The Empire of Necessity (60 page)

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An 1846 ophthalmology textbook,
A Manual of the Diseases of the Eye,
called the case of the
Rôdeur
a “melancholy instance of the ravages of this ophthalmia, under circumstances propitious to its extension.” For his part, the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier drew from Guillié’s article to compose his 1834 antislavery poem, “The Slave-Ships,” which describes the throwing of “fettered and blind” slaves overboard: “one after one, / Plunged down the vessel’s side. / … God of the earth! what cries / Rang upward unto thee? / … / The last dull plunge was heard, / The last wave caught its stain.”

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The Río de la Plata was the southernmost outpost of what the musician and historian Ned Sublette calls the Atlantic Ocean’s “saints and festivals belt,” a fusion of Catholic and African rituals and rhythms: similar to New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indians and its second-line clubs, in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, enslaved Africans and, after slavery had ended, free people of color, organized mutual-aid societies. Often based on their places of origin, these organizations comprised a startlingly diverse array of “nations,” including
nación congo
,
nación benguela
,
nación moro
,
nación bornó
,
nación lubono
,
nación angola
, and
nación mozambique
, electing “kings” and “queens” and staging collective dances and public processions. By the late 1700s, Spanish officials were regularly complaining about neighborhoods where “black men and women are found in various houses using the
tambo
and
tango
,” words that could mean either the instruments (drums) or the dance.

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In this instance, Montejo identifies Congolese Africans as those most likely to fly away: they “flew the most; they disappeared by means of witchcraft … without making a sound. There are those who say the Negros threw themselves into rivers. This is untrue. The truth is they fastened a chain to their waists which was full of magic. That was where their power came from. I know this all intimately and it is true beyond a doubt.” The equation of suicide and flight runs through Toni Morrison’s
Song of Solomon
. After hearing children singing lines from an old blues song (“Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone, Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home”), Milkman, the novel’s twentieth-century protagonist, realizes his connection to a long-ago “flying African.” Working in the cotton field one day, Milkman’s ancestor “flew off.… He flew. You know, like a bird.… Went right back to wherever it was he came from.”

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Going to sea did for plebeian citizens like Delano what landed property did for republican gentry, whose large estates were not so much commodities, to be traded like so many hogsheads of tobacco. Rather, landed wealth buffered them from the jostle of the marketplace and sheltered them from all its petty, parochial, divisive interests. It allowed men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to cultivate their cosmopolitanism, to rise above the fray and advance an uplifting vision of the republican good. As Washington said, to be a republican was to be “a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large.” While it didn’t afford the same kind of financial security, going to sea, living a close-quartered life with people of many races, did allow a person like Amasa Delano or Herman Melville to imagine himself, as Melville wrote, an “untrammeled citizen and sailor of the universe.”

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Decades after Allyn’s 1805 sermon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1841, made the same point, criticizing the conceit that one could remain clean from the stink of commerce simply by choosing a noble career. The “trail of the serpent,” Emerson said
,
“reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man.” “We are all implicated”; all one had to do was ask a “few questions” about the goods that enter one’s home to realize that “we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities.” “How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us from the West Indies” or the “Spanish islands,” he asked, where one man “dies in ten every year … to yield us sugar”?

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Allyn’s way out of the impasse was to support the deportation of Africans and African Americans to Africa. Others, though, demanded more forceful leadership from their religious leaders. Divisions in Duxbury over slavery eventually led to the founding of the Wesleyan Church because the Methodist Episcopal Church wouldn’t vote on a motion saying slavery “is sin” and that “liberty and slavery cannot exist together.” Duxbury resident Seth Sprague, just three years older than Amasa Delano, led these splits. Of the Methodists, Sprague said: “by degrees the sin of slavery crept into the church; and when an attempt was made by a few of its members to expel that enormous sin, all the influence of the Church was arrayed against them.” The Church, Sprague said, was but “one great prop in support of slavery.” “So long as I remain a member of that Church, I am virtually giving my influence in support of slavery.”

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He didn’t refuse the chief of Palau’s gift of a female concubine, which he characteristically describes as satisfying the virtue of inquisitiveness rather than sating the vice of lust: “I was curious to know whether any of the women would be unwilling to go with those by whom they were chosen; but I discovered in their countenances only cheerfulness and pleasure.”

