The Empire of Necessity (32 page)

Rozas gave up. He granted Cerreño permission to return to Lima and told Delano to take his complaint to Santiago. The
Tryal
left Talcahuano at the end of April, followed shortly by the
Perseverance
. Delano’s reputation preceded him: royal authorities in Santiago wouldn’t even grant him permission to leave his ship. They told him it would be best if he “headed for Lima” and spoke directly to the viceroy.
¹¹

*   *   *

Delano in the past had complained about Spanish legalisms, the endless paperwork, inexplicable double or triple taxes levied on single items, and the complicated and seemingly arbitrary rules and regulations governing trade and navigation. He had trouble with everyday Spanish, but Spanish formalism, with its passive voice and reflexive verbs seemingly intent on confusing subject and object, was a bewildering hall of mirrors.

He had hoped to handle his dispute with Cerreño “plainly.” In Concepción, he had told Thomas Delphin, an old Irish merchant who had been so long in Chile he called himself Tomás Delfín, that he “didn’t want to pursue a legal dispute of any kind.” It was, Delano said, his most “fervent desire to avoid a court case.” Now, as he tried to defend himself from charges he only half understood, and fought for compensation he believed he had earned, Delano found himself being passed from one magistrate to another, lost in the twilight world of Spanish colonialism, whose arcane rules and conspiracies grew even more confusing as royal authority faded.

And so Delano went to Lima.

INTERLUDE

The Machinery of Civilization

Benito Cereno
’s fictional Amasa Delano reads like a complement to Herman Melville’s more famous creation, Captain Ahab, with the men representing two sides of American expansion. One is virtuous, the other vengeful. Amasa is hollowed out, trapped by the superficialities of his own perception of the world. Ahab is profound. He peers into the depths. The first cannot see evil, the second can see only nature’s “intangible malignity.” “A storm for every calm,” Ahab says in
Moby-Dick
.

The same complementarity applies to Ahab and the historical Amasa Delano. Both men are agents of two of the most predatory industries of their day, their ships lugging the “machinery of civilization,” as the real Delano put it, to the Pacific, using steel, iron, and fire to kill animals and transform their corpses into value on the spot. Ahab’s “wild egoism” has been read by some as an extension of the individualism born out of American expansion, his rage the rage of a self that refuses to be limited by nature’s frontier, an individual supremacy projected into the wide-open ocean, unable to connect with any other human being except, fleetingly, Pip. Amasa too is ego driven. In over five hundred pages of his memoir, he rarely mentions another crew member. You would think he were sailing his ship alone. But his egoism, in contrast to Ahab’s, is turned inward, obsessed not so much with mastery of the world, though he does want to succeed, but with mastery of himself.
¹

Ahab is the exception, a rebel who hunts his white whale unto death, against all rational economic logic. He has hijacked the “machinery,” the
Pequod
, and rioted against “civilization,” pursuing his quixotic chase in violation of the contract he has with his ship’s owners. The character today is synonymous with ruin, used to explain everything from George W. Bush’s wars to global warming, a planet destroyer embodying man’s insatiable quest for more and more resources. But insurgents like Ahab, however dangerous to the people around them, are not the primary drivers of destruction. They are not the ones who will hunt animals to near extinction—or force the world to the brink. Those would be the men who never dissent, who carry out, as Jeremy Harding writes in an essay on
Moby-Dick
, the “grinding, day-in-day-out extractive process,” men who are “smitten with the glories of the planet but devoted to their expenditure.” Like Amasa Delano.
²

Delano is the rule. Where the mesmeric Ahab—the “thunder-cloven old oak”—has been taken as a prototype of the twentieth-century totalitarian, a one-legged Hitler or Stalin, Delano represents a more common form of modern authority. His power is based not on the demagogic pull of charisma but on the everyday pressures involved in controlling labor and converting diminishing natural resources into marketable items. Caught in the pincers of supply and demand and trapped in the vortex of ecological exhaustion, with his own crew on the brink of mutiny because there are no seals left to kill and no money to be made, Delano rallies men to the chase, not of a white whale but of black rebels. Their slide into barbarism, followed by his pursuit, relentless while at the same time mundane, of Benito Cerreño for half the value of his ship and its cargo, happens not because he is dissenting from the laws of commerce and capital but because he faithfully and routinely administers them. He had “knowledge of his duty,” as he said, and was “disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.”

PART VII

GENERAL AVERAGE

Average
(insurance): A loss to a shipment of goods that is less than a total loss … and ultimately comes from the Arabic word
awarijah
, which means “merchandise damaged by sea water.” … A particular average is an insurance loss that affects specific interests only.… A general average is an insurance loss that affects all cargo interests on board the vessel as well as the ship herself.

—
DICTIONARY OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE,
2005

24

LIMA, OR THE LAW OF GENERAL AVERAGE

Nine miles inland and overlooking the Pacific at fifteen hundred feet above the sea, Lima, the City of Kings, the seat of the Inquisition and home of the royal mint, was the grand throne of Spanish Catholicism in South America. Below, on the coast, the port of Callao was impressive in a different sort of way. It was one of the world’s busiest global harbors, linking Spanish America to the Philippines, China, Japan, Indonesia, India, and Russia, with a deep anchorage and calm water that gave safe berths to hundreds of ships at a time.
¹

It was also one of the blackest. Over the course of nearly three centuries, about 100,000 Africans had been brought into Peru through Callao. But Callao wasn’t just a slave port. It was a slaves’ port, the radiating heart of the black Pacific, testimony to the fact that Spain’s maritime trade in the Americas, the blood flow of its empire, was largely run by people of color. One of the first things Amasa Delano would have seen, after entering the harbor and appreciating the spires of Lima in the distance, and after being pulled to the wharf in a ferryboat through flocks of flamingos and then climbing the stairway that ran alongside the breakwater, was a narrow dirt street “full of sailors and blacks, of all shades of color, Peruvians and mules.” The streets were busy with African and African American mariners, vendors, craftsmen, teamsters, beggars, and prostitutes, some of them free, others enslaved, all going about their business with a liberty that would have been unthinkable in a U.S. slave harbor (except New Orleans).

The town itself seemed to be “compressed into the smallest possible dimensions—reduced to its lowest terms,” a tumbledown city of tight alleys and single-story adobe houses, their main rooms with their swinging hammocks open to the street. Delano might have “wondered at the donkeys, the inconceivable dirt of their drivers, the gay dresses of the women, the extraordinary appearance” of the Quechua soldiers—in small caps and reddish gray uniforms, with “high cheeks,” their “eyes … burning coal” and a “volcanic fire raging just under the skin.”

There was a business street of ship chandlers selling rosin, tar, cordage, oakum, axes, and other maritime merchandise, clothing stores filled with Nanking pants, Dutch breeches, and British peacoats, dance halls, and at least one “wretched” inn and tavern where the men were “all sharks, the women all black-eyed, and black-faced Susans.” There were Jack Tars on every corner and groups of “captains sitting in old chairs.”

Despite its dust and dirt, this part of town was considered new in 1805. Old Callao, on the point of a peninsula that jutted out into the harbor, was destroyed in 1746 by a massive tsunami that nearly reached Lima’s gates. At least five thousand people were killed in the disaster, almost all of the port’s residents, and when Delano visited the ruins he was shocked by the bones that still lay strewn about. Some were from victims who had been trapped in their homes when the quake hit or were the remains of corpses washed up by the tide after the wave subsided. “The sea vomited bodies for months, the naked cadavers half eaten by fish,” reported a witness from the time. Others were skeletons of those buried in mass graves, “worked out of the gravel” by erosion.
²

They were everywhere, scattered on the barren soil and collected in piles in what had been the cellars of the swept-to-sea houses. The most startling scene was a pair of arched vaults, all that was left of a prison building where “the foreigners as well as the lower order of the Spanish people were confined” when the water hit: “these arches were filled with human bones, as were also most of the cellars, without any kind of covering over them.” Another visitor described touring the “arched caverns” and seeing skeletons “huddled together in the narrow vaults, just high enough to lie down in, and in every variety of posture, in which they yielded to the agonies of dissolution.”
³

