The Empire of Necessity (23 page)

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The plaintiffs claimed to be the masters of James Mye, a young cabin boy who had shipped out on the
Tryal
in 1801. Half African American and half Wampanoag, Mye was born in Mashpee, a “praying village”—as the Puritans called their Indian reservations—that had been settled at the base of Cape Cod.
²

Before the arrival of Europeans in the early 1600s, the Wampanoag, an Algonquin-speaking people, numbered many thousands and lived throughout southern New England, including on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and eastern Long Island. Even before the establishment of Plymouth Bay Colony, epidemics, brought by Europeans, had devastated the population. Settlers took Wampanoags as slaves, using them as servants and laborers or trading them to the Spanish and French in the West Indies for goods or African slaves. By the early 1800s, the Wampanoag had almost disappeared. Only about sixty families were left in Mashpee, which survived largely due to the arrival of a number of free or escaped “foreign-Negros and Molatoes” from points south. “Too many Negroes,” reported an 1800 census of the town, “have mixt with these people.”
³

The Wampanoag in Mashpee had tried to get by picking wild fruit, catching clams, and making brooms to sell on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. This commerce wasn’t enough to live on in a world where cash and credit ruled. More and more Wampanoag took advances from local merchants. Ever deeper in debt, men signed on to whaling ships to pay off their mounting loans. “An Indian having gotten into debt obliges himself,” wrote one minister in the mid-1700s, “to go a whaling till he pays.”
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Many, though, found their debt actually increased on long voyages, built up by their “buying” tobacco and other goods from the ship’s slop chest during the voyage. The obligations would pass on to their children, who then too would be “bound to serve.” “Children were sold or bound as security for the payment of their fathers’ debts as soon as they were seven or eight years old.… These Indians and their children were transferred from one to another master like slaves,” said one observer in 1758. “Every Indian had his master.”
⁴

During the colonial period, just prior to the American Revolution, London granted Wampanoag villages like Mashpee some autonomy. Yet granting nominal freedom to a subjugated people trapped in debt bondage just led to more subjugation: the only thing the Wampanoag were truly free to do was take on more debt, to bind themselves or their children to merchants, artisans, and whalers. Then, after the revolution, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts imposed a “guardian system” on Mashpee, supposedly to protect its residents from falling “very easy prey” to creditors who plied “them with spirituous liquor.” But this reform also worked to institutionalize bondage, giving a board of white “guardians” nearly unlimited power to administer village affairs, including authorizing all debt, indenture, apprentice, and other labor contracts.

Under this new system, when a Nantucket ship owner wanted a Mashpee Wampanoag for a whaling or sealing crew, he made his request to the Marshpee guardians. When indebted families signed over their young children to white masters, they needed the approval of the guardians. When masters willed their apprentices to their children or when they sold their indentures to another master, the guardians had to give their permission. And when masters bound out their apprentices on whaling or sealing ships, with the expectation they would turn over half of their shares when the voyage was complete, they required the authorization of the guardians.

That’s how James Mye wound up on the
Tryal
. Two Mashpee guardians, Joseph Nye and David Parker, both direct descendants of
Mayflower
Pilgrims, “did bind out” the boy to one Joshua Hall. On Hall’s death, Mye’s indenture passed to Hall’s two sons, Stephen and Joshua, who in turn “bound out” Mye to Thomas Coffin
,
for a period of five years.

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Stephen and Joshua Hall wanted their share of what they thought Mye was owed for his time on the
Tryal
, had the ship done what its owners said it would do: go sealing. In exchange for his labor, Mye was to receive “a one-hundredth part of the produce of all the skins”—a “proportion” of which was to be paid to the Hall brothers. Instead, Coffin and his associates used their ship to “deceive, disappoint, wrong and defraud,” said plaintiffs, and as a result their enterprise was “defeated, broken up, and lost, altogether.”
⁵

Barnstable County’s Court of Common Pleas decided in favor of the Hall brothers, ordering the
Tryal
’s owners to pay the plaintiffs $100. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the decision on appeal.

