The Empire of Necessity (9 page)

INTERLUDE

I Never Could Look at Death without a Shudder

Herman Melville believed in abolition. “Sin it is, no less,” he wrote of slavery, “it puts out the sun at noon.” Yet he tended to treat bondage as a metaphysical problem and freedom as an idea best suited to some inner realm of personal sovereignty. It was a common position for his time. Individuals, wrote Henry David Thoreau in
Walden
, published a year before
Benito Cereno
, needed to achieve “self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination.” All human beings, Melville believed, oscillate somewhere between the two extreme poles of liberty and slavery that defined much of the political rhetoric of antebellum America. His stories contained characters who were slaves yet made to seem free, and freemen, like Ishmael and Ahab, who were slaves, mostly to their own tangled thoughts and uncontrollable passions. All the tomes of “human jurisprudence,” Melville wrote in
Moby-Dick
, could be reduced in essence to the whaler’s rule distinguishing “Fast-Fish” (harpooned or hooked on a line, and thus in the possession of a given party) from “Loose-Fish” (unclaimed and therefore fair game). “What plays the mischief with this masterly code,” Melville said, “is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.”
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And once expounded, it turns out that there is no such thing as a completely Fast or a completely Loose Fish. “What are the Rights of Man and liberties of the world but Loose-fish?… And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” “All men live enveloped in whale-lines,” he said elsewhere in
Moby-Dick
, “All are born with halters round their necks.” “Who aint a slave?” Ishmael asks. “Tell me that.” There’s joy in the question, as well as in the implied answer—
no one—
an acceptance of the fact that humans, by sheer stint of being human, are bound to one another.
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There was one moment in Melville’s writing career, though, when he admitted that the chattel slavery of dark-skinned people from Africa, or descendants of Africans, was different. It’s in a scene from one of his earlier novels,
Redburn
, partly based on his visit to Liverpool in 1839, when he came upon a statue of Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson had led the British to their greatest naval victory, over the combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in October 1805, but he died in the battle, cut down by a French bullet. Most of the memorials that went up afterward throughout Great Britain to honor Nelson’s sacrifice were simple tributes, like the column in London, which supports the regally posed admiral in full dress uniform.

But Liverpool’s monument, located in Exchange Flags Square, in the shadow of city hall, was darkly symbolic, more befitting, thought one observer, a “barbarous” nation ruled by savages or Catholics rather than by true Christians: a naked Nelson falls back in uneasy repose in Victory’s arms, his left foot trampling down a dead man, as Death, in the form of a cowled skeleton, its ribs separated by dark recesses, grasps at his heart. Around the pedestal sit four pitiful figures chained to the stone.
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They were supposed to be French and Spanish prisoners of war. But they made Herman Melville think of slaves:

At uniform intervals round the base of the pedestal, four naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, are seated in various attitudes of humiliation and despair. One has his leg recklessly thrown over his knee, and his head bowed over, as if he had given up all hope of ever feeling better. Another has his head buried in despondency, and no doubt looks mournfully out of his eyes, but as his face was averted at the time, I could not catch the expression. These woe-begone figures of captives are emblematic of Nelson’s principal victories; but I never could look at their swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place.

And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina; and also to the historical fact, that the African slave-trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution. And I remembered that my father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool; that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc at the fire-sides of the merchants; estranged sons from sires; and even separated husband from wife.

Melville was especially impressed with the way the monument’s “hideous skeleton” insinuated “his bony hand under the hero’s robe,” groping for Nelson’s heart. “A very striking design, and true to the imagination; I never could look at Death without a shudder.”
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Considering that Melville resisted imagining chattel slavery as a singular problem, distinct from other forms of domination, the proposition set forth in the second paragraph is interesting: Liverpool’s wealth, as well as Carolina’s and Virginia’s, was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. But what is especially compelling is the cascading flow of the prose, the way an initial, fleeting impression kicks off an “involuntary” stream of associations revealing slavery’s outsized role in Western history, the way the trade made seemingly random coincidences fit into a meaningful pattern.

One such coincidence involves the Nelson statue itself. Melville probably didn’t know it, but the monument was raised by a civic committee made up mostly of slavers, shippers, and sugar planters who were grateful that the Royal Navy, thanks to Nelson, had established its dominance over the Atlantic, so that they could sail their vessels to and from the slave plantations in the Caribbean in relative safety. Among them was John Bolton. This meant that the slaver responsible for the arrival in America of some of the West Africans who would later inspire Melville to write
Benito Cereno
was also responsible for the “fleeting images” that prompted Melville, years earlier, to write about slavery in the first place.

Melville’s vision would soon pass and he would return to discussing slavery as a proxy for the human condition in general. Yet while in Liverpool, he circled the ghastly memorial “repeatedly.” “How this group of statuary affected me,” Melville wrote in
Redburn
, based on that visit, “may be inferred from the fact, that I never went through Chapel-street without going through the little arch to look at it again. And there, night or day, I was sure to find Lord Nelson still falling back, Victory’s wreath still hovering over his sword point, and Death grim and grasping as ever, while the four bronze captives still lamented their captivity.”

Melville returned one more time to look at the monument, in 1856, a year after he wrote
Benito Cereno
. “After dinner went to Exchange,” he recorded in his diary, “Looked at Nelson statue, with peculiar emotion, mindful of 20 years ago.”
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PART II

A LOOSE FISH

What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?

