The Empire of Necessity (33 page)

Delano was as lost trying to figure out the warren of rival commercial interests that seemed to be standing in the way of his receiving his rightful reward, for despite Avilés’s affection for Amasa, the viceroy couldn’t easily satisfy his complaint. The uprising on the
Tryal
, the loss of much of its cargo, including the exiled, executed, and starved-to-death Africans, affected many powerful interests, including a number of merchants who had financed Cerreño’s purchase of his ship. In an economy that ran largely on promissory notes and exchange bills, they weren’t likely to pass on a ship full of real monetized wealth in the form of slaves.
¹⁰

When, a few days before Delano arrived, Cerreño had sailed the
Tryal
into Callao’s harbor carrying fifty-five masterless slaves, about half of whom were women and children, the investors wanted their share. The West Africans weren’t loose fish but, as breathing expressions of debt, credit, and collateral, who they were struck fast to was a matter of dispute.

*   *   *

Now that Aranda was dead, who had the right to sell the surviving
Tryal
rebels? And who would get the profits from their sale? These were two main questions on which the various cases turned. The Buenos Aires rancher turned slaver Juan Nonell, when he heard the news of the uprising and its suppression, gave a Lima lawyer power of attorney to put a lien on the slaves for the value of what Aranda owed him. At the same time, Aranda’s father-in-law and wife in Mendoza also filed papers putting a lien on the West Africans. They were looking to recover at least an amount equivalent to the down payment Aranda gave Nonell when he purchased them in April 1804, along with the value of a box of jewels and other property Aranda had been traveling with that had gone missing. Cerreño’s many creditors, the men who advanced him loans to purchase the
Tryal
, as well as the merchants who lost cargo during the voyage, also claimed what they said they were owed. And then there was Cerreño himself. He considered the slaves his prize, hoping to sell them to cover his loss, pay his debts, and free himself of Amasa Delano.
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To make his case, Cerreño, in his petition to Lima’s commercial court, invoked a principle of maritime law known as the law of general average (
avería gruesa
in Spanish). It’s an old code, shared by Roman, Islamic, and Christian mariners before specialized cargo insurance became widespread. It was meant to equalize losses resulting from a seafaring disaster. If a crew had to jettison one merchant’s cargo to lighten a ship to ride out a storm, then all the merchants with goods on the stricken vessel would be asked to bear some of the loss, based on a percentage of their portion of the total freight. As marine insurance evolved through the 1700s and 1800s, slave ship owners also applied the law of general average to make claims for damages incurred during slave insurrections. They argued that such revolts should be considered comparable to an act of God, a storm, or some other “peril of the sea,” and hence any resulting damage to the ship or loss of cargo should be distributed among all interested parties (actuaries calculated that there was a one in ten chance that the cargo of any given slaver might revolt and that in a rebellion an eighth of the slaves would be killed). And there is at least one infamous case, that of the
Zong
in 1781, where slave ship owners claimed that the jettisoning of 132 Africans was necessary to save the rest of the slaves and crew because the ship wasn’t carrying enough food to cover its journey across the Atlantic.
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Cerreño didn’t have insurance but he argued the principle, saying that part of the profit from the sale of the
Tryal
’s slaves should be used to help him offset his debt and rid himself of Delano. His plea was denied on its first hearing but, after months of appeals, he eventually won a partially favorable ruling. A judge ordered the West Africans to be sold to one of Lima’s most active slave traders, Jacinto Jimeño, for a price based on their assessed value. Jimeño, in turn, would split his payment among Nonell, Aranda’s heirs, and Cerreño. The ruling, though, didn’t settle the case. Nonell and Aranda’s heirs appealed and Cerreño’s creditors continued their demands, as did the merchants whose cargo was tossed to lighten the ship during the storm. The multiple suits and countersuits swirling around the question of how to divide the estimated value of the surviving
Tryal
rebels didn’t drag on quite as long as
Bleak House
’s
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
, but for years no two lawyers could talk about the matter for “five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.”
¹²

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Amasa Delano continued to demand ten thousand pesos from Cerreño. His brother Samuel arrived in Lima in June, telling him that seals were still scarce, confirming without doubt what the brothers already knew: the voyage was a bust.