The three-member higher court ruled that sons couldn’t inherit indentures as if they were personal property. When the plaintiffs’ counsel argued that the Mashpee guardians had verbally sanctioned the transfer, the justices unanimously held that an oral agreement wasn’t enough “to send a man round the globe and bring an action for his service.” The decision, in a sense, was based on a narrow reading of the law: it didn’t challenge the legitimacy of Wampanoag guardianship or the practice of indenture, implying that had the guardians approved the transfer in writing the Halls would have been in their rights to send Mye wherever they wanted.

One of the judges did offer a more far-reaching opinion. Justice Simeon Strong argued that even if Mye had been bound to the Halls by a formal contract, the brothers still wouldn’t have had the “right to send him to the south-pole, to the end of the globe, in their service.” Strong also said that Mye himself couldn’t, even if he wanted to, agree to such an arrangement, since he was a young boy with “no will of his own.” Strong here was clearly defining labor as something that required willful, rational consent.

Hall et al. v. Gardner et al
. was an early precedent in a growing body of case law that helped move America away from apprenticeships and indentures, which tied workers in various ways to their place and person of employ, toward modern notions of free labor. In the decades before the Civil War, lawyers cited the case to reform child indenture, to limit the “boundless license” of masters to send their apprentices and indentured workers wherever they wanted, and to rein in third-party “brokers” who in some states acted much like slavers, carrying out a “lively trade in apprentices well into the nineteenth century.”
⁶

The case was even cited at least twice by Hawaiian lawyers after the Civil War to restrict the near-absolute power of plantations over indentured migrant workers. In 1870, for example, attorney W. C. Jones used it in his successful bid to free Gip Ah Chan from prison. Chan had left China five years earlier on the ship
Matador
, part of a fleet that since 1849 had been carrying tens of thousands of “coolie” laborers to Peru. This time the
Matador
sailed to Hilo, Hawaii. During the voyage, representatives of a plantation owned by Theodore Metcalf “thrust” a half-Spanish, half-English contract at Chan, who, though he couldn’t understand its contents, had no choice but to sign it.

In Hilo, Chan was put to work on Metcalf’s sugar plantation. When Metcalf died shortly thereafter, Chan quit the plantation. In response, Metcalf’s partners had local authorities arrest him for violating Hawaii’s statute covering master-servant relations. They claimed that Chan’s labor contract was still in force and that it had passed to them upon Metcalf’s death. Chan’s lawyer, Jones, cited, along with other precedents,
Hall et al. v. Gardner et al.
to argue the contrary, that contracts couldn’t be bequeathed from one partner to another. The judge agreed with the defendant and freed Chan. At some point during the proceedings, Metcalf’s associates had objected to accusations leveled by Jones that they had treated his client like a slave. There was, they said in their defense, “nothing similar to chattel slavery in the prisoner’s condition.” Chan was a free man who could stop working whenever he paid off his obligations. “A slave,” in contrast, “had no right to wife, child, or to anything on earth.”

“Slavery has grades,” Mr. Jones answered.
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As he was defending himself in court against the Hall brothers, Thomas Coffin continued efforts he had started in Chile to get his ship back, petitioning the U.S. government to intervene on his behalf against Spain. He was too late. Spanish authorities had long since auctioned the
Tryal
off.
⁸

The ship was purchased by José Ignacio Palacio, a wealthy Lima merchant who then sold it, on credit, to Benito Cerreño. Cerreño kept the vessel’s English name and, even before Coffin arrived back in Nantucket, had started using it to run freight up and down the Spanish Main’s Pacific coast, from Concepción in the south to Lima in the north and Valparaiso in between.
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INTERLUDE

A Merry Repast

During his Pacific voyages in the 1840s, Herman Melville visited many of the same places Amasa Delano had passed through four decades earlier, such as Lima and Más Afuera. At the Galapagos, both men were struck by the size and slowness of the islands’ famous giant tortoises. The insistence of these animals on moving in a straight line no matter what immovable obstacle stood in their way seemed to awaken in the two men thoughts of destiny and free will.