—HERMAN MELVILLE,
MOBY-DICK

6

A SUITABLE GUIDE TO BLISS

Amasa Delano was born into one of those sprawling pilgrim families that, if not for their pedigree then because of their numbers, seemed to have had a hand in everything America was becoming. His great-great-great grandfather Philippe de Lannoy arrived in Plymouth in 1621, one ship behind the
Mayflower
. Within less than a decade, he had joined with other colonists to sail his family across the bay, settling what became the town of Duxbury on a spit of forest and meadowland nestled between the ocean and salt marshes and fed with freshwater springs.

Philippe married twice, had five sons, four daughters, and thirty-eight grandchildren—who each in turn had a prodigious number of offspring, eagerly so: one of Philippe’s sons, Amasa’s great-great grandfather, was fined ten pounds for having committed “carnall copulation” with a woman he subsequently married. “They are so plentiful they roost in trees like turkeys,” a Duxbury neighbor once said. The Delanos, as the name came to be written, were soon found across New England, from Maine to New York, and beyond, and included branches that produced some of America’s most successful businessmen, artists, and statesmen, among them three presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amasa’s mother’s ancestors also arrived early in Plymouth, descended from a Devonshire man said to have been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
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At the time of Amasa’s birth in 1763, Duxbury was a poor fishing town made up of horse trails and cottages stocked with rough-edged, homemade furnishings. Only one home had anything that could be called a carpet and nobody had a four-wheel cart and just a few families owned African slaves. Marshfield, one town over, was wealthier. Its sons went to Harvard or enlisted in the British Royal Navy. Duxbury stayed stocked with farmers, fisherman, wood cutters, colliers (charcoal makers), and shipwrights, “iron-nerved” men who could “hew down forests and live on crumbs.” All were poor, but some were poorer, mostly the elderly who had outlived their kin and couldn’t survive on their own. Families took turns “keeping” a distant cousin of Amasa’s, for instance, “old Jane Delanoe,” and then paid for her coffin when she died.
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Amasa’s parents, Samuel and Abigail, called the rest of their boys Alexander, William, and Samuel Jr. But they named their firstborn after his uncle Amasa, which in Hebrew means burden or to carry a heavy load. There is only one Amasa in the Old Testament. He is King David’s nephew, murdered by his cousin Joab, who with his right hand pulls Amasa’s beard in friendship as if to kiss him as he uses his left to thrust a dagger into his side. Amasa’s intestines spill out on the ground and he dies in his own blood. “The more plot there is in sin, the worse it is,” was how an eighteenth-century commentary on the Bible interpreted this passage. And if the biblical reference weren’t forbidding enough, the circumstances of his namesake uncle’s death were even darker.
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On October 4, 1759, Amasa’s uncle Amasa Delanoe, a sergeant in Rogers Rangers, a celebrated British militia, took part in an attack on Saint Francis, a French-allied Abenaki settlement near the Saint Lawrence River. The village’s men had gone out patrolling, leaving behind mostly children, women, the sick, and the old. Dressed as Indians, the Rangers set the village on fire. In “less then a quarter of an hour the whole town was in a blaze, the carnage terrible,” Robert Kirk, a Scottish member of the Rangers, recorded in his diary. “Those who the flames did not devour were either shot or tomohawk’ed.” Kirk called it “the bloodiest scene in all America.”

The killing was over in a few hours, but the retreat down the Connecticut River valley, with the British pursued by the French and Abenaki, lasted weeks. Short on food and water and badly exposed to the elements, the Rangers, now broken up into small bands, got lost in the woods. Exhausted and starving, they survived through cannibalism. Kirk’s unit was in killed a captive they had taken from Saint Francis, Marie-Jeanne Gill, the daughter of the Abenaki chief. “We then broiled and eat most of her,” Kirk wrote, “and receive great strength thereby.” Delanoe’s group, reduced to three soldiers, did the same to its prisoner, who might have been the Abenaki leader’s other child, his son Xavier. The next day, the Abenaki caught Delanoe and his men near Lake Champlain, and when they learned the British “had killed and eat a Little Boy,” the Indians “killed and scalped” them “in revenge.”
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*   *   *

The younger Amasa took first to freshwater, then to salt, and by the age of five could plunge into the cold ocean and stay under for unusual lengths. Even as a boy he had a compact physique, as if he were composed of condensed energy. Along with his younger brothers, Samuel and William (Alexander died an infant), Amasa learned to build ships from their shipwright father and to navigate on fishing trips to the Grand Banks, bringing back cod, mackerel, and herring to sell in Boston. He quit school after a few years, rebelling against the “severity of schoolmasters,” though he continued to be a voracious reader.

Duxbury was a small town and a large part of Amasa’s moral education took place in his family’s pew in its clapboard First Parish Church. Reverend Charles Turner was the village pastor through the whole of Amasa’s first thirteen years. He was a severe-looking man who wore an unusually large white wig as he made his rounds calling on families and scaring children. “I was exceedingly afraid of him,” recalled one of Amasa’s contemporaries.
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Turner projected authority but his theology was subversive. He was a man of “practiced eloquence,” part of a generation of preachers who were planting the seeds of what would later become known as Unitarianism. They were leaving behind the cold Calvinism of Delano’s parents and grandparents, which held that there was little an individual could do to change the course of his afterlife (and which thought it nothing to name a baby boy Amasa). The people of Duxbury were embracing a more liberal faith, which included the notion that man possessed free will. Turner had an opportunity to rehearse this new outlook in Boston in 1773, before an audience of royal magistrates. He had been selected to give that year’s annual Election Sermon, a prestigious honor in recognition of a long and distinguished career in the ministry.
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