Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  The play attracted “multitudes” to the nation’s largest theater. If performed every other day for two weeks (it may have been longer), at only two-thirds capacity of the theater’s 3,500 seats, it would have been seen by roughly 15,000 people, about one in twenty of the city’s population. Another way of estimating the number in attendance is to divide the production’s estimated gross earnings of $5,250 ($131,834 in 2014 dollars) by prevailing ticket prices (most were 25 cents, some were 50 and 75 cents), which also suggests roughly 15,000 viewers. The play therefore played a major role not only in interpreting the Amistad rebellion, but in spreading the news of it.23

  A detailed playbill for The Long, Low, Black Schooner provides a “Synopsis of Scenery, Incidents, &c.” Set on the main deck of the Amistad, the play featured as characters the actual people who were involved in the uprising. The leading character was “Zemba Cinques, an African, Chief of the Mutineers,” based on Cinqué and played by Joseph Proctor, a “young American tragedian,” perhaps in burnt-cork blackface, as was common at the Bowery.24 The “Captain of the Schooner, and owner of the Slaves” was Pedro Montes, the actual owner of four of the enslaved who sailed the vessel after the rebellion. The supercargo was Juan Ruez, based on José Ruiz, owner of forty-nine slaves on board. Cudjo, “a deformed Dumb Negro,” who resembles the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, was apparently based on the “savage” Konoma, who was ridiculed for his tusklike teeth and decried as a cannibal in the early reports of the Amistad Africans. Lazarillo, the “overseer of the slaves,” probably drew on the slave-sailor Celestino. Other characters included Cabrero the mate, sailors, and the wholly invented damsel-soon-to-be-in-distress Inez, the daughter of Montes and the wife of Ruez.25

  Act I begins as the vessel sets sail from Havana, passing Moro Castle and heading out to sea. The history of Zemba Cinques, the hero of the story, is recounted as a prelude to entry into the “hold of the schooner,” where lay the “wretched slaves!” The bondsmen plot and soon take an “Oath of vengeance,” which they (and pirates) actually did. In a rising storm, also noted in the accounts of the rebellion, “The Slaves, led by Zemba Cin[q]ues” force open the hatchway, which results in “MUTINY and MURDER!” The rebels seize the vessel and reset its course, heading eastward across the Atlantic to their native Sierra