After bringing a few of these enormous creatures on board his ship and observing their movements, Delano came to believe that they could “easily be taught to go to any place on the deck.” The trick, he wrote, was to be found in “whipping them with a small line when they are out of place, and to take them up and carry them to the place assigned for them; which being repeated a few times will bring them into the practice of going themselves, by being whipped when they are out of their place.”

Years later, in a series of sketches about the islands called
The Encantadas
, Melville’s narrator also spends time considering their movements. “There is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures,” he says. “Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs.” It is as if some “malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter” had bestowed on them a “crowning curse”: a “drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.”

Melville then relates a common sailor superstition regarding the animals. “All wicked sea-officers,” especially captains and commodores, “are at death transformed into tortoises” and sentenced to long, lonely lives walking across barren, solitary islands—much like the castaways, left-behinds, and runaways tormented by shipmasters like George Howe.

Then, as if to underscore Melville’s own tortoiselike faith in cosmic reason—his hope that, despite living in a world littered with evidence proving otherwise, things that go round will come round—he has his narrator sit down with his shipmates and make “a merry repast from tortoise steaks and tortoise stews.” The reincarnated becomes the digested.
¹

PART V

IF GOD WILLS

Therein come down the Angels.

—THE QUR’AN, 97:4

17

NIGHT OF POWER

It was a coincidence, and a bad one for Alejandro de Aranda. In 1804, Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic lunar calendar, fell just before he began to move his slaves over the high Andes. Islam is a prophetic religion, like Christianity and Judaism. It promises deliverance from earthly pain. Even more so does Sufism—the kind of Islam found in the part of West Africa where Babo, Mori, and the others were captured—which charges the faith’s already powerful universalism with a potent mysticism.

Mystics often describe their efforts to become one with the absolute as a journey “upward and outward.” “The road on which we enter is a royal road which leads to Heaven,” wrote Saint Teresa. “We ascend,” said Saint Augustine. Islam, too, uses the metaphor of journeying to imagine an individual’s approach to God, enacted in the obligation of Muslims to visit Mecca once in their lives. Sufism especially associates religious faith with a quest. The “Sufi who sets out to seek God calls himself a ‘traveller’ (
salik
), he advances by slow ‘stages’ (
maqamat
) along a path (
tariqat
) to the goal of union with reality.” Islamic mysticism is popularly associated with dervishes whirling in an effort to achieve self-annihilation. But in West Africa, Sufism also has a strong quietist tradition that encourages a contemplative submission of one’s interior self to divine will. The British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard, based on fieldwork he conducted in the 1920s among the Azande people in southern Sudan, writes that the aim of Sufism is to transcend the senses to the point where there is “no longer a duality of ‘God’ and ‘I,’ but there is only ‘God.’” West African Muslims did this through asceticism, contemplation, and prayers until a “state of ecstasy” took over the soul, freeing the believer from his or her “bodily prison.”
¹

Whichever of these traditions Babo and the other Muslims among Aranda’s captives were part of, their climb up the Andean slave road—where years later Darwin would notice how the extreme clarity of the air distorted perspective—collapsed their physical and spiritual worlds into each other. Christians who willingly made the journey described the climb in mystical terms. “A very extraordinary effect is often produced on the mind,” wrote one early nineteenth-century traveler of his experience approaching the summit, making him feel a “strong vibration,” as if his whole being was “harmonizing” with the universe. “It seems as if crowds of ideas were dancing in the mind, with associations so rapid and figures so intricate, that I could not make any of the performances out: something like a cadenced shake alone was sensible.” Such a feeling of disorientation must have been even stronger for those force-marched up the mountain pass.