The Empire of Necessity (24 page)

In the evening, after their daily ascent, or in the morning before starting out, or maybe during short breaks along the path, the West Africans might have been ignored by their handlers long enough that they could face east and pray. But the extreme conditions of the climb would have made it hard to wash themselves and probably impossible for them to fast, adding to the intensity of their journey. As did the fact that they were moving west, not east, away from Mecca. The cold was extreme, sparks might have flown from their clothes, and the radiance of the moon, the movement of which told them it was Ramadan, was unlike anything they had seen before. What was routine fearfulness for those used to the heights would have been an all-consuming anguish for a people coming from a land of grassy flats, having just survived a two-month ocean voyage only to be forced on a nearly equally long trek over the pampas. Probably not all of Aranda’s captives were Muslim. But their extreme experience might have allowed those among them, like Babo and Mori, who could make prophetic sense of their journey, who could use the moon and the stars not just to explain their movements but to promise deliverance from their sufferings, to rise as leaders. Among West African Muslims there is a belief that the hardship of traveling by foot on pilgrimages to Mecca helped fortify spiritual powers that could be used to defeat evil spirits, or jinns, that might be encountered along the way.
²

It was worse luck for Aranda that once in the port town of Valparaiso he didn’t have to wait to embark his cargo. The schooner
Tryal
was already there in the harbor, loaded with cargo from southern Chile, including wheat, cypress and pine timber, butter, cheese, casks of lard and wine, and biscuits
,
bound for Lima, where Aranda had planned to sell his slaves. They were able to board quickly, just before the ship hauled anchor, which meant they would be on the high seas for Laylat al-Qadr, translated as the Night of Power or the Night of Destiny. Every year Muslims celebrate this day, which falls at the end of Ramadan, when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mohammed, a reminder of Allah’s promise to deliver the faithful from history’s suffering. The promise is told in the Qur’an: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. Therein come down the Angels.… Peace!… This until the rise of morn!”
³

*   *   *

Early on the eve of Laylat al-Qadr, three hours before sunrise and five days after setting sail from Valparaiso on December 22, the West Africans rose up and took control of the
Tryal
. The ship’s cargo hold was full; as a result, the slaves had been sleeping on deck amidships since leaving port, guarded by a night watch but unshackled. Aranda, mistaking exhaustion and emaciation for docility, told Cerreño that they were “tractable.” At this point, there were seventy-two slaves in the shipment, eight more than Aranda had purchased from Nonell eight months earlier. The additions might have been the infants that were occasionally mentioned in Spanish documents, born along the way. Or perhaps Aranda purchased them from other sources. The records don’t say.
*

Most of the ship’s thirty or so hands also slept on deck, in a makeshift canvas tent pitched off of the foremast. What was the
Tryal
’s bunk room in the bow of the ship, the forecastle, had been converted into quarters for Aranda and his traveling entourage, six people, including three clerks, a cousin from Spain, and his brother-in-law. At least three other slaves were on board the vessel, and they had
,
a few days before the revolt, begun to conspire with the West Africans.

Two of them, José and Francisco, were Aranda’s servants. Islam was a strong bond, yet slavery forged other kinds of alliances. The nineteen-year-old José was from Africa. He had been purchased by Aranda six years earlier and might have spoken the West Africans’ language. Prior to the revolt, the ship’s pilot caught him several times “having secret conversations” with Mori and chased him away. The mulatto Francisco, born in Buenos Aires and with Aranda for most of his life, probably spoke only Spanish.

