The Empire of Necessity (30 page)

Throughout the day, Delano had tried to talk to Cerreño about compensation. He was glad to offer his assistance but, as was the case with the
Integrity
at Bass Strait, he expected to be paid for his effort. Yet each time he asked if they could meet alone, away from Mori, he was rebuffed, told by Cerreño that whatever he wanted to say he could say in front of the slave. The idea of talking about money in front of Mori must have unsettled him, for Delano kept putting the conversation off. Just before he was ready to leave, he asked one last time if he and Cerreño could go below to talk. He was again refused. Delano then invited the Spaniard to take tea or coffee on his vessel. Cerreño said no. “His answer was short,” remembered Delano. He decided to retaliate. “In return, I became less sociable, and said little to him.”

But just as Delano was going over the side of the
Tryal
, about to climb down into his boat, Cerreño came toward him. Delano’s hand had been holding on to the top rail and Cerreño placed his over it, pressing down and squeezing tight. A surge of relief flowed through Delano. He immediately returned the warmth. That Cerreño seemed reluctant to let go of his hand, that it even had to be pulled it free. The release from his worry that the Spaniard held him in low regard was so powerful that, over a decade later in his memoir, he recounted his experience on board the
Tryal
as if it were his relationship to Cerreño that was driving the action, as if he didn’t know, though of course he did by then, that the West Africans were the ones who were choreographing that relationship.

“I had committed a mistake,” Delano wrote of his attributing Cerreño’s “coldness to neglect; and as soon as the discovery was made, I was happy to rectify it, by prompt renewal of friendly intercourse. He continued to hold my hand fast till I stepped off the gunwale down the side, when he let it go, and stood making me compliments.”
⁷

*   *   *

For his part, Mori’s acting had been almost flawless, as Spanish officials would later say. But Mori, too, succumbed to pride. As Amasa Delano was climbing down the ladder, the West African slipped out of character, stepped up to Cerreño, and quietly asked him how many men the American had on the
Perseverance
. Thirty, the Spaniard answered, but many of them were on the island. “Good,” Mori nodded, then whispering: “We will only need three blacks to take it, and before night falls you will have two ships to sail.”

The boast shocked Cerreño out of his torpor. He looked at his black captain, stepped on the gunwale, and threw himself overboard.

22

RETRIBUTION

Delano’s men, with Delano sitting in the rear of his boat, had just pushed off far enough from the
Tryal
’s hull to lower their oars, when Benito Cerreño fell into the boat. As soon as he landed, he yelled up to his men: “Into the water all who can swim, the rest up the rigging.” He was speaking fast and frantically, and Delano, with his simple Spanish, couldn’t understand him. For a moment, Delano thought he himself was being attacked, that his earlier fears were correct after all. But after a Portuguese hand helped translate, Delano finally realized what was happening.

Events then moved fast. After pulling three of the
Tryal
’s four sailors out of the water, Delano’s crew began to row toward the
Perseverance
. When they reached earshot, Delano, still in the stern of his boat with one arm pressed on the tiller and the other wrapped around a collapsed Cerreño, ordered his men on deck to run the cannons out their portholes. But the West Africans had cut the
Tryal
’s anchor cable, letting the tide swing the bow and point the ship out of the bay. The
Perseverance
was left in a bad position, with only its aft gun facing the fleeing vessel. It fired six shots, missing each time save for one cut of the foremast rigging.

*   *   *

The
Tryal
was moving, but the
Perseverance
, with two dropped anchors, couldn’t immediately follow. Cutting his cables would have allowed Delano to set sail quickly. But that would have resulted in a financial loss either to the
Perseverance
’s investors or to its insurers. In
Moby-Dick
, when the
Pequod
’s first mate, Starbuck, tells Ahab his obsession isn’t economically rational and will hurt the profits of the ship’s owners, Ahab responds by cursing rationality: “Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners? Owners, Owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.”
¹