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First among them was Tomás Antonio Romero, who exercised near “vertical domination” over large parts of Río de la Plata’s economy. He controlled land, ships, slaves, and
saladeros
. He worked closely with merchants in Cádiz, bankers in London, and shippers in Boston and Providence. Described as an “arch-corruptor” of Spanish administrators, Romero played all sides against the others with unrivaled skill. At different moments, he held exclusive monopoly contracts to provide Spain’s royal navy with salted meat from his
saladero
, to import Brazilian twist chewing tobacco, which was sweetened with molasses and popular with Buenos Aires’s sailors, market women, and teamsters, and to freight quicksilver, or mercury, used to amalgamate silver, to Potosí, and then ship the silver out of Potosí to Spain. Yet he was eloquent in defense of “free trade,” fighting “cape and sword” for the right to diversify his trading options, even as he used his political connections to cut out his rivals. All told, between 1799 and 1806, Romero organized at least thirty-two slave expeditions, exporting about a quarter of a million pesos in hides and importing almost twice that value in Africans. And that is only what he officially reported. It was Romero who was the target of Viceroy del Pino’s anticorruption campaign.

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Borges is here talking about Jaime Llavallol del Riu, an emigrant from Barcelona who founded one of Buenos Aires’s most successful commercial houses. He is credited with modernizing the city’s port facilities, which, according to Borges, also included the slave market at El Retiro. Later, in the 1840s, as Argentina moved toward abolishing slavery, Llavallol and Sons began to import thousands of indentured servants from Gallegos and the Canary Islands, “treating them like slaves” (Isidoro Ruiz Moreno,
Relaciones hispano-argentinas: De la guerra a los tratados
, Buenos Aires, 1981, p. 16).

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The phrase
to strike
to refer to a labor stoppage comes from maritime history and is an example of how revolutionary times can redefine a word to mean its exact opposite. Through the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century,
to strike
was used as a metaphor for submission, referring to the practice of captured ships dropping, or
striking
, their sails or flags to their conquerors and of subordinate ships doing the same to salute their superiors. “Now Margaret / Must strike her sail,” wrote William Shakespeare in
Henry VI
, describing an invitation extended by the “Mighty King” of France to Margaret, the weaker queen of England, to join him at the dinner table “and learn a while to serve / Where kings command.” Or as this 1712 account of a British privateer taking a Spanish man-o-war off the coast of Peru in 1709 put it: “fir’d two shot over her, and then she struck” and bowed “down to us” (Rogers,
A Cruising Voyage
, p. 160). In 1768, London sailors turned the term inside out. Joining city artisans and tradesmen—weavers, hatters, sawyers, glass grinders, and coal heavers—in the fight for better wages, they struck their sails and paralyzed the city’s commerce. They “unmanned or otherwise prevented from sailing every ship in the Thames.” From this point forward,
strike
meant the refusal of submission.

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Ships purchased skins from alone men with promissory notes to be paid in the United States, often postdated thirty months. See “Extract from the Journal of Joel Root,”
Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society
5 (1894): 149–72.

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Quakers prohibited “fraudulent” commerce, but the sanction was hard to maintain since they tended to abhor “any restrictions on their ability to trade” and were “ambivalent about any authority except their own.” Trade was a moral imperative that transcended politics, and Europe’s revolutionary wars only made their “inner light,” like the
fuero interno
of Río de la Plata merchants, that much stronger.

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In
Moby-Dick
, Tashtego, a Wampanoag from Nantucket, is a skilled harpooner. Some Wampanoag, like Amos Haskins, who became master of the whaler
Massasoit
, might sail as skilled hands or officers, but most Native Americans were low-share deckhands. The “captaincies and mateships were the ‘exclusive preserve’ of white Nantucketers.”

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Spanish documents related to the event report seventy-two slaves were on board the
Tryal
but give inconsistent information regarding their breakdown by age, gender, and origin. The following is an approximation: thirty-two men from Africa (twelve of whom were specifically identified as coming from Senegal), three other men (perhaps men not in Aranda’s shipment who joined the rebels), twenty-eight African women, and eleven “suckling babies” of both sexes. Twenty of the men were twelve to sixteen years old; twelve were between twenty-five and fifty.

