The Empire of Necessity (29 page)

Delano then gave an order to pick up the nearby away teams and proceed to Santa María. He needed to find his brother.

21

DECEPTION

The
Tryal
came down along the rough, windy side of Santa María Island hard around its southern head, rocking and pitching. Only by luck did Cerreño give a wide berth to a low ledge that ran about a mile out from the point, to land full stop in a quiet bay about half a league from the
Perseverance
, bow to stern.

Falling in with the Duxbury brig jolted the ship’s voyagers out of their trancelike state. For fifty-three days since the uprising, Cerreño had sailed undetected, avoiding the busy sea lanes between Valparaiso and Lima crowded with merchant vessels and naval ships. Two West African women, along with their two babies, had died of hunger and thirst, leaving a total of eighty-seven people on board: sixty-eight West Africans, their three allies—Joaquín, Francisco, and José—ten surviving sailors, four cabin boys, one passenger left from Alejandro de Aranda’s entourage, and Captain Cerreño. It had been a month since the rebels threw Aranda into the sea, and his murder had eased tensions. As did the pledge Cerreño signed to take the rebels to Senegal.

But the situation was dire. Food was short and water gone. There would have been dew in the evening, almost as dense as rain, though not enough to keep the travelers hydrated. After the deaths of the two women and their children, desperation had turned to stupor.
¹

The
Tryal
was broad-beamed, built like many of New Bedford’s oak whaling and trading ships for seaworthiness. The voyagers, though, had eaten their way through much of the food merchandise that had served as ballast, the casks of lard, bushels of wheat, boxes of biscuits, chickens, pigs, and cows that weighted the ship and helped keep it steady. And they had run into a bad storm shortly after Aranda’s murder. Waves tossed the ship like a log and water poured over the coamings into the hatches, more than the West Africans, pumping furiously, could kick back out. Cerreño had no choice but to jettison much of the rest of the ship’s heavy cargo, including a load of timber from southern Chile, overboard.

Because the ship was lighter and riding higher on the waves, less water breached the
Tryal
’s gunwales. But its pitch increased. The ship was already worn and leaky when Cerreño had taken possession of it in early 1803, and it had grown worse with over a year of hard use and poor care. Now it was nearly ruined, its sails threadbare and its rigging a tangle. Long braids of kelp draped the vessel’s bow and barnacles encrusted its hull. “A ship grows foul very fast in these seas,” a sailor wrote of the waters in which the
Tryal
traveled.
²

*   *   *

The morning the
Tryal
rounded Santa María’s southern head, Amasa Delano was lying in his bunk thinking about the line that separated sport from insubordination. The
Perseverance
had dropped anchor four days earlier to wait for Samuel, who still hadn’t appeared, and soon thereafter Delano cast eight men he had discovered plotting against him off his ship, putting them on the island. He allowed another eight to go to shore to have some fun, “shooting, fishing, getting birds’ eggs, and playing ball.” Though after the troubles in New South Wales, the tense voyage to Chile, and the suspicious actions of his crew off of Juan Fernández (Amasa never found out what really happened that night), he wasn’t sure how many from this group would come back. Santa María wasn’t a big island. It was just about five miles long and half that wide, but there were plenty of places to hide among its pines or in its marshes and coves. Delano would have to wait for his brother Samuel before he could hunt down deserters, since so many of the men left on the
Perseverance
were close to desertion themselves.

Dressed and on deck after being told about the appearance of the
Tryal
, Delano considered what to do. He feared privateers and knew firsthand their trick of feigning distress, then striking. But he also knew that maritime commerce, and the prosperity that came with it, couldn’t exist without courtesy and trust. “One ship may be in want of something that another can spare,” wrote Delano later. Besides, the ship could be an ally and might even help him with his own troubles.

