The Empire of Necessity (22 page)

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The rebellion was called off before it started. Faced with the threat of having his ship seized and being placed in chains, Howe not only capitulated but “embraced substantially” the spirit of the crew’s petition. With goodwill restored, the near-mutinous men boarded the
Onico
, hauled anchor, and made for Más Afuera.

They arrived on the island—which at this point was serving as the capital of what might be called the Oceanic Republic of Sealers—on October 30, finding it crowded with the gangs from at least ten ships, along with the hundred or so unattached “alone men.” Amasa Delano was there with the
Perseverance
, as were the Nantucket Swain brothers, captains of the
Mars
and the
Miantonomoh
. Out of New Haven was the
Oneida
, which had on board an “apostate Methodist priest.” Though he declared himself an atheist and spent his nights “drinking and carousing,” the minister continued to preach during the day.

Open-minded Amasa Delano believed the doubting priest to be a “man of fine sense and liberal principles” and invited him to give a sermon on board the
Perseverance
. Moulton, having befriended the cleric, suggested he take 2 Corinthians 4 as his text:

We faint not. But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.… We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.

Good republicans like Moulton interpreted the verse as supporting natural, inherent rights: the fact that every man had his own God-given conscience shining in his heart—the “light of nature,” as Delano put it elsewhere—meant that sovereignty, reason, morality, and justice were vested in individuals and didn’t spring from “fountain head” despots like George Howe.

*   *   *

Once at Más Afuera, Howe didn’t return to his old generalized arbitrariness but rather concentrated his bile on Moulton, threatening to leave him stranded on the mainland, where the Spaniards would take him prisoner and put him to work “in the mines.” Moulton responded by composing another declaration, this time directed not to Howe but to all the “American Masters” at Más Afuera, including Amasa Delano, who were acting like the informal island colony’s ad hoc governing council. Once again, Moulton recounted Howe’s many insults, concluding his defense by asking to be released from all his obligations to Howe and the
Onico
’s owners.

The council of captains convened a hearing on March 15, 1801, hosted by Valentine Swain, master of the schooner
Miantonomoh
. Around a head table in the captain’s quarters sat Delano, the Swain brothers, and four other seal shipmasters, who conducted the inquiry with decorum and solemnity. They called witnesses and considered evidence but the case came down to the balance of Moulton’s portage bill, the record kept by ships listing a sailor’s credits and debits. Moulton didn’t contest that his share of the voyage was worth less than what he owed on cash advances and for the tobacco and other provisions he had taken from the
Onico
’s slop chest. But he said his debt should be deducted from Howe’s earnings, since it was Howe’s erratic rule that made the voyage unprofitable.

The captain-judges decided in Moulton’s favor, ruling that he was no longer obligated to Howe. Moulton was elated, until he realized that the Swain brothers, who were employed by the same Norwich merchant company that owned the
Onico
, were using the dispute to best Howe. They wanted his ship, crew, and what few skins he had. They weren’t so much absolving Moulton’s debt as transferring it to Valentine Swain and the
Miantonomoh
. That’s why Valentine Swain had had Moulton’s chest brought on board his ship before the hearing, to make it difficult for Moulton to flee.

Captain Swain demanded to know Moulton’s intentions, but Moulton hedged. He was fighting here for a principle, the doctrine of “free labor,” the idea that since every man possessed his own conscience in the eyes of God, he also possessed his own labor. For Moulton, this meant “sealing for myself or whomever I pleased.” Yet now he was being passed from one master to another like, as he put it, a “tool.”

Standing before these lords of the island in the oak-lined cabin of one of their “most consequential,” Moulton was acutely aware that there were forms of power that might not exactly be called slavery yet were coercive nonetheless. The captains’ recommendation that he join the crew of the
Miantonomoh
was presented to him merely as “advice.” Moulton, however, had no doubt that it was the “advice of those who commanded nearly all the ships and property of merchants belonging to the United States in this ocean, and who dictated, divided, and parceled out the sealing ground on this island.”

“You will at once see how near that advice approached to a command,” was how Moulton described his predicament in his memoir.

Moulton thanked the captains for releasing him from Howe’s authority. He then muttered “some ambiguous expressions” to evade Swain’s question and conceal his intentions. The
Miantonomoh
, set to sail the next day for Valparaiso, was leaving a sealing gang behind, which Moulton said he would join. That night, he removed his chest and bedding from the ship and fled to the interior of the island.

Swearing never to sign his name to “another portage bill, under any ship-master whatever,” Moulton set out to live “independently in every respect,… to seal by and for myself.”

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Swain’s crew didn’t make it easy. Moulton built a hut and started to hunt seals, joining the ranks of Más Afuera’s hundred or so masterless alone men. He was treated as a deserter, constantly harassed by the men of the
Mars
and the
Miantonomoh
, who stole his skins and chased him from the island’s rookeries.

Moulton had made his bid for freedom in mid-1801, just as the skinning season was about to start. After six or seven years of intensive slaughter, there were fewer seals on the island. By the end of the year, “very few clapmatches” or “young seal pups” were to be found. The only seals coming on shore were “old whigs.” Despite the shortage, the market in Canton was still saturated and prices were still falling. The result was more clashes among the seal gangs attached to specific ships on Más Afuera, more stealing, and more fighting over territory.

In response to what today would be called an ecological crisis, some of the alone men formed an association. Having recently helped draft a “declaration of independence,” Moulton now joined with others to compose a constitution. The alone men’s “rules for their government” stipulated that any motion that was made, seconded, put to a vote, and carried by a majority would be “binding on all.” The association was an almost perfect example of the principle of government by consent, of men coming together in a state of (despoiled) nature and agreeing on a set of laws to protect their interests and freedoms.

