The Empire of Necessity (21 page)

*   *   *

Sealers on Más Afuera, as well as on other islands, who began to think that the abuse wasn’t worth the share or who realized that the chances were dim that they would ever see their share, increasingly decided to strike: they quit, either collectively or individually.
*

In 1803, the entire crew of the
Mentor
jumped ship at Más Afuera, with only 350 skins and thirty barrels of sea elephant oil in its hold. Its captain had to sell the ship in Chile for a pittance to cover passage home for him and his remaining officers. Around the same time, the away team from the
Jenny
, under the command of a Boston captain named Crocker, refused to return to the ship. Amasa Delano heard the news from his agent in Canton, who warned him to keep an eye on his own men: “The People left on Massafuero by Crocker have most all deserted.”
⁸

Most of these islands were uninhabited, so there was no local source of labor. If their men deserted them, captains would have to travel some distance to recruit new hands, one way or another. At some point after his men abandoned him, Crocker, now in command of the
Nancy,
visited Easter Island, located about eighteen hundred miles west of Más Afuera. After a “bloody” battle with the island’s inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, Crocker captured twelve men and ten women and locked them in his hold. According to the captain of a Russian sealer, he was going to maroon them on Más Afuera to establish a slave “colony” of sealers. Three days out of Easter Island, however, the men jumped overboard and drowned. “They preferred perishing in the waves, to leading a miserable life in captivity.” The women tried to follow and were “prevented only by force.”
⁹

Officers needing to fill their ships’ holds used all their power to stop desertions and forcibly “carry” men back. And men did all they could to avoid being brought back. Here are the March 1799 entries from the captain’s log from the
Concord
, a sealer off an island south of Más Afuera:

17th. In the course of the night Glover and Drown, two of our seamen stole the yawl and run on shore with all their clothes. We found the boat, but can’t find the men.

18th. Saw those two fellows that run ashore, but there is so much wood and swamp that it is impossible to catch them.

22d. Sent the boat on shore to fill three barrels of water which were empty. Moser, one of our hands, gave us the slip. We supposed at first that he went to take a walk and did not come back in time to come off in the boat.… We saw him on the beach, sent the boat after him, but he ran into the woods. The people are all dissatisfied [and] have been mutinous of late.

23rd. Sent two boat crews on shore to try to catch those Infernal Rascals. Caught Drown but Moser kept his distance. Night calm, some hands ashore to catch the Villain. No Moser to be found. The fellow must be a plagy fool, for he’s got no clothes but what he has on.

Then later, on Más Afuera:

April 12th. Drown, one of the fellows that run away, swears by all that’s good that he will not work. I suppose we must tie him in the shrouds and give him a plagy flogging which is very disagreeable, but there is no help for it.
¹⁰

Sealing was as nearly an all-or-nothing system of labor relations as possible: until a ship had its complement of skins, workers had leverage in their dealings with officers. They might desert one vessel and bargain with another for better terms. Yet once their ship’s hold was full, their bargaining position completely and absolutely vanished, leaving them at the mercy of the officers. Before that point, though, masters were desperate to maintain their authority. Whipping was common, as the
Concord
’s refractory Drown, threatened with a plagy flogging, learned. And seal ship captains could use their far-reaching contacts to financially punish runaways. Later, when a number of men abandoned the
Perseverance
on its second sealing voyage
,
Delano sent their names to China, instructing his man there to embargo the “proceeds of their share” should they show up as hands on another vessel.
¹¹

