The Empire of Necessity (3 page)

Aside from its sheer audacity, what is most fascinating about the daylong deception is the way it exposes a larger falsehood, on which the whole ideological edifice of slavery rested: the idea not just that slaves were loyal and simpleminded but that they had no independent lives or thoughts or, if they did have an interior self, that it too was subject to their masters’ jurisdiction, it too was property, that what you saw on the outside was what there was on the inside. The West Africans used talents their masters said they didn’t have (cunning, reason, and discipline) to give the lie to the stereotypes of what they were said to be (dimwitted and faithful). That day on board the
Tryal
, the slave-rebels were the masters of their passions, able to defer their desires, for, say, revenge or immediate freedom, and to harness their thoughts and emotions to play their roles. Mori in particular, as a Spanish official reviewing the affair later wrote, “was a man of skill who perfectly acted the part of a humble and submissive slave.”
⁹

The man they fooled, Amasa Delano, was in the Pacific hunting seals, an industry as predatory, bloody, and, for a short time, profitable as whaling but even more unsustainable. It’s tempting to think of him as the first in a long line of American innocents abroad, oblivious to the consequences of their actions, even as they drive themselves and those around them to ruin. Delano, though, is a more compelling figure. Born in the great upswell of Christian optimism that gave rise to the American Revolution, an optimism that held individuals to be in charge of their destinies, in the next life and this, he embodied all the possibilities and limits of that revolution. When he first set out as a sailor from New England, he carried with him the hopes of his youth. He believed slavery to be a relic of the past, certain to fade away. Yet his actions on the
Tryal
, the descent of his crew into barbarism, and his behavior in the months that followed, spoke of a future to come.

*   *   *

Herman Melville spent nearly his whole writing career considering the problem of freedom and slavery. Yet he most often did so elliptically, intent, seemingly, on disentangling the experience from the particularities of skin color, economics, or geography. He rarely wrote about human bondage as an historical institution with victims and victimizers but rather as an existential, or philosophical, condition common to all.
Benito Cereno
is an exception. Even here, though, Melville, by forcing the reader to adopt the perspective of Amasa Delano, is concerned less with exposing specific social horrors than with revealing slavery’s foundational deception—not just the fantasy that some men were natural slaves but that others could be absolutely free. There is a sense reading
Benito Cereno
that Melville knew, or feared, that the fantasy wouldn’t end, that after abolition, if abolition ever came, it would adapt itself to new circumstances, becoming even more elusive, even more entrenched in human affairs. It’s this awareness, this dread, that makes
Benito Cereno
so enduring a story—and Melville such an astute appraiser of slavery’s true power and lasting legacy.

I first learned that
Benito Cereno
was based on actual events when I assigned the novella for a seminar I taught on American Exceptionalisms. That class explored the ways an idea usually thought of exclusively in terms of the United States—that America had a providential mission, a manifest destiny, to lead humanity to a new dawn—was actually held by all the New World republics. I began to research the history behind
Benito Cereno
, thinking that a book that focused narrowly on the rebellion and ruse could nicely illustrate the role slavery played in such self-understandings. But the more I tried to figure out what happened on board the
Tryal
, and the more I tried to uncover the motives and values of those involved, of Benito Cerreño, Amasa Delano, and, above all, of Babo, Mori, and the other West African rebels, the more convinced I became that it would be impossible to tell the story—or, rather, impossible to convey the meaning of the story—without presenting its larger context. I kept getting pulled further afield, into realms of human activity and belief not immediately associated with slavery, into, for instance, piracy, sealing, and Islam. That’s the thing about American slavery: it never was just about slavery.

*   *   *

In his memoir, Delano uses a now obsolete sailor’s term, “horse market,” to describe the explosive pileup of converging tides, strong enough to scuttle vessels. It’s a good metaphor. That’s what the people on board the
Tryal
were caught in, a horse market of crashing historical currents, of free trade, U.S. expansion, and slavery, and of colliding ideas of justice and faith. The different routes that led all those involved in the drama to the Pacific reveal the fullness of the paradox of freedom and slavery in America, so pervasive it could trap not just slaves and slavers but men who thought they were neither.

PART I

FAST FISH

First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.

—HERMAN MELVILLE
, MOBY-DICK

1

HAWKS ABROAD

In early January 1804, a one-armed French pirate cruised into Montevideo’s harbor. The Spaniards in his multinational crew had trouble saying his name, so they called him Captain Manco—
manco
being the Spanish word for cripple. François-de-Paule Hippolyte Mordeille didn’t mind the nickname. It was the rank he didn’t like.

Mordeille was a seafaring Jacobin. He presided over men who wrapped red sashes around their waists, sang the “Marseillaise,” and worked the deck to the rhythms of revolutionary chants.
Long live the republic! Perish earthly kings! String up aristocrats from the yardarms!
Commanding ships called
Le Brave Sans-Culottes
,
Révolution,
and
Le Démocrat
, he patrolled the coast of Africa from Île de France (now Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean to Senegal in the Atlantic, harassing the French Revolution’s enemies and guarding its friends. Mordeille, true to his republican spirit, preferred to be addressed as
citoyen—
citizen—or
Citoyen Manco
if need be. But not
captain
.