The charter mandated that all the alone men would collectively decide when the skinning season was to start. It allowed that whigs that wandered inland could be hunted freely but permitted “not a seal to be taken” on the beach until “we all go a sealing.” The idea was to give rookeries a chance to form and grow before they were assaulted. The members of the association would club, rip, and flipper the seals collectively as a group but they would flay the carcasses individually, with “every man” taking “what he skins” as the product of his labor. No sealing would be done on Sundays and any man caught violating the rules or stealing the skins of another member would be fined appropriately. Members, if possible, would sell their skins to ships as a group, to get a better price.

It would have been remarkable if all the association did was to try to regulate hunting in response to vanishing seals and the predations of captains and shore gangs. Yet one of its rules went beyond that, expanding the idea of freedom to mean not just individual liberty but mutual interdependence and social security: “If any of us get disabled by sickness, or being bitten or wounded,” the members agreed, “there shall be an equitable proportion of sealing ground set off for the disabled person or persons; or that his deficiency of skins occasioned thereby, shall be made up to him by the rest of us, in an equal ration proportionate to the number of skins taken by each individual.” Each would do what he could, but each would have what he needed.

For the brief few years in the late 1700s and early 1800s when the council of American sea captains, among them Amasa Delano, governed Más Afuera, they ruled less like republican emissaries than like rival emperors divvying up a continent: they signed treaties defining boundaries, commanded expeditions that fought one another over resources and wealth, came together to enforce common rules governing property and debt, and even issued their own currency.
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At the same time, an odd lot of “felons, pirates & murderers” survived in the nooks and crannies of this “terrific sovereignty,” men who might either renounce Jesus and money and live in caves or decide that being free “in every respect” meant organizing a half-anarchic, half-social-democratic seal-hunting guild.

*   *   *

As to Captain George Howe, he fell apart after Más Afuera’s captain’s council ruled against him. The
Onico
became infested with rats, which he couldn’t smoke out. Depressed and anxious, he was, as Moulton guessed he would be, relieved of his command by the Swain brothers, who took his skins and crew.

Howe wound up in Valparaiso, confined to the back room of a home of a respected Spanish family, gravely sick with fever. Amasa Delano considered Howe an honest and noble-minded friend, despite joining the Swain brothers to rule against him, and was surprised to learn of his whereabouts. Delano himself had dined a number of times in the house, yet his hosts never once told him that Howe was a few feet away, dying. When he paid a visit, he found the captain untended, in a room “no better than a hovel, in a most deplorable situation.” Alone in a “miserable bed,” Howe looked “wasted,” like a skeleton.

Just before Howe died, the owner of the house brought out his ledgers and had the captain “acknowledge the different charges” he had incurred during his stay. The Spaniard already held the captain’s cash for safekeeping. Now he presented him with a bill for his room and board. “So far gone,” Amasa wrote, Howe could only say “yes—without probably knowing what he said.” Thus Captain Howe left this world in debt, having signed his last portage bill. His own.
⁴

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In mid-October 1801, after tending to George Howe’s affairs, Delano returned to the
Perseverance
, gathered the men he had scattered on Más Afuera and other islands, and sailed to China to deliver his haul. For once, his timing was good. He had heard from his agent that the market was volatile but he made it to Canton and sold his skins just before prices truly collapsed.

In the Chilean Pacific, seal rookeries continued to disappear. “Seals were scarce” said the log of the
Minerva
in 1802. In 1803, after three weeks on Más Afuera in what should have been the height of the skinning season, one away team could barely kill enough seals to “cover a hut, during which time we had no other shelter than an old boat, turned bottom upwards.” Prospects were “dreary” and “gloomy,” made worse by the fact that “most of the time it was rainy.” In 1804, there were more men than seals on Más Afuera. Two years later, there were no seals at all.
⁵

“No seals,” reported the
Topaz
sailing off of Chile, “no seals.”

16

SLAVERY HAS GRADES

Unable to seal, since there were no seals, sealers turned to smuggling to make a profit. That’s how Benito Cerreño, a young Andalusian shipmaster new to the Americas, wound up owning the
Tryal—
a vessel that, even before serving as the stage for a South Pacific slave uprising, had already been involved in another fight concerning labor, back in New England.

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Flat-decked, three-masted, square-rigged, and built in New Bedford in 1794, the
Tryal
was purchased by the Nantucket Quakers Paul Gardner Jr., Thomas Starbuck, Moses Mitchell, and Thomas Coffin Jr. in early 1801. The four men might have intended to use the vessel for sealing, as they told its crew, yet by the time the ship left Woods Hole on the first day of March 1801, with Coffin at the helm, it had been refitted with secret holds and false-bottom crates.

Coffin arrived at Más Afuera in December, planning to use the island as cover to make quick runs of contraband cargo, including cigars, guns, and textiles, into Valparaiso. It was a dangerous business. Spanish officials might be tolerant in general, but their tolerance could quickly disappear with shifting wartime alliances, as Madrid broke with London to join Paris or argued with Washington over tariffs. In one swoop, a Spanish man-of-war could descend on an island, confiscate skins, embargo and auction ships, along with the personal belongings of the crew, and imprison sailors and officers.

That’s what happened to Valentine Swain’s brother, Uriah, who was also a Quaker.
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Caught with $2,000 worth of banned luxury goods in his schooner
Mars
, his men were sent to Lima, where they were “robbed, plundered, and put into prison.” And that’s what happened to Thomas Coffin when, in June 1802, the
Tryal
was seized by the Spaniards in Valparaiso and its voyage ended.
¹

Crossing the Andes, traveling through Brazil, and then catching a ship north, Thomas Coffin took three years to make it back to Nantucket. He arrived home just in time to learn that he along with the other three owners of the
Tryal
were being sued for “deceit.”