The Empire of Necessity (41 page)

MELVILLE AND SLAVERY

Melville’s position on slavery has been the subject of much discussion. In considering the question as it relates to
Benito Cereno
, I’ve drawn from the authors cited below, among others, even though many of them hold opposing opinions, ranging from Hershel Parker, who downplays the importance of slavery and race, to Sterling Stuckey, who insists on the centrality of African and African American culture in Melville’s thought and art. Stuckey hears the early notes of jazz in Melville’s prose, for instance, speculating that Melville might have picked it up listening to slaves play music on the street corners and in the markets of New York and Albany.

Benito Cereno
scrambled the core conceits of both opponents and advocates of slavery. Unlike those religious abolitionists, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrayed blacks as Christ-like innocents, Melville’s Babo unapologetically terrorizes his white captives. To those who defended slavery, like the Virginian George Fitzhugh, by saying that it was founded on “domestic affection,” that the intellectual feebleness of blacks helps their owners achieve their best selves, that slavery civilizes slave and master alike, Melville’s troupe of slave-actors turned such assumptions into a show, using their intellect to perform their expected lack of intellect (see
Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society
, Richmond: Morris, 1984, pp. 37–40, 201). Thus they revealed what southerners said was natural to be artificial, since by definition acting is artifice. It was Babo’s “brain, not body” that “had schemed and led the revolt.” And for those who believed that the crisis caused by slavery could be solved peacefully, Melville wrote a story that ended in near total destruction (see Rogin,
Subversive Genealogy
, p. 213, for an elaboration of this line of argument).

Melville had read Homer’s
Odyssey
, a work that revolves around a character, Odysseus, whom many scholars think of as representing the first “modern” self, a character not only with interiority but with the cunning to manipulate interiority, to create a schism between what is seen on the outside and what exists on the inside. And while the
Odyssey
is not about slavery, political philosophers, including many around the time Melville was writing, often used chattel slavery, particularly the power masters had over slaves, as a metaphor to represent exactly the kind of ability Odysseus possessed, to use reason and will to master passions and vices. In any case, the deception played out on the
Tryal
is equal to the ruse Odysseus stages to escape Polyphemous in Homer’s
Odyssey
. “I am nobody,” Odysseus says, playing with the subtleties of language to trick the Cyclops, and that’s exactly what Mori, Babo, and the rest of the slave-rebel troupe do, act as if they are inconsequential slaves, nobodies hardly worth noticing. Whatever Melville meant
Benito Cereno
to say about slavery, the story is fundamentally about blindness, an inability to see, a persistent theme in Melville’s writings. If one compares the story, for example, to Ishmael’s discussion in
Moby-Dick
about the “peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes
,
” one realizes that the author had been thinking about the problem Amasa Delano represents for some time.

See Karcher,
Shadow over the Promised Land
; Hershel Parker, “Melville and Politics”; Eleanor E. Simpson, “Melville and the Negro: From
Typee
to ‘Benito Cereno,’”
American Literature
41 (March 1969): 19–38; Rogin,
Subversive Genealogy
; Stuckey,
African Culture and Melville’s Art
; and Spark,
Hunting Captain Ahab
, especially pp. 102–7. See also Wai-chee Dimock
, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. For Melville’s complex engagement with the Civil War, see Stanton Garner,
The Civil War World of Herman Melville
, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993; Daniel Aaron,
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
, New York: Knopf, 1973, pp. 75–90; and Parker,
Melville: A Biography
, vol. 2, pp. 606–25.

THE
NEPTUNE

The
Neptune
was built by the British East India Company in Bombay, India (hence the teak), to sail as a merchantman under the name
Laurel
. But the French seized and renamed it
Le Neptune
. The British recaptured the ship and auctioned it to John Bolton, who kept its name and outfitted it as a slaver (Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool Register of Merchant Ships, 1793–1802, microfilm reel 23, 70/1799). Had Mordeille not intercepted the ship and its cargo, it might have returned to London with a hold full of dark Caribbean mahogany, used to carve the handsome doors of Bolton’s Storrs Hall.