By 1801, there were on Más Afuera more than a hundred “alone men,” a phrase used to describe sealers who lived and worked independently, unaffiliated with any ship. They were of “all descriptions and characters.” Some, “badly used” by officers, were refugees from coercion and abuse who had escaped the “clutches of their tyrants.” Others were at loose ends, left stranded far from home after their ships had been seized by Spanish authorities for smuggling. Still others were left-behinds, abandoned after having worked for months or a year to fill a hold of a ship. Ship captains described these castaways as “felons, pirates & murderers.” Amasa Delano’s agent in China warned him to guard his skins: “There are so many fellows or rascals on the Island that what one gets cant be call’d his own they steal so.” The island became an oxymoron, a society of hermits. “Not acknowledging the common continent of men,” to use Melville’s description of the “isolatos” on the
Pequod
, each lived on a “separate continent of his own.” On Más Afuera, they were islands living together on an island, federated along its gulches and mountain ledges.
¹²

One of these isolatos was an “English lad, by the name of Bill” who took the idea of freedom further than most did during his day. Having fled his ship, he lived in one of Más Afuera’s many caves, deciding he wanted nothing to do with either shipboard discipline or the modern world’s new master, money. “He keeps at work sealing,” said a sailor who spoke with him, “and says if he can get bread and rum he shall be contented.” Bill sold the sailor sixty skins, asking only to have his “keg filled” in exchange.

The sixty skins were worth twenty dollars, the sailor said, which would buy much more than two gallons of rum. Bill didn’t care. “He says he was never so happy before; there is no larboard watch, no reefing top-sails, no body to quarrel with, and he sleeps when he pleases and works when he pleases.”
¹³

“Want nothing else?” the sailor asked. “No,” answered Bill.

15

A TERRIFIC SOVEREIGNTY

Second mate William Moulton also tried to flee from his captain, George Howe, master of the sealing schooner
Onico
. Howe had become abusive shortly after the
Onico
left New London in late 1799. At first Moulton and the rest of the crew thought he was afflicted by drink. Howe “clipped his words” and suffered long “spells of hiccupping.” He slept most of the day on the quarterdeck, “so profoundly” that he didn’t wake when the sea broke “over him with an impetuosity that almost threatened to wash him off.”
¹

Moulton began to see a deeper malice behind the captain’s cruelty, which couldn’t be explained by alcohol or by the pressure caused by the falling price of sealskins. Howe, decided Moulton, was intoxicated by unchecked power. Maimed and blind in the right eye, he was impressive. One can’t read Moulton’s 1804 account of his eventful voyage without thinking of Melville’s Captain Ahab. Moulton describes Howe as tall and lean, with a sharp nose, thin lips, and a “sneerful smile.” He was a “genius,” a “monocular master,” who compensated for what he lacked in mathematical and astronomical talent by cursing God and nature: “no Son of Neptune can excel him in execrating the elements and their author, the winds, and him that sent them.”

Where Ahab tapped into wells of dark emotion to bind his men to him, making them think they were joining his mania out of their own free will, Howe ruled only by fear and division. He invented useless chores, like heaving seawater up in a bucket and passing it awkwardly along up a line of men in the rigging, until the bucket was empty and the men soaked. “Discord among his crew was the basis of his strength.” He often ordered one group of hands to give their biscuits to another. Without cause, he lashed men to the deck cannons to be “cobbed,” forcing all hands to participate in the paddling lest they themselves incur “like punishment.” Howe commanded other “victims” of his “vengeance” to “hold their faces fair” to his “strokes.” If they turned away, he would direct his blows to “the more sensitive and vital parts” of their body.

Disfigured, damning God and nature to hell, and exercising a “terrific sovereignty” over his crew, Howe took pleasure, Moulton said, “proportionate to the misery of others.” When the
Onico
dropped anchor to hunt seals at Staten Land, a craggy, mountainous island off the tip of Tierra del Fuego, where the sea surged “against all sides of it with great violence,” the abuse continued. Howe forbade his men from building their own shelters until they had raised his own commodious fifty-rafter hut and covered it with the thickest sealskins. He withheld medicine and food, kept them “on seals” till they were sick, and refused to let them wear warm clothing. Howe watered down the ship’s rum and taxed the crew’s own liquor supply, whipping all who dared protest until they were bloody. Howe became obsessed with Moulton, who, having fought in the American Revolution, represented a living symbol of rights and a challenge to arbitrary authority.