Delano ordered the ship’s boat to be loaded with fish, water, bread, and pumpkins and hoisted out quickly, since it looked as if the wind was pushing the
Tryal
toward the ledge. He had recently learned from a Captain Barney, master of the Nantucket whaler
Mars
, of yet another plot by some of his “convict men” to steal his boat and make for the island. This time, though, unlike at Juan Fernández, he had men he could trust with him, including his first midshipman, Nathaniel Luther, and his brother William. He left William in charge of the ship and climbed into the boat with Luther.

Santa María sits fifty miles off a wide coastal gulf into which flows the Bio Bio River down from the Andes, the natural border separating Chile’s tamed north from its wild south. Over the centuries Spain had tried to turn Santa María into a defensive garrison, an outpost against pirates, contrabandists, freebooters, unauthorized whalers and sealers, and rival empires.
³
But the island was still mostly uninhabited in 1805. In the opening scenes of
Benito Cereno
Melville paints the place gray on gray: “Everything was mute and calm; everything gray.… The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors.… Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” But as Delano made his way toward the
Tryal
the sun was breaking through the early mist, revealing a blue sky that would last the day long.
⁴

*   *   *

The West Africans could have tried to stay ahead of their dwindling food and water by reducing the number of people on board their ship. Yet they needed the remaining crew alive if they were going to make it to Senegal. And as far as surviving documents suggest, they didn’t turn on one another. Rather, in the weeks prior to the encounter with the
Perseverance
, the rebels sank into stillness. During calm days, the late summer sun waxed warm as the vessel rocked listlessly in the water and its yardarms creaked in their slings. Power slid into impotence. After the frenzied uprising and the rush of executions, followed by the heavy work needed to empty the cargo hold during the storm, there was nothing to do. Until the sight of the
Perseverance
rousted the rebels out of their resignation.

Witnesses say it was Babo and Mori who came up with the plan. Had they tried to flee, the
Perseverance
probably wouldn’t have pursued. The West Africans, though, didn’t know that. They could have immediately fought. Benito Cerreño later testified that, upon coming on Delano’s ship, the rebels picked up their knives and broad axes and made ready. Instead, Babo and Mori thought of the idea of deceiving the boarding party, of acting as if they were still slaves. Mori warned Cerreño that he would be listening to his every word and watching his every move. If Cerreño gave “any indication about what had happened on the ship,” as the Spanish report on the incident later said, “they would kill him on the spot, along with all the rest of the crew and passengers.”

Babo, Mori, and possibly others on board the
Tryal
were lettered men, probably educated in qur’anic schools. They knew how to read the sky, at least enough to keep the calendar, and how to write in their own language. Legal contracts like the kind they had made Cerreño sign in exchange for his life were well established in Islam by 1805, as they were in Christianity. Mori knew enough Spanish to communicate with Cerreño. And Babo was held in high respect by the other West Africans, suggesting that he could have been a marabout (a cleric) or a
faqīh
(a scholar) in his former life.
⁵

Slavery existed throughout West Africa. Babo, Mori, and some of the others might have been slave owners themselves. Or they might have been slaves, since neither status nor education would have necessarily protected them against being captured and sold to Europeans in one of the many conflicts that roiled parts of West Africa at the time. Beyond whatever firsthand familiarity Babo might have had with slavery, if he was a religious man or an elder scholar, he would also have been well versed in the theology of slavery. Many of the great Sufi manuscripts today found in Timbuktu and elsewhere throughout Mali, for instance, grapple with slavery as a moral, legal, and intellectual problem.
*
As did Christians, Muslim philosophers and clerics worked to reconcile their humanism—the idea that all could be saved, that, as a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist said, “the basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom”—with the practice of slavery.

