The Empire of Necessity (44 page)

Some of the locations on this itinerary have only a glancing relationship to slavery, through this particular history. Others, like Seville, Buenos Aires, Port Saint-Louis, Lima, Boston, and Liverpool, were central hubs in a network that financed, administered, and profited from the slave trade, a vast yet surprisingly intimate network, as the story of the
Tryal
illustrates. Along the way, I began to see traces of slavery everywhere, not just in the wealth it left behind, in beautiful Baroque buildings and stately landscaped cities and manicured gardens like the one in Buenos Aires that sits over the old slave market, El Retiro, but in the meaning it created.

Slavery was such an omnipresent institution that it produced its own kind of synchronicity, making chance events seem almost conspiratorial, as if some divine author fit them together into an intentional pattern, like, for just one example, the recurrent influence the Liverpool slaver John Bolton had on Melville’s literary production. In addition to dispatching his slave ship, the
Neptune
, to Bonny and raising funds to erect Liverpool’s monument to Admiral Nelson, he used his fortune made from slavery to entertain and support some of Britain’s greatest Romantic poets, including occasionally William Wordsworth. A friend of the rights of man and an opponent of slavery, Wordsworth had a strong influence on Herman Melville.
*
According to Hershel Parker (
Melville: A Biography
, vol. 2, p. 165), he taught Melville to find “the still, sad music of humanity” in nature, to look at a barren landscape and see its social as well as natural history (to look, perhaps, at the 23,000-foot Mount Aconcagua, which separates Argentina from Chile, and realize that a slave road once wound around it). Trying to make sense of some of these connections sent me off on tangents, following history’s hyperlinks from one thing to another. I began to feel a bit like Herman Melville himself, who in 1839 looked at Liverpool’s “Lord Nelson expiring in the arms of victory” and saw not a memorial to a man but the slave trade as the key to unlocking history.

Fourteen years passed between Melville’s first sight of the Nelson monument and the publication of
Benito Cereno
. But when I visited the statue while in Liverpool, there looking for information on Bolton’s
Neptune
, I couldn’t help but think Melville had “Death grim and grasping” in mind when he had Babo lash Aranda’s bones to the prow and tell his captives to keep faith with the blacks.

ARCHIVES

Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina [AGN (Buenos Aires)]

Archivo General de la Provincia, Mendoza, Argentina [AGP (Mendoza)]

Archivo del Arzobispado
,
Mendoza, Argentina [AA (Mendoza)]

Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru [AGN (Lima)]

Archivo Arzobispal
,
Lima, Peru [AA (Lima)]

Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay [AGN (Montevideo)]

Archivo Nacional de Chile, Santiago [ANC (Santiago)]

Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago

Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Spain [AHN (Madrid)]

Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain [AGI (Seville)]

Archivo Municipal de Calañas
,
Calañas, Spain [AMC (Calañas)]

National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland [NARA (College Park)]

National Archives and Record Administration, Boston [NARA (Boston)]

Duxbury Rural and Historical Society, Massachusetts [DRHS]

Massachusetts Archives, Boston [MA (Boston)]

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Baker Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

British National Archives, London [BN (London)]

Maritime Archives and Library at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, UK

OTHER COLLECTIONS

Centro de Estudios Militares del Peru (Lima), Sección Archivos y Catálogos

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections

Harvard Law Library, Small Manuscript Collection

Social Law Library (Boston)

New Haven Colony Historical Society

Nantucket Historical Association

Peabody Essex Museum

Library of Congress

Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France)

“Melville’s Marginalia Online” (edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon at
http://melvillesmarginalia.org
)

The New York Public Library, Gansevoort-Lansing Collection

The New-York Historical Society

John Brown Carter Library, Brown University

Archives Nationales du Sénégal (Dakar, Senegal)

NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

INTRODUCTION

  
1
. Amasa Delano,
A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands
, Boston: E. G. House, 1817.

  
2
. In December 1916, in a magazine called
Pacífico
, the Chilean Joaquín Díaz Garcés wrote a fictional short story, “El Camino de los Esclavos,” which focused on the overland journey of Mori, Babo, and their companions across the continent. Díaz Garcés had died before the Melville revival of the 1920s and
Benito Cereno
hadn’t been translated into Spanish until the 1940s (and wasn’t widely available in Latin America until the 1960s), so he must have learned of events on the
Tryal
through the work of the Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who wrote about it in
Historia de Valparaíso
(Valparaiso: Imprenta Albión de Cox i Taylor, 1869, vol. 2. In a note to his story, Díaz Garcés said he hoped to open “indifferent Chilean eyes to the history of African slavery, which, for many years, also sent its sorrowful caravans across our national territory,” a reference that Julio Pinto says, in a personal communication, may refer to the forced deportation of Bolivians and Peruvians. Though he didn’t get to it, Díaz Garcés planned to follow up with another story about the “improbable” events on the
Tryal
. In 1944, two decades after Díaz Garcés’s death, the publishing house he helped found, Zig Zag, put out the first Latin American Spanish-language version of
Benito Cereno
. For Neruda, see discussion in appendix.

