the British had for Americans suggesting intrepidness and curiosity but also gullibility and worldly innocence.
¹³

So he had no reason to doubt his shipmates when, on the small Pacific island of Pio Quinto to load wood and water, they reported finding gold a few miles inland, along the narrow river that spilled into the harbor. As he listened to his companions talk, “every time this word,
gold
, was pronounced,” Delano said, “my imagination became more heated.” The British officers said that they weren’t going back themselves since they didn’t know much about minerals and wouldn’t be able to extract the valuable gold from the useless rock.

“
Odds mon
,” said one of the Scots, slapping Delano on the shoulder and telling him to make a go of it, offering the American his canvas bag and “Malabar boy”—a slave from the Indian region of Kerala—for a guide. “He knows the place where we found these curious ores, and you can return with a back load of gold.”
¹⁴

Delano spent that night dreaming “South Sea dreams.” The next morning, he lit out early with the young slave boy. The riverbank they followed was a delight at first, level and easy. But as the ground gradually rose, broken ravines and strewn rocks began to block their way. They walked hours more and still didn’t come upon the gold. Growing tired, Delano kept asking the boy how much farther. The boy didn’t speak English but he kept gesturing ahead. “The gold inspired me,” Delano said, “and banished all sense of hardship.” They kept moving.

After about five hours, the boy, reacting to Delano’s now frantic questioning, cried out and collapsed. Delano realized he was the brunt of a joke by his fellow officers. The slave was only half in on the trick; he had been instructed by his Scottish master to simply point upriver whenever Delano asked him a question. “From the very moment that the idea of a hoax entered my mind, all the evidence on this subject struck me in a new light. I saw how to put the circumstances together, and how to account for every thing,” wrote Delano more than two decades later. The prank had left an impression. “The intrigue unfolded itself with perfect clearness and I saw myself in a wilderness, a fatigued, disappointed, and ridiculous dupe.”

It was a “hard struggle” back. Delano tried to make the best of the situation, filling his bag with insects, flora, rocks, soil, and birds he shot with his musket. He was acting the part of a naturalist, hoping to return with “something to check the force of the laugh against me.” But he soon gave up the pretense. Fear of scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas, along with a thick underbrush of thorns and nettles, kept him on the river’s banks. And as the day wore on, the insects he thought to observe bit his ankles and drove him to seek refuge on rocks in the middle of the river. Every retraced step back to the
Panther
“renewed … the consciousness” of his “foolish credulity.”

They made it back to the beach just before night fell, “completely worn down with fatigue.” Delano sat on a boulder in the middle of the river’s mouth as feelings of humiliation washed over him:

When I was seated in perfect silence, on a rock in the river near its sources, and could hear the echo of the waters through the awful stillness of the desert, mingled with the occasional but unintelligible expressions of anxiety by the poor Malabar boy; and when I remembered that I was at an almost immeasurable distance from my native country, in the service of a foreign power, the victim of an imposition which appeared to me under various aspects, and now in a savage spot where the natives might be every moment upon me, I confess I was not very far from that fixed mood of melancholy, mortification, and terror, which required but little more to overcome me.

It must have been some image: a seated, silent towheaded Amasa Delano, head in hands, and a dark Kerala slave boy prostrate at his feet, convulsed and crying with fright, two isolated figures on a barren rock island in a river mouth in the middle of the Pacific, the waste of an empty white beach all around them and the green of a tropical forest behind. Delano was so lost in the “perfect silence” and “awful stillness” of his own misery that he was barely aware of the indecipherable wails of the young Indian.

Later, once the episode was behind him, Amasa said that the intense distress he felt sitting on his beach promontory helped him be more empathetic to the pain of others. As a “child of misfortune,” he was extremely sensitive to the “sufferings and wants of men, whose spirits fail, when they are at a distance from home, and appear to themselves to be cast out from the sympathies of the human family.” Though he was talking about the hard life of sailors, Delano’s description of vulnerability and loss could be describing the condition of slavery: “Many are the instances, in which generous and feeling minds have been ruined, and only relieved by death, when they were subject to the command of others, and during a period of depression were inhumanly treated without the means of redress.” He said in retrospect that the episode helped him understand the loneliness that is a part of “human nature” and made him a better leader of men.

Yet here on a South Sea beach, he ignored his Malabar slave boy, who undoubtedly was feeling the same “melancholy, mortification, and terror” he was. Even if he had wanted to pay attention, the boy “could not speak English.” “And I,” Amasa said, “could not speak anything else.”

Not too long after this event, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel published
The Phenomenology of Spirit
, which contains what the historian David Brion Davis describes as the “most profound analysis of slavery ever written.” Davis is referring to a short chapter that starts with the master believing he is a sovereign consciousness, independent of and superior to his slavish bondsman, even as he grows materially and psychically dependent on his slave. Soon, the solipsism of the master gives way to an intense awareness of the slave’s being, so much so that he can’t imagine the world without him. He comes to realize his utter dependence on the slave, not just on his labor but on the slave’s recognition of his very existence. In turn, the slave becomes aware of this dependence and realizes his equality. One philosopher has called Hegel’s description an “existential impasse.” But it isn’t really an impasse, since there is an exit: the whole point of Hegel’s parable is to identify how human consciousness evolves, how it moves toward a higher level of freedom. It is out of the struggle between the master and the slave that a new world consciousness emerges. As Hegel wrote elsewhere, it wasn’t “so much
from
slavery as
through
slavery that humanity was emancipated.”
¹⁵