As it did in Christianity, this contradiction raised a number of questions that Islamic scholars struggled to answer: Who could legitimately be enslaved? Who has the right to enslave? What limitations should be placed on the power of masters? What obligations did slaves have to their owners? Muslim theologians, like Christian ones, elaborated strong ethical codes regulating servitude, urging slaves to obey their masters and masters to be righteous and merciful, to treat slaves as family.
**

Also much like Christians, Islamic philosophers understood freedom and slavery broadly, as psychological and spiritual conditions. Desire, or worldly envy and pride, was slavery; the freeing of oneself of desire, giving up ambition, was freedom. Sufis in particular used slavery as an analogy for nurturing an intimate relation with Allah, of submitting one’s will and being to God. Who aint a slave? The person who serves God like a slave. “Let it be known,” wrote the tenth-century Sufi theologian, Abd al-Karim ibn Hawazin al-Qushayri, “that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery.”
⁶

In a way, giving themselves over is what Babo, Mori, and the others did. As they watched Delano cutting across the bay, they started to abandon the outward manifestations of the freedom they had won with their rebellion, a freedom that in any case was already slipping away with each day they spent in the Pacific. Drawing on their own experience with the master-slave relation, with its mannerisms that signaled duty, submission, and affection, they readied themselves to play their part, to inhabit their characters. They would try to “perfect slavery.”

*   *   *

It took Delano and his men about twenty minutes to reach the
Tryal
, which was slowly drifting out of the bay, away from the ledge and away from the
Perseverance
. After he had boarded, and after he had quickly surveyed the state of the ship and finished distributing the food and water he had brought with him, Delano spent most of the rest of the day in the company of Cerreño and Mori. He had sent his midshipman, Luther, along with the rest of his away team, to obtain more supplies, so he was alone. Delano knew it would take a long time for them to return. They first had to go to a fresh spring inland on the island to fill the
Tryal
’s water casks and then back to the
Perseverance
for canvas and more food. Delano also told them to wait for the return of the
Perseverance
’s larger and better-built yawl, which was out on a fishing run, and to use that to bring the full casks and food back to the
Tryal
.

Cerreño had greeted him warmly when he first came on board, and the two captains began conversing in a mix of broken Spanish and basic English. Cerreño rallied himself to his part, telling Delano that his ship was out of Buenos Aires bound for Lima, Peru, but had run into a bad storm rounding Cape Horn, where he had lost a number of men overboard. He had made it into the Pacific only to fall becalmed. In the windless, tideless sea, the fevers had hit, he said, killing all his officers and most of the rest of his crew.

Cerreño seems to have tried to drop hints that things on board were not as they appeared, introducing Mori to Delano, for instance, as “captain of the slaves.” A more suspicious mind perhaps would have picked up the irony, that it was Cerreño who was enslaved and Mori his master. But Delano didn’t. Exhausted and wasted, Cerreño had trouble keeping the performance going. He grew distant. Delano kept asking him questions, which Cerreño tried to answer. But his responses became shorter and shorter. His change in demeanor had a noticeable effect on Delano, who began to think that his initial worries were justified, that Cerreño planned to kill him and, in alliance with the slaves, take his ship.

Those fears, though, began to fade, leaving Delano to feel a different kind of vulnerability. He started to think that he was being insulted, that Cerreño’s “neglect” was intentional. As he grew more agitated, Delano began to pay more attention to the black man at Cerreño’s side. But he couldn’t stay focused. His mind turned from one thing to the next, from Cerreño, to Mori, to the nursing, dirge-singing women, to the rest of the slaves, and then back to Cerreño.

The
Tryal
rebels didn’t quite “perfect slavery.” They were impatient. They seemed to have wanted to see what they could get away with and still have a white man think them slaves. At one point, a young African, with Delano standing nearby, pulled out a knife and slashed the head of a Spanish cabin boy, cutting him to the bone. Blood poured out and the startled Delano looked to Cerreño, who brushed off the attack as “merely sport.” “Rather serious sport,” said Delano. Delano noticed other, similar incidents that made him think that the slaves enjoyed what he called “extraordinary liberty.”

*   *   *

Shortly after Luther returned with the supplies, around three o’clock in the afternoon, Delano felt a change in wind and looked up to notice that the
Tryal
had drifted nearly out of the bay and now was about three leagues away from the
Perseverance
. Delano asked Cerreño why he hadn’t dropped anchor. Receiving no satisfactory answer, he took charge, ordering the ship be brought as close to his vessel as possible. When that was done, he had the anchor put out and made ready to leave. He had had enough.