Delano, in contrast, not only almost lets the
Tryal
get away in order to save the two anchors but years later, telling the story in his memoir, interrupts the chase to provide readers with a long lecture on the responsibilities and duties of sea captains as defined by insurance law. To cut his ship’s cables, he says, “would be to break our policy of insurance by a deviation, against which I would here caution the masters of all vessels.” Whenever possible, it was best not to do anything to harm the interest of the underwriters, shareholders in the ship, and financers of the voyage. “All bad consequences,” he continues, “may be avoided by one who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.” Delano would take risks when it came to storms, seals, and other perils of sailing. But regarding the institutions that had evolved to govern commerce—like insurance and law—he remained faithful and duty bound. He preferred to risk letting the
Tryal
slip away than deviate from a correct course.
*

Delano decided to send his boats after the
Tryal
. At this point, he had about twenty-three men on his ship. He picked twenty of them for the assault, including his clubfooted brother, William, gunner Charles Spence, and midshipman Nathaniel Luther. He put Rufus Low, the officer who presided over the run of floggings, in command.

Before giving the final order to capture the rebel ship, Delano took Cerreño by the arm and stepped him away from his men. He was finally going to have that word alone. Later, the two would dispute what was said and how it was said, but Delano shortly returned to his men and told them to gather around. When they did, he now began to sound less like a clerk at his counting table and more like a captain possessed.

On the far side of the island, the sun was setting as calmly as it rose, throwing dusky light on the bay. Looking out at the moving
Tryal
with his spyglass from the stern of the
Perseverance
, Amasa could see its remaining sailors climbing high aloft its topgallant masts. Delano pointed to them and reminded his men of the “suffering conditions of the poor Spaniards” at the hand of the slaves. If the men failed to retake the vessel, “death must be their fate.” Benito Cerreño, who was on deck listening, “considered the ship and what was in her as lost,” Delano said. That meant it was a prize for the taking, which he calculated was worth tens of thousands of pesos. “If we should take her, it should be all our own.”

“God to prosper,” Delano prayed. He told his men that he wished “never to see their faces again” if they failed. All these encouragements, he later said, were “pretty powerful stimulants.” The men boarded their boats, gave themselves three huzzahs, and began to row.

*   *   *

Delano’s command to capture the
Tryal
, with its double promise of doing good and making money, helped unite a fractured crew. The
Perseverance
’s two boats set off, armed with muskets, pistols, sabers, pikes, and the sharp-edged lances the away men used to skin seals. Rowing fast, the pursuers soon came up along the side of the rebel-held ship, opening musket fire. They directed their shots at the helm, where the leaders of the revolt had gathered. A Spanish sailor whom the West Africans had steering the ship took advantage of the shooting to abandon the wheel and climb up the rigging. But Delano’s men mistook him for a rebel and shot him twice. He fell to the deck. A surviving member of Aranda’s entourage, a Basque cousin, Joaquín Arabaolaza, who had taken over the steering, was also shot.

The wind had picked up and the
Tryal
began to make headway, but its moss-heavy bow and barnacle-befouled hull slowed it down. Delano’s men pulled hard and kept up. They yelled to the Spaniards who had fled up the fore- and mainmasts to cut the sheets holding the sails to the yards, which they did, leaving only the mizzenmast to manage the ship. They kept their firing up for over an hour, wearing the rebels down. There was no one left on board who knew how to steer, and eventually the ship turned round to the wind, allowing the two boats to come up on either side of the bow. Covered by musket fire, their men began to board.

The
Perseverance
’s sailors clambered up the hull. By this point, the sun had set but the nearly three-quarter moon in a cloudless sky lit the deck. On either side of the ship, in each of the boats, a point man held aloft an oil lamp. The West Africans withdrew to the stern, which Delano later described as the “place of resort for the negros.” Some of the rebels had grabbed empty water casks and bales of yerba maté and erected a makeshift breastwork at amidships, six feet high and running full across its beam. Delano’s men, still covered by musket fire from their boats, forced their way over. One West African stabbed Rufus Low with a pike, wounding him badly in the chest. But the barricade was breached. Babo was the first to die. Surrounded by Delano’s men, Joaquín, the ship’s caulker turned rebel, swung an ax wildly in a circle until he was put down, wounded yet alive.

The West Africans defended themselves with “desperate courage,” Delano said, but his men used their superior weapons, particularly their lances, with “extraordinary fury.”