  
3
. All quotations from
Benito Cereno
are from the version found in
Billy Budd, and Other Stories
, New York: Penguin, 1986. Quotations from the novels
Mardi, Redburn
,
White-Jacket
, and
Moby-Dick
are from the Library of America editions of Melville’s work, New York, 1982 and 1983.

  
4
. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker,
Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 469–83; Kevin Hayes,
The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 79.

  
5
. Hershel Parker,
Herman Melville: A Biography
, vol. 2: 1851–1891, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 244 for “collapsed,” p. 399 for “cold north.”

  
6
. Edmund Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
, New York: Norton, 1975, pp. 4–5.

  
7
. “A mere sea-drudge, a very Guinea slave,” was how a captain of a British naval ship patrolling the coast of Africa and protecting British slavers described himself in 1779. See James G. Basker, ed.,
Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 283.

  
8
. Based on selected searches done on December 8, 2012, in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database (
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
).

  
9
. At its most basic level, the deception the West Africans managed to pull off on the
Tryal
speaks to debates over slave paternalism, not just to the language the master class used to justify slavery but to questions related to what degree either masters or slaves believed the language. It’s a long debate but the place to start, as with most things related to slavery, is with W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903) and
The Negro
(1915). In 1959, Stanley Elkins (
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press), writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, used the phrase “total institutions” to describe slave plantations, which he compared to concentration camps, as having the same totalitarian power over the enslaved, able to destroy their personalities and force them to internalize their subordination, rendering them into infantile Sambos (as Mori first appeared to Delano). Earl Lewis’s “To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas” (in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds.,
Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) discusses the importance of Elkins’s essay, along with a generation of scholars, starting in the late 1960s, that “openly rejected” Elkins’s thesis. In the early 1970s, John W. Blassingame (
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) emphasized the ability of slaves to manipulate the roles assigned to them. Eugene Genovese, in turn, spent a career documenting what he, writing with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, called the “fatal self-deception” of the master class. In 1971, Genovese, referring to house servants, said that the master class “had always thought they knew these blacks, loved them, were loved by them, and they considered them part of the family. One day they learned that they had been deceiving themselves and living intimately with people they did not know at all” (
In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History
, New York: Pantheon Books, 1971, p. 117).

1. HAWKS ABROAD

  
1
. Clifton Kroeber,
The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region: 1794–1860
, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957; Carlos Noé Alberto Guevara,
La problemática marítima argentina
, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Fundación Argentina de Estudios Marítimos, 1981, p. 74; Rubén Naranjo,
Paraná, el pariente del mar
, Rosario: Editorial Biblioteca, 1973, p. 180.

  
2
. For the discussion of the
Neptune
in this chapter and subsequent ones, see the following documents in Argentina, Uruguay, and Great Britain: in the AGN (Buenos Aires), in the Tribunales collection, legajo 94, expediente 21; legajo 131, expediente 3288; in the Hacienda collection, legajo 132, expediente 3305, and legajo 120, expediente 3046; and legajo 36 in the collection named División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Guerra y Marina 9.24.4/1806. In the AGN (Montevideo), in the collection called Protocolos de Marina (1795–1814) for the year 1805, see “Fianza don Rafael Fernández, don Jaime Illa y don Antonio San Vicente, con don Benito Olazábal.” Also in the AGN (Montevideo), in a collection called Ex. Archivo y Museo Histórico Nacional, in caja (box) 257, carpeta (file) 40, there is a document called “Obrados de la fragata ‘Aguila’ presa por la fragata ‘Neptuno.’” See also the collection called Escribanía de Gobierno y Hacienda, caja 66, expediente 157 (“Caso de la Hoop”), caja 192 (“Expediente formado sobre ocho rollos de tabaco negro del Brasil hallados en la corbeta Francesa La Ligera su capitán Hipólito Mordell procedente de la costa de África”). See also BN (London) BT 98/63, 229, and ADM 12/110.