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Hernán Cortes, Mexico’s conqueror, called the sedentary Aztecs
moors
, while at least one priest thought the nomadic peoples who roamed the deserts of northern Mexico reminded him of
alárabes
, or Arabians. Spaniards used the word
mosque
to describe Aztec and Incan temples and believed Andean ritual baths and animal slaughtering practices to be suspiciously similar to Islamic rites. When royal officials arrived to survey Castile’s new possessions, local bureaucrats welcomed them by staging reenactments in town plazas not of the conquest of the Americas but of the reconquest of Spain. And the saint the Spaniards picked to be the patron of America was Santiago Matamoros: Saint James the Moor Slayer. Columbus himself described his voyage as the next step in the struggle against the “sect of Mohamet and of all idolatries and heresies,” even though one of the reasons he sailed west was to avoid Islam, to find a way to bypass Muslim control of trade routes to Asia.

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According to one Christian traveler among the Fulbe in the early 1800s, West African Muslims recognized the resemblance as well: there was “a belief that Islam
is
, in fact, true and primitive Christianity as really taught by Christ and his Apostles,—reformed by Mohammed, with equal authority, from the corruptions which had by his time been introduced.”

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This paragraph is from Sandoval’s 1627 treatise on slavery, originally titled
De instaruanda Aethiopum salute
. Sandoval based his book on years of firsthand fieldwork on Cartagena’s waterfront, one of the first slave ports set up by Spain on the American mainland, into which came tens of thousands of West Africans. By the early 1600s, when Sandoval was active, the city counted over seven thousand Africans or African-descended inhabitants, more than twice the number of Europeans. To communicate in the over seventy African languages or dialects that existed in the city, Sandoval worked through interpreters or used the Afro-Spanish pidgin that had evolved with the slave trade. Among the information he gathered were slave impressions of the forced collective baptisms performed on them before they left Africa, where sailors would push the heads of the captured Africans into pots of water as priests chanted Latin prayers. Compared with how Muslim clerics spread their faith in the regions south of the Sahara, these mass baptisms would do little, in Sandoval’s view, to endear Christianity to African slaves. Some thought they were being marked, that the oil would be squeezed from their bodies and they would be eaten. Others believed it was a hex, meant to prevent them from rebelling on the ship. Sometimes slaves were baptized and branded during the same ceremony, their flesh seared with an R topped by a crown, a royal seal. They might not have understood the meaning of the water, but the pain made its point. Sandoval was especially pessimistic about the conversion of Muslim Wolofs, Fulanis, and Mandinkas. Sandoval’s history didn’t question the legitimacy of slavery. “Only God knows if these blacks are enslaved justly,” he wrote. But he did depict Africans as suffering humans with souls equal to those of whites. He was one of the first Europeans to describe in graphic, horrible detail the torment we today associate with the slave trade, a description even more exceptional since it was based on the testimony of the slaves themselves. Sandoval was especially critical of “Christians” who “punish their slaves more in a week than” Muslim slave masters “do in a year.” The priest was also among the first Europeans to understand slavery as a quintessential modern institution in the sense that it forced a psychic alienation, or schism, between appearance and reality, between one’s interior thoughts and one’s outer performance. Sandoval’s Jesuit colleagues argued that as long as slaves didn’t openly rebel against the Catholic Church, then their passivity could be taken as implicit consent that they had accepted Christ. But Sandoval recognized that slaves had inner lives and private thoughts concealed from their masters, that the brutality inherent to slavery forced slaves to use cunning to survive. The examples he gave of this deception were the rituals of branding and baptism: “Think about how they do not fight off the burning brand used to mark them and permanently imprison them in their masters’ power to be abused and threatened,” he wrote; “branding hurts them, and they do not want it, but they passively receive it and suffer through it, meanwhile detesting it on the inside.” As to baptism, those Africans who understood it as a rite of religious conversion, often remarked afterward that, “‘their heart said nothing to them’ (using their own words).”