LORD NELSON AND
THE WRONGS OF AFRICA

Sixteen of the nineteen members of the civic committee established to erect Liverpool’s Nelson monument were slavers. The city’s mayor, who convened the committee, was John Bridge Aspinall, a prominent slave merchant who, with others in his family, ran over 180 voyages that had carried nearly sixty thousand Africans to the Americas. The committee, though, was chaired by an abolitionist, William Roscoe, a member of Parliament and the author of a number of poems and pamphlets denouncing the slave trade, including
The Wrongs of Africa
and
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo
(1792). Some historians of Liverpool have speculated that Roscoe, in helping to select the monument’s design, meant its four enchained prisoners to be a veiled criticism of slavery. Roscoe was also an acquaintance of Herman Melville’s father, a fact mentioned by Melville later in his stream-of-consciousness
Redburn
passage: “And my thoughts reverted to my father’s friend, the good and great Roscoe, the intrepid enemy of the trade; who in every way exerted his fine talents toward its suppression; writing a poem (“the Wrongs of Africa”), several pamphlets; and in his place in Parliament, he delivered a speech against it, which, as coming from a member for Liverpool, was supposed to have turned many votes, and had no small share in the triumph of sound policy and humanity that ensued.”

For Aspinall, see Trans-Atlantic Slave Database (
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
). For the composition of the monument’s subscription committee, see Thomas Baines,
History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool
, vol. 1, London: Longman, 1852, p. 524. For Roscoe, see Penelope Curtis,
Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside
, Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1989, pp. 21–26. For Melville’s father’s association with Roscoe, see Hershel Parker,
Melville: The Making of the Poet
, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007, p. 46, and Parker,
Melville: A Biography
, vol. 1, p. 9.

THE
TRYAL
AND ITS REBELS

Eric Robert Taylor writes in his very useful survey of hundreds of slave ship rebellions,
If We Must Die in This Way
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), that the
Tryal
rebellion is “particularly compelling” because of “the incredible amount of surviving information about it.” This is a startling statement, for by far the most frustrating aspect of doing research for this book was the limited available information concerning the history of the West Africans involved, how they got to America, where they came from, and what they suffered along the way. The scarcity of documentary records underscores the large degree to which New World slavery was an anonymous genocide. There are many memoirs of emancipated slaves, and specific events such as the
Amistad
rebellion and the 1835 Bahia uprising in Brazil produced significant documentary evidence. But the quantity of information pales in comparison with the scale of slavery. See Taylor, p. 139. For the
Amistad
, see Marcus Rediker’s magisterial new history,
The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom,
New York: Viking, 2012. For examples of memoirs, see Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
, 1789; James Williams,
A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834
, ed. Diana Paton, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001; and Terry Alford’s history of the life of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima,
A Prince among Slaves
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Of the at least 12,500,000 people taken out of Africa and brought to America, historians have identified only about 100,000 original African names, a figure that gives a sense of the magnitude of the historical silence. Most of these names are listed in the African Origins Project (
http://www.african-origins.org/african-data/
), which is based on the records of roughly 92,000 enslaved Africans liberated primarily by the British Royal Navy after 1808. While extremely useful, the project is limited. The names are of Africans freed from intercepted slaving vessels after British abolition of the slave trade and might overrepresent ships that embarked slaves in West Africa, from ports running from Senegambia to Biafra. One of the goals of the project is to share the names with African-speaking people so as to identify origin and ethnic group. Respondents have associated the name Mori, or variations, with the Kuranko, who live in what today is Sierra Leone and Guinea, are closely related to the Mandinka, and speak a dialect of Mende. Just under 50 percent of the Kuranko today are Muslim. Most of the other thirteen
Tryal
rebels’ names are also associated with embarkations at or around Bonny. It is more likely, though, that the named slave-rebels were embarked somewhere in Senegambia. Correspondence with the Senegalese scholar Boubacar Barry was also very useful in identifying the possible ethnicity and origins of the names. See Alex Borucki, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo, “Using Pre-Orthographic African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862” (forthcoming).