The third slave who joined the West Africans was Joaquín, the ship’s thirty-five-year-old caulker, one of the many “people of color” (the term is associated with late-twentieth-century racial politics yet it was commonly used in colonial Spanish America in the early 1800s) who worked as tars, carpenters, blacksmiths, and shipwrights, a corps of free and enslaved laborers who kept the Spanish Pacific maritime fleet running. Joaquín was described as a Christian who had “lived many years among the Spaniards.” Later, in his testimony, Benito Cerreño said he was
de los más malos
—“among the worst” of the rebels when it came to murdering Spaniards.
⁴

At around three o’clock on the morning of the revolt, about thirty West Africans moved quietly toward the bow, led by Babo and Mori and armed with knives and axes secreted for them by José and Joaquín. For some of the men—the ones who had come to America on the
Neptune
and been transferred to the
Santa Eulalia
—this would be their third bid to free themselves. They first attacked the ship’s carpenter and boatswain, who were on watch but had fallen asleep, wounding them badly. The insurgents then fell on the other sailors. Left behind around the mainmast, the West African women, even before the men overcame the guards, had begun to sing softly, their sound muffled by the waves. When the first scream broke the night, their voices grew louder, letting out a “melancholic” dirge, a murderous sadness that was meant to give the men courage to kill.

What were they singing? They might have been reciting lines from the Qur’an. It was more common for men to memorize verses from the holy book through rhythmic chanting, but throughout West Africa, select women also participated in qur’anic studies. Or it might have been a praise song or call to war, one of many such songs and poems that made up West Africa’s extensive musical repertoire. Whatever it was, one thing is certain: it added to the terror that the
Tryal
’s sailors felt as they succumbed to the slaves’ assault. Spaniards generally thought African music was, as one observer wrote in the 1770s, “the most barbaric and grotesque thing imaginable.” Slaves fashioned percussion instruments out of anything they could, including jawbones of asses, which when beaten made a rasping sound that Spaniards found particularly unnerving: their “song is like a howl” and their “dances call to mind rituals that witches perform for the Devil on their Sabbaths.”
⁵

The rebels executed eighteen sailors, stabbing and hacking some to death and throwing others overboard. Three or four crew members managed to break away and hide. Seven begged for their lives and were spared.

The West Africans then took control of the ship’s cockpit and three hatchways, tying the hands of their captives behind their backs and forcing them down the ladder of the middle hatch to the cargo hold. A few of the ship’s hands had been belowdecks when the fighting started. When they tried to come up the forward hatch, the rebels drove them back into the forecastle with the ship’s passengers, including Aranda.

*   *   *

The aft hatch led to the captain’s quarters. Benito Cerreño was twenty-nine years old, thin and tall for his time. He was born in Calañas, Spain, a small orchard and goat town outside of Seville, into a gentry family that had begun to come apart as agricultural prices in Spain steadily declined throughout the late 1700s. Cerreño arrived in Lima in the first years of the 1800s, probably on a ship owned by his future father-in-law, Raymundo Murre, whose fleet included a number of cargo vessels that ran up and down the Pacific coast. It was through Murre’s contacts that Cerreño financed his purchase of the
Tryal.
⁶

Like Aranda, Cerreño was using the expansion of Spanish American commerce to try to escape his family’s downward fall—not with slavery but with shipping, an industry that grew in tandem with slavery. When Spain began liberalizing commerce, it allowed its American colonies to trade among themselves. Chilean merchants, for instance, wanted to sell their wheat and wine to Peru and other northern ports, and when they were permitted to do so, a vibrant merchant marine, run out of Lima, began to take shape. And though Cerreño wasn’t a slaver and the
Tryal
wasn’t a “slave ship,” his trade’s success depended on carrying slave-produced goods as well as, occasionally, slaves.

Cerreño was asleep when the revolt began but awoke to the noise and quickly realized the seriousness of the situation. Armed with two pistols and a musket he kept in his quarters, he moved into the passageway between his cabin and the main cargo hold, where the hatch ladder descended. He stayed there through the night, keeping the West Africans from either climbing down or coming through the hold’s bulkhead door. The standoff ended at dawn, when Babo ordered three prisoners be brought to him. Without giving the Spanish captain an ultimatum, he had them thrown overboard, bound but not gagged, so their screams could be heard. Cerreño surrendered.

When he’d gone below to sleep the night before, the slaves, if Cerreño noticed them, had been heaped around the mainsail. Now he came out into the morning light of a different world.