For the next couple of months, Delano went before one royal bureaucrat after another. To each, he recited the risk he had put himself and his men in that day in the South Pacific. To each, he pointed out the place in Cerreño’s testimony where the Spaniard praised his actions, calling him heroic and generous, and where in another deposition he “thanked divine providence” for sending “Masa Delano to repress the Blacks.” To each, he appealed to maritime law and custom regarding rewards and compensation for services rendered. And to each, he reiterated that he could have just kept the whole ship and its cargo, “every handsome thing.”

Finally, in September, he made one last plea to Avilés. Delano said he understood that the viceroy had many interests to consider. But he begged him to settle the matter once and for all. Since first arriving in Talcahuano, his men had continued to abandon him, often taking valuable equipment from his ship with them. He had been in Lima for months, going deeper in debt trying to feed the men that did stay with him. He was so desperate, he had even tried to sell the
Perseverance
to the Spanish navy, hoping to pay off what he owed and just return home on the
Pilgrim
. The navy declined the offer, thinking it would be too expensive to turn the schooner into a man-of-war. He still had “nearly thirty men on different islands.” They needed food and other supplies, and if his claim was deferred any longer, it was certain that “they must suffer.”
¹³

Avilés finally told Delano he would rule in his favor, but only if he would lower his demand to eight thousand pesos. Delano had rejected compromising earlier, in Concepción, but now he had little choice but to agree. The viceroy called Cerreño into his office, with Delano present, and told the Spaniard that he would throw him in jail if he didn’t pay. Cerreño had yet to receive his share from the sale of the West Africans to Jimeño (it’s unknown if he ever did) but on the strength of the decision he was able to mortgage the
Tryal
and borrow the money to pay Delano.

*   *   *

Delano received his reward, eight thousand pesos in gold, but it didn’t go far. That was close to the amount he owed various suppliers in Callao for keeping the
Perseverance
afloat and its men fed. It took more than another year, nearly three since he left Boston, for Delano finally to fill its hold with sealskins. In July 1806, he took the
Perseverance
to China, but with the market still glutted he had to wait months before he could sell the fur.

Samuel Delano stayed in the waters off of Chile and Peru for another year, finally leaving in September 1807 with only thirteen thousand skins. On the way to Canton, the
Pilgrim
ran into a northeast gale as it entered the China Sea, turning on its side until its masts were below the waves. Three men were lost and it seemed that the ship would be as well. But then the wind miraculously swung the bow around and righted the vessel before it could fill with water. The
Pilgrim
was saved though nearly all of its skins were ruined.

*   *   *

Back in Lima, Jimeño sold most of the fifty-five West African men, women, children, and infants who came into his possession within a year. Many were purchased individually. They found themselves distributed throughout Lima alone, the solidarity and community they had built up over their long journey shattered. Others were lucky enough to be kept in groups of two or three.

The sociologist Orlando Patterson has written that the essence of slavery was “social death.” In a way, Patterson describes what the doctors in Montevideo concluded about the
Joaquín
in late 1803, that slavery resulted in
cisma
, or schism, severing humans from their past, from their history, family, and home, and transforming them into “genealogical isolates.” Nothing illustrates this rupture better than the sales receipts that exist in Lima’s archives concerning the
Tryal
’s surviving men, women, and children. The documentation is meager. At most, the records provide the age and gender of the person being sold, along with the price and credit terms of the transaction. They omit original names and give no indication as to what happened to the babies, whether they were kept with their mothers or sold to different households.
¹⁴

The receipts do provide one bit of information that suggests that the psychic breach wasn’t absolute. In a few cases, they reveal the new Christian names of the West Africans: “Two new blacks,” purchased by one household for 960 pesos, “respond to the names Antonio and Manuel and are thirteen years old.” One young boy brought by a merchant “responds to the name Joaquín.” The phrase “responds to” is meant to be formalistic and bland. But it jars. It sounds almost like an admission on the part of the masters that these new labels would always be aliases and that the slaves’ forfeiture of their recent experiences and past lives would remain incomplete—that the two twelve-year-old girls taken off the
Tryal
and sold to Doña María Daga and Doña María Rivera for 920 pesos might “respond to the Christian names María and Rosa” but that would never be all they were.