Coming south from Brazil, Mordeille tacked to starboard and hugged the coastline as he entered Río de la Plata, the great water highway to Montevideo and Buenos Aires and points beyond. The broad sea gulf seemed welcoming. But it was shallow, shoaled, and rock strewn. Its fast-flowing tributaries—it was the mouth of several rivers—ran through some of the driest regions in South America, pouring tons of silty sediment into the estuary, raising sandbars, and rerouting sea lanes. Strong dark-cloud winds coming off the pampas were especially treacherous when they hit the water at low tide. Just a few years earlier a windstorm had wrecked eighty-six ships in a single blow. Even the north shore, considered the safest route in and along which Mordeille sailed, was known as “carpenter’s coast,” since woodworkers made a living salvaging the timber of washed-up broken ships.
¹

Of Río de la Plata’s two cities, Buenos Aires, located farther in on the south shore, was wealthier. But sailors preferred Montevideo on the north. It was littered with sunken hulls and still didn’t have a wharf or a pier, but its harbor was deeper than the shallow riverbed off of Buenos Aires and thus preferable for loading and unloading cargo. Mordeille sailed in, driving his ship, the
Hope
, through the bay’s muddy water to safe anchorage. Behind him came the
Neptune,
a prize Mordeille and his crew had taken near the Bight of Biafra.
²

*   *   *

Copper-bottomed, teak-framed, three-masted, and three-decked, the 343-ton
Neptune
had a sharp-angled cutwater topped with an ornately carved prow: a lion without a crown, as the Spaniards would later describe the figurehead. It was big and looked warlike. Its purpose, though, was to carry cargo and not to fight. It was no match for smaller, better-armed vessels like the
Hope
, a fact that its captain, David Phillips, learned at great cost.

While the ship was anchored off Bonny Island, Phillips had heard reports that a French corvette was cruising the sea lanes, standing between him and open water. But with his hold full, he decided to risk a confrontation and make for Barbados. When he saw the
Hope
coming in fast on portside, Phillips gave the order to run. But his pursuer was faster, sweeping the trader’s bow, forcing it to give up the wind. Mordeille then boxhauled around, bracing his ship’s sails and returning on the
Neptune
. Phillips was trapped.

If the objective was to destroy the target, the fight would have been over quickly. But the rules of privateering meant that Mordeille got to keep what the
Neptune
was carrying, so his men aimed their guns not at its hull but at its rigging. The firing continued as boys ran back and forth watering the
Hope
’s deck to make sure blown powder didn’t set it alight. A party of men readied themselves with boarding axes to take the
Neptune
by hand. The weapons weren’t needed. A ball hit the rudder head, making it impossible to steer, and after about an hour more of firing, with eleven of his crew dead, another sixteen wounded, and his sails pocked and rigging frayed, Captain Phillips surrendered.

When Mordeille’s men opened the
Neptune
’s hatch, they found close to four hundred Africans, mostly boys and men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, but also a number of women and children.

They were in chains and dressed in blue cotton smocks.

*   *   *

Spanish documents indicate that some of the
Tryal
rebels were among them. But they don’t say who or how many. The name Mori was common for captives embarked at Bonny. According to one database of African names, of all the recorded men called Mori to leave Africa as slaves, a plurality of them, just under 37 percent, did so from Bonny. Variations of Babo—Baboo, Babu, Baba, and so forth—were likewise found among slaves put on ships at nearby ports. Court records give the names of only thirteen other participants in the uprising, all men: Diamelo, Leobe, Natu, Quiamobo, Liché, Dick, Matunqui, Alasan, Yola, Yan, Malpenda, Yambaio, or Samba, and Atufal. The
Tryal
’s fifty-seven other West African men and women remain anonymous.

Most of the men and women Mordeille found on the
Neptune
would already have traveled weeks, in some cases months, moving along the trunks and tributaries of the enormous Niger, an ever-expanding grid reaching deep into the interior. Bonny was a popular station during these years, as big ships of considerable draft could anchor on the hard sand bed and take on large cargos, as many as seven hundred Africans in some cases. The river was “spacious and deep,” reported one English sailor around the time the
Neptune
would have arrived, “wider than the Thames.” At any given moment there’d be a queue of up to fifteen vessels, many of them Liverpoolers, forming along the island’s shoreline, waiting for the black traders who came down from the inland once a fortnight. The traders would arrive in flotillas of twenty to thirty canoes, each holding as many as thirty captives, to be bartered for guns, gunpowder, iron, cloth, and brandy.
³

The Europeans at Bonny and elsewhere in West Africa had no idea where the cargo came from. As late as 1803, the British Royal African Company instructed its agent in nearby Cape Coast Castle, on the Gold Coast west of Bonny, to survey the African merchants from whom they brought their slaves: did they come to the coast in “small parties” or “caravans”? What were the names of the “towns or villages passed through”? Were the people in these towns “Mohamedans or pagans”? If they came from the “Great Desert,” “what were the names of their tribes?” If they came “from beyond the Niger,” what did “they know concerning its course”? Did they have any information about the “great chain of mountains that are reported to extend from Manding to Abysinia”? The British had been on the Gold Coast for well over a hundred years—they had controlled Cape Coast Castle since 1664—and yet their agent could give only the vaguest answers to these questions.
⁴

The Africans embarked at Bonny, even if their enslavers didn’t know their origins, had a reputation for being willful and prone to fatalism. Those two qualities might seem opposing but they often resulted in the same action: suicide. One ship surgeon, Alexander Falconbridge, in his 1788 condemnation of the slave trade, tells of fifteen slaves put on a ship at Bonny who, before the ship left port, threw themselves into a school of sharks. Another voyager on a Bonny slave ship, a young boy kept awake by the “howling of these negros,” described three captives who managed to break free and jump overboard: they were “dancing about among the waves, yelling with all their might what seemed to me to be a song of triumph” until their “voices came fainter and fainter upon the wind.”
⁵

*   *   *

The
Neptune
was a Liverpool slave ship, which meant that, for Mordeille, its taking was more than potentially profitable. It was personal. The Frenchman had lost his arm escaping from a Spanish dungeon, but it was during a long lockup in Portsmouth, after having been captured by a Liverpool corsair, that he developed his “tenacious hatred” of the British.
⁶