Combing through notary records in Mendoza, Santiago, and Buenos Aires provided information on the sale and transport of 64 Africans by Juan Nonell in April 1804 to the Mendoza merchant Alejandro de Aranda, including the fact that some of them most likely arrived on the
Neptune
. Others in the lot arrived on different ships. Alex Borucki reports that there were regular connections between Senegambia and the Río de la Plata in those years, mostly through U.S. slavers. The
Tryal
rebels all likely came from West Africa but they may not all have been Muslim. Spanish documents alternatively describe them as
guineos, etíopes
, or “from the coast of Senegal,’ a distinction that could mean something or nothing to their owner and overseers. Spanish slavers tended to use
Senegal
to describe the region between the Senegal River and the Gambia River. They might also use
Guinea
to mean that area. More often, though, they meant it to refer to the land south of the Gambia River, running into the part of West Africa that hangs over the Atlantic, including Bonny Island in the vast Niger River delta, where many of the Liverpool prizes captured by Mordeille embarked their captives.
Guinea
and
etiopía
could also just mean all of Africa. Many, perhaps most, slave transactions were illegal and therefore not documented. And since 1804 was the height of “free trade in blacks” in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, what record keeping there was was often rushed, reflecting the frenzy of the moment. There was information on the
Neptune
in Liverpool and London, but not a manifest or any other paperwork to give information on the four hundred or so Africans the ship embarked at Bonny.

The most important documents, in addition to Delano’s memoir, for reconstructing events on the
Tryal
are (for abbreviations, see “Archives Consulted,” the next section): AGI (Seville), Lima, 731, N.27 (“Carta n° 445 del virrey Marqués de Avilés a Miguel Cayetano Soler, Ministro de Hacienda. Comunica el alzamiento de los negros esclavos de Senegal, conducidos a Lima desde Montevideo y Valparaíso en los navíos ‘San Juan Nepomuceno’ y ‘Trial,’ respectivamente,” April 23, 1805); AHN (Madrid), legajo 5543, expediente 5 (“El Capitán Amasu de Eleno presta auxilio en la isla Santa María, a la tripulación de la fragata español Trial, en la que habían sublevado los negros”); BN (Santiago), Sala Medina, MSS, vol. 331, ff. 170–89 (“Informe de Luís de Alva al Presidente Luís Muñoz de Guzmán, Concepción”); ANC (Santiago), Real Audiencia de Santiago, vol. 608, ff. 90–93 (“Libro copiador de sentencias 1802 a 1814”); ANC (Santiago), Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 12, ff. 179–89 (“Informe rebelión de negros en la fragata Trial)”; ANC (Santiago), “Amacio Delano Capitán de la Fragata Perseverancia con el dueño de la Trial sobre el compensativo,” ff. 199–213. Details are also found in uncataloged bundles of documents related to customs taxes and other paperwork concerning shipping found in Contaduría Mayor, in Santiago’s ANC, as well as cited documents describing Delano’s subsequent legal conflict with Cerreño found in Chile and Lima. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna,
Historia de Valparaíso
, vol. 2, Valparaiso: Imprenta Albión de Cox i Taylor, 1869, is also useful, as are Javiera Carmona, “De Senegal a Talcahuano: Los esclavos de un alzamiento en la costa pacífica (1804),” in
Huellas de África en América. Perspectivas para Chile
, ed. Celia L. Cussen, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2009, pp. 137–58, and Jorge Pinto, “Una rebelión de negros en las costas del Pacífico Sur: El caso de la fragata Trial en 1804,”
Revista Histórica
10 (1986): 139–55. For Nonell’s sale to Aranda, also see the notary entries for Inocencio Agrelo, April 10, 1805, December 24th, 1806, January 1811, and April 16th, 1839 (marginal notations in the original entry).