*   *   *

The battle lasted for four hours. At 10 p.m., Delano got word that the
Tryal
was taken. He and Cerreño waited until the next morning to board, bringing with them handcuffs, leg irons, and shackles. They weren’t needed.

What they found, Delano said, was “truly horrid.” Babo’s body was among the bales of yerba maté, as were the corpses of six other West Africans: Atufal, Dick, Leobe, Diamelo, Natu, and Quiamobo. The rest were chained tight, hands to feet, through the ring bolts in the deck. They had been tortured. Some had been disemboweled and were writhing in their viscera. Others had had the skin on their backs and thighs shaved off.

This had been done with the
Perseverance
’s skinning knives, which, Delano wrote, “were always kept exceedingly sharp and as bright as a gentleman’s sword.”

23

CONVICTION

The
Tryal
was secured and its slaves “double ironed.” But Delano didn’t trust the ship’s surviving crew. Soon after he had boarded, one of Cerreño’s mates had slashed the face of a West African with a straight razor. He was going for the man’s throat when a hand from the
Perseverance
stopped him. Then, a minute later, a sailor tugged Delano’s sleeve and nodded in the direction of Cerreño, who was about to stab a rebel, possibly Mori, with a dirk he had pulled from his belt. Delano grabbed his arm and Cerreño dropped the knife. The American threatened to have the Spaniards flogged if they didn’t stand down. It was all he could do to stop Cerreño’s men from “cutting to pieces and killing these poor unfortunate beings.”
¹

Delano felt his authority braced by victory. He ordered the corpses of the six dead rebels, including Babo, to be thrown overboard and then told Cerreño it would be best if he returned with him to the
Perseverance
, placing his second officer, a Mr. Brown, in command of the
Tryal
and asking him to do an inventory of its cargo. Delano had two objectives. He didn’t want to be accused of piracy but did want to be rewarded for his services. Brown counted a bag holding nearly a thousand doubloons, another purse with an equal number of dollars, several baskets of watches, and some gold and silver that had belonged to the murdered slaver, Alejandro de Aranda.

Back on the
Perseverance
, Delano started doing the math. Even with most of its cargo gone, the ship, with its slaves, was surely worth thirty or forty thousand pesos. Divided up proportionally among the mates and midshipmen, the gunner, boatswain, and carpenter, that kind of money might rescue his so-far doomed voyage and buy him some goodwill with his disgruntled crew. The question was whether the
Tryal
was a “prize,” as implied in Cerreño’s abandonment of it the day before, in which case they would get it all. Or a “rescue,” which would yield only a percentage reward. Delano had Low go to Santa María and inform the men there what had happened and the money they could expect if they rejoined the
Perseverance
.

He then made ready to bring the
Tryal
to the nearby town of Talcahuano, which served as the port to the bigger inland city of Concepción, the last major southern outpost of Spanish authority before entering the wilds of Patagonia. Delano wanted to wait for his brother Samuel and the
Pilgrim
to turn up so he used the time to dredge for the anchor the rebels had cut loose from the
Tryal
trying to escape. It was valuable and, in the event the vessel wasn’t insured, its loss would be deducted against the ship’s worth. When Samuel hadn’t arrived by the next day, the two ships set sail.

*   *   *

Talcahuano is tucked inside what seems a sheltered bay protected by a narrow mouth. Its snugness, though, is deceiving, for the seabed is extremely shallow, unable to dilute the force of the tsunamis that hit southern Chile with frequency. The port sits on the Pacific Rim’s tectonic “ring of fire” and had been devastated five times already by either a quake or a wave by the time Delano showed up. In his account of his voyages on the
Beagle
, Charles Darwin described arriving at Talcahuano in 1835, just a few days after the town had been struck a sixth time. “The whole coast,” he wrote, was “strewed over with timber and furniture as if a thousand ships had been wrecked.” Its storehouses “had been burst open, and great bags of cotton, yerba, and other valuable merchandise were scattered on the shore.” The shoreline had been raised two or three feet from the violence of the quake. Darwin was equally impressed with the destruction he witnessed along the nine-mile road to Concepción. It was, he said, an “awful yet interesting spectacle,” giving him some ideas about the elasticity of the earth’s crust and the power of the forces that flowed beneath.
²