The
Tryal
was seventy-five feet long and a bit less than a third that wide. Its stern was square and, with neither figurehead nor billethead, its prow was blunt and unadorned. Save for the masts, riggings, wheelhouse, and hatchway coamings, the
Tryal
’s top deck was flush and unbroken from stern to stem, almost like a barge, or a stage, allowing an open view to a new scene: everywhere Cerreño looked, there were West Africans, armed and in charge.

Mori spoke Spanish and he interpreted for his father, Babo. One of the first things the West African asked Cerreño was if there were any “lands of black people in these seas where they could be taken.”

No, Cerreño said.

*   *   *

He was lying. It was inconceivable that a man of Cerreño’s class, skin color, origin, and occupation didn’t know that early the year before, in 1804, Haiti had declared its independence, establishing the second republic in the Americas.

The revolt had started in 1791 and the wars that followed had lasted more than a decade. The fight to end slavery on one of the world’s most profitable slave islands had repercussions that were felt across the Atlantic world, from Montevideo, where a group of runaway slaves set up a short-lived Republic of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, to the Hudson Valley, where in 1793 slaves said to be inspired by Haiti started a series of fires (first in the barn of Herman Melville’s great-uncle Leonard Gansevoort, then another in the stables of his grandfather Peter Gansevoort) that nearly destroyed Albany. Reports of the Revolution, rumors, including eyewitness testimony, songs, poetry, and slogans, ran through the Americas, carried by sailors from port to port.
⁷

Consider this Victor Hugo–like image: In 1797, six years after the start of the Revolution, in the middle of the night on a bridge in La Guaira, a harbor town on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast a short sail from Haiti, a young mulatto slave boy named Josef strolls out of the misty darkness singing in French. Alarmed authorities take him into custody and, in an effort to learn the lyrics, demand that he continue singing. Josef does, and, according to the historian Cristina Soriano, who found the transcript of the interrogation in the Venezuelan archives, every song has the same chorus: “Long live the republic, long live liberty, long live equality.”
⁸

It is also unlikely that some of the West Africans on the
Tryal
didn’t know of Haiti, either from the time they spent in the harbors and holding corrals of Buenos Aires and Montevideo or on Citizen Mordeille’s corsair ship, where French sailors had to have been talking about Napoleon Bonaparte’s failure to restore slavery on the island. In 1801, Bonaparte sent fourteen generals and twenty thousand troops to the island. Less than three years later, they were gone, vanquished by rebels and disease, and the free republic of Haiti was proclaimed. Haiti had become a refuge for “foreigners of color” seeking freedom; black Haitian privateers stopped at least one slave ship bound for Cuba, “declaring their intention to take the captives to Saint-Domingue so that they ‘might enjoy their freedom in the land of liberty.’” Ada Ferrer, who has studied the influence of the Haitian Revolution in the broad Atlantic world, writes that after declaring independence the new nation’s “leaders made it increasingly clear that the ‘land of liberty’ referred to Haiti and not to France.”
⁹

Cerreño told the West Africans that no such place existed. After a long conference among themselves, the slaves demanded to be taken either to Senegal or to São Nicolau (San Nicolás, in Spanish), an island in the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of Senegal.

Cerreño said it was too far a sail and his ship wouldn’t make it in its condition. The rebels said they would do anything he required in terms of rationing food and water but they would kill him if he didn’t return them to Africa.

*   *   *

Cerreño relented, but since the West Africans didn’t know whether the passage back to the Atlantic was to the north or to the south, he continued sailing north to Lima. Mori told him he would die if they spotted any town or settlement, so the Spaniard stayed far off shore, away from coastal towns, even as he scanned the horizon hoping for a Spanish or foreign ship.

The West Africans held what Cerreño later described as “daily conferences” early every morning to decide their course of action, a ritual that might have included prayers. After the uprising, many of the rebels had discarded their filthy, threadbare clothes, replacing them with tunics cut out of canvas the ship had in stock, and tied with rope belts strapped around their waists. With each passing day, they were, Cerreño said, becoming more “restless” and “mutinous,” anxious to feel that they were making progress home.