Moulton tried to escape. Setting out on a twelve-day trek to the other side of the island, he slept in caves, climbed precipices, and slipped down into deep valleys, barely avoiding landslides. With Howe following on his heels carrying “fire arms well loaded with powder and ball” and swearing “revenge,” Moulton crawled “up a gulch to gain the top of a mountain” and called to God to rescue him from “covetous one-eyed self interest.” “Oh! Pride and ambition, what havoc have you made,” he cried, “let me be delivered from malice, deceit, and envy.… Lord, save or I perish.” Howe caught him on the far side of the island and dragged him back to the
Onico
.

*   *   *

The extent of George Howe’s hatred of Moulton was extreme, but his power over his crew was typical. Both maritime law and custom granted captains of whalers, slavers, merchantmen, sealers, and naval vessels absolute authority over their men. “A Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession,” thought one eighteenth-century mariner. Captains could whip at will; the quarterdeck where floggings took place was often referred to as the “slaughter-house.” Sailors were punished for the most minor offenses: losing a whaleboat’s oar, breaking a dish, or letting an African slave drink out of the wrong water cask. Captain Francis Rogers of the
Crown
told his crew that he would “skin them alive,” while another shipmaster told a sailor that he would “split his Soul or Stab him and eat a piece of his Liver.” Captains doled out their punishment with a “brutal severity,” said one account, describing what happened when an old hand on a slave ship anchored off Bonny Island complained about his water allowance: a deck officer beat him until his teeth fell out and then jammed “iron pump-bolts” in his mouth, forcing him to swallow his blood.
²

Legally, ships remained redoubts of the old regime well through and beyond the Age of Revolution. It wasn’t until 1835 that the U.S. Congress passed an act that tried to place merchant ships under the rule of law and due process, making it a crime punishable by $1,000 or five years in prison for “any master or other officer, of any American ship or vessel on the high seas” to, with “malice, hatred, or revenge, and without justifiable cause, beat, wound, or imprison, any one or more of the crew … or withhold from them suitable food and nourishment, or shall inflict upon them any cruel and unusual punishment.” And it wasn’t until 1850 that the navy outlawed flogging on its vessels. But these practices continued well past their legal abolitions. “No southern monarch of the slave,” said a sailor in an account of his voyages in 1854, could best the “brutality” and “want of moral principle” of sea captains.
³

Still, the new language of rights spreading around the Atlantic and Pacific following the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions provided sailors with new ways to think about shipboard sovereignty, along with ways to contest it when they felt it was unfairly exercised.

*   *   *

By the time Moulton returned to the
Onico
’s sealing camp, he found most of the rest of his shipmates ready to join him against Howe. They were younger than Moulton, but most of their fathers had fought in the revolution, so they did what their parents’ generation did: they elected an assembly, drafted a declaration, and voted to rebel against a man named George.

Like the Declaration of Independence, on which it was clearly modeled, the document the sealers of the
Onico
composed in September 1800 was both a litany of specific grievances and a treatise on natural law and just rule. There, on a remote island at the bottom of the world, its drafters identified themselves as “citizens of the United States of America” and announced they were opposing Howe’s “authority without reason.”

They listed many of the captain’s specific abuses and quickly moved on to their main point: “It would be an endless, endless talk, should we attempt to enumerate all the instances of your tyranny, though of sufficient magnitude to deserve particular notice. What power is there that you could have assumed, which you have not assumed?” “If you exercise this mighty power by right,” they asked, where “did you derive this right?”

Most of the
Onico
’s
sealers deliberated on every stage in planning their mutiny, taking direct votes before proceeding on any action. As in the American Revolution itself, there were limits. The crew’s one unnamed “negro” was, Moulton wrote in his journal without further comment, “excluded from the knowledge of these proceedings.”