It is Amasa on his rock who is at an impasse, so trapped within himself that he can’t even enter into the dialectic of dependence and interdependence, he can’t even begin the process of seeing himself in another. In this particular case, he is insensate to the cries of his own, at least for a day, slave lying at his feet. But throughout his memoir he seems blind to the larger social world around him. Being from New England, he thinks he is “free,” not only in a political sense, as compared with the legal enslavements of Africans and others, but in every other sense. Free from the past, from the passions that soaked human history in so much blood. Free from vices; reason is his master. And of course free from slavery itself, from relations of bondage and exploitation. After every one of his many other moments of crisis or of disappointment, including this one, he affirms his faith in the idea of self-mastery and self-creation. And his faith is repeatedly proven to be misplaced.

Amasa’s feelings began to regain their elasticity after his British mates arrived in the ship’s boat. “Brother Jonathans” were known for their cheerfulness, and so the players of the joke pressed him to “join in the common laugh.” Delano obliged. But when he jumped into the boat to go back to his ship, he felt a sharp sting. A “large centipede eight or nine inches long” had crawled out of a pile of firewood and given Delano “a most venomous bite” on his throat. The infected area “swelled very much, and caused an extremely painful night.”

“Thus ended my dreams and my excursion in search of the golden ore.”

*   *   *

Morals wouldn’t let Amasa run a slave ship or trade with slave islands. Insufficient access to capital, along with other deficits, ruled out whaling. There was, though, one maritime profession that well suited Delano’s resources, talents, and temper: sealing.

INTERLUDE

Black Will Always Have Something Melancholy in It

Largely ignored throughout the nineteenth century,
Benito Cereno
was hailed as a masterpiece at the beginning of the twentieth. It was, wrote one critic, a “flaming instance of the author’s pure genius.” But what did it mean?
Moby-Dick
’s symbolism was so fluid and open-ended it could be debated endlessly.
Benito Cereno
, in contrast, seemed unrelentingly to be about one thing, the most divisive subject in American history: slavery.
¹

Except that for a long time scholars said it wasn’t about slavery.
Benito Cereno
“equals the best of Conrad,” wrote Carl Van Doren in 1928. And like those who read Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
for its “Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision” but ignored its true story of homicidal Belgian imperialism in the Congo, scholars didn’t think
Benito Cereno
was about the slave trade and the racism it bred. Some said it was an allegory of the clash between European decadence (Cereno) and American innocence (Delano). But more often, critics read it as a parable of the cosmic struggle between absolute virtue and absolute evil.
²

Article after academic article fixated on Babo’s blackness (recall that in Melville’s novella, it is Babo, not Mori, who plays the role of deceptive servant). “Blackness and darkness are Melville’s predominant symbols of evil, and Babo is blackness, not simply a Negro.” He is “pure deviltry … a creature of undiluted evil.” The West African who in the story presides over the murder of his enslaver and much of the ship’s crew is a “manifestation of pure evil.” He is the “origin of evil,” a “monster,” and “the metaphorical extension” of “the basic evil in human nature.” Babo isn’t a symbol of evil or a human being who does evil: “Babo is evil.”

Most early-twentieth-century scholars couldn’t see any rational reason for his violence. Babo’s is a “motiveless malignity.” He hates for the “happiness of hatred” and is evil “for the sake of evil.” He is “everything untamed and demoniac—the principle of unknown terror.” He is “the shark beneath the waters.” Some, such as Harvard’s F. O. Matthiessen, cautiously suggested that the slaves’ actions were justified by their captivity, since “evil” had “originally been done to them.” But most white scholars continued to insist that the “morality of slavery is not an issue in this story.” “Babo, after all, as perhaps his name suggests,” wrote Yale University’s Stanley Williams in 1947, “is just an animal, a mutinous baboon.”
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African American critics saw things differently. As early as 1937, Sterling Brown, a professor of literature at Howard, himself the son of a slave who trained a generation of writers, poets, activists, and actors, including Toni Morrison, Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Nkrumah, Ossie Davis, and Amiri Baraka, wrote that he wasn’t troubled by the portrayal of the West Africans as “bloodthirsty and cruel.” They weren’t villains, Brown wrote, much less incantatory exclamations of cosmic evil. They were human men and they “revolt as mankind has always revolted.” In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the black power protests of the 1960s, African American writers and activists started to celebrate Babo as an “underground hero” and to read
Benito Cereno
as subversive, seeming to take the side of the whites while skewering their idiocy.
⁴

Then there’s Amasa Delano’s whiteness. The image of the Duxbury captain that accompanies his memoir is striking. His cropped hair is colorless and his face is white, as intensely so as the starched, ruffled white cravat that grabs his round neck a bit too tightly. The retreating flanks of Delano’s scalp are curved and his arched eyebrows seem to continue their circumnavigation around fleshy cheeks. There’s a hint of a sailor’s squint, yet his eyes lack depth. They are fishlike. In fact, the combined effect of the whiteness and the roundness calls to mind a sea creature, a whale or maybe an otter. D. H. Lawrence described Herman Melville as “half a water animal”: “There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over.” Delano, too, according to an acquaintance, was “almost amphibious.”
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