Delano in his memoirs often seems to skim the surface of things, bouncing from event to event, intuiting their importance and even at times offering sharp observations yet never quite comprehending the deep undercurrents of history that churn beneath. But here in Callao, the portal for so many Africans into Lima, itself built over the graves of vanquished Incas, Delano stands amid a vast field of ashen bones and almost grasps the fullness of time. “The whole of these ruins viewed together,” he writes, “by a person on the spot, was, I think sufficient to put all the powers of the mind in motion.”
⁴

*   *   *

Once in Lima proper, Delano acted something like a New England Yankee in King Carlos’s Court. In truth, the royal city better suited Delano than Concepción. That town, for all its Enlightenment radicalism, was prim and provincial. In contrast, Lima, though it still wasn’t the dissolute place it would become after independence, was more a melting pot, a place where both inquisitorial Catholicism and prudish Protestantism could find some release. “The very sound” of the “word”
Lima
, one English-speaking voyager wrote of the city’s name, “affects me now like some lively, half melancholy Spanish dance.”
⁵

The streets were crowded, the stores were stocked, and the city swarmed with “people of all classes, colours, and professions.” There were more churches than theaters or billiard rooms, and many of them were graceful in their decay. Melville was in the city in 1844 and compared their drooping crosses to the “canted yards of anchored fleets.”

There were plenty of taverns and inns, too. Delano, who stayed at one favored by sea captains, describes a practical joke he helped play on a Catholic priest who came to the hotel begging for offerings and urging the Protestant officers to kiss an icon of the Virgin Mary. When the priest momentarily turned his attention away, Delano and his companions hid the Virgin under the sheets of his bed. The cleric became distressed upon not being able to locate the statue until finally one of the sailors pulled back the sheets to reveal Mary underneath. Since the priest was selling her kisses for alms, he said, maybe she decided to go into business for herself and climb straight into bed.

*   *   *

Because officials in Santiago had denied his petition for an audience, brusquely sending him and his ship on their way, Delano thought he would show up unannounced at the viceroy’s palace and hope for the best. He arrived early on an autumn Sunday morning, as the viceroy, Gabriel de Avilés Itúrbide y del Fierro, the second marquis of Avilés, readied himself for Mass. It wasn’t the most opportune moment to seek an impromptu meeting with the most powerful Spanish official in South America. Madrid’s relations with the United States during those months were strained, as negotiations over Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from the French, which included large pieces of territory claimed by Carlos IV, were not going well. But Avilés came to enjoy Delano. He gave him permission to come and go as he pleased, when he pleased, so much so that the Duxbury captain became known among palace courtiers as the “King’s favourite.”
⁶

Lima’s three-story royal palace sat on nearly five acres of land in the center of the city. The building was famous for its labyrinthine hallways, luscious gardens planted with fig trees and flowers, cavernous halls hung with tapestries and oil paintings, and gallery running along the full length of its second floor. It had been destroyed, rebuilt, and expanded many times since first put up in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca empire and the founder of Spanish Peru. By the time Amasa Delano arrived, the royal court was considered “the best and most sumptuous building in the entire realm, since there has hardly been a viceroy that hasn’t added a room or a new wing, adding to the majesty that it represents.”
⁷

Amasa visited the palace at least fifty times during his stay in Lima, often losing himself in its “many turnings and windings.” Having read about the splendor of the court’s royal sentinels in
Bank’s Geography
, he set out at once to satisfy his curiosity. “I did not fully believe the account until I saw them myself.”
⁸
Delano, wearing his coarse wool sailor’s coat and cotton pantaloons, inspected the sentries, who were dressed in fine red breeches and gold-laced blue waistcoats, silk stockings, and velvet shoes and were armed with French swords and Swiss halberd pike axes. He also passed a smaller contingent of five ceremonial slaves—
los negros del rey
, the king’s blacks—outfitted in expensive Quito-blue cotton shirts with wide velvet collars, ivory buttons, wide-brimmed, high-crowned straw hats, and graceful cotton ponchos. “The dress of the body guards makes the most elegant and extraordinary appearance of any thing I have seen,” Delano thought.
⁹