25

THE LUCKY ONE

Though Benito Cerreño had kept the original English name of his ship painted on its hull, he occasionally referred to the
Tryal
as
la Prueba
, a Spanish word that also means a test of faith. It was as common for Catholics in Spanish America to draw on religious themes for the names of their vessels as it was for Protestants in New England, though the former were partial to martyred saints (including San Juan Nepomuceno) while the latter preferred the virtues (like perseverance). In any case, Benito Cerreño, having passed through more trials than Job, decided soon after he had returned to Lima from Concepción to rename his ship. It would now sail as
la Dichosa—
the Lucky One.
¹

Cerreño wouldn’t be on it. Vowing never to return to sea, he leased out
la Dichosa
to another merchant captain and dedicated himself to starting a new life on land. A week after his return to Lima, Cerreño married Francisca Murre, a recent widow whose first husband had left her a considerable-size sugar plantation, Hacienda Humaya, about seventy miles north of the city. At the time, the best measure of the value of farmland was not its size but rather the age and height of its crops. When Benito and Francisca moved in, Humaya had twelve fields planted with eighteen-month-old sugarcane upward of twelve feet tall, almost ready to be harvested. All told, with its sugar, fruit orchids, workshops, manor house, and livestock, the plantation was valued at nearly 200,000 pesos.
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The assessment included its slaves, since the cane would have been worthless without the hands to cut it. The estate’s 236 slaves were assessed at 91,782 pesos, almost half the property’s total value. Most of them—129 men and 107 women—had been in America longer than their new master, having been born and raised in Peru and baptized in the Catholic faith. Some were descended from the first Africans present when the estate was founded in 1693. Others might even have had ancestors in Peru earlier than that.

It must have been tempting for Cerreño, as he assumed his gentry life, a life his family back in Andalusia had lost, to believe that he had put all that had happened to him on the
Tryal
behind him. Days removed from the bustle and politics of Lima, Hacienda Humaya sprawled up the mist-shrouded sides of the rolling Huaura Valley. It was an ancient Jesuit estate, connected to the coast by an old, rutted road. When Cerreño took it over, its double-nave chapel still had its original organ, stone-carved baptismal font, and wooden pulpit.

There were no Babos. No Atufals and Moris. No Leobes, Quiamobos, Alasans, Malpendas, or Matunquis. No mass of indistinguishable African women singing death dirges. There were just Humaya’s settled sharecropper slaves who lived in small thatched houses along the road connecting the manor house to the plantation’s graveyard. Among them was the sixty-three-year-old Juan Capistrano, who ran the grinding mill (he was assessed at three hundred pesos), Domingo de la Nieves (worth one peso for each of his eighty years), and Augustina de la Rosa, a ninety-year-old invalid (ten pesos).

But in 1820, the world once again broke in on Cerreño.

*   *   *

In Spanish America during its wars for independence—which lasted for over a decade, from about 1810 to well into the 1820s—thousands of black slaves in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and the Andes quit their fields, workshops, and houses to join insurrectionary armies. In some places, they made up as much as 30 percent of revolutionary forces.

Chile was in the vanguard of independence and emancipation, establishing under the leadership of none other than Juan Martínez de Rozas a self-governing council that in 1811 passed a number of measures limiting slavery. Among them was a “law of free womb,” which decreed all children born of slave parents to be free, and a ban on the future importation of new slaves into Chilean territory. When Peru’s viceroy sent in royal troops to pacify Chile, the Revolutionary Army of the Andes—led by General José de San Martín and made up largely of manumitted slaves from Buenos Aires and Mendoza—crossed into the country from Argentina to defeat them. Many of these slaves-turned-revolutionaries had in effect retraced Babo’s and Mori’s journey, but under vastly different circumstances: having first arrived in Montevideo as property, they trekked across the pampas as free people, joining San Martín’s insurgent forces in Mendoza and then climbing over the Andes to liberate Chile, an important step in achieving the independence of all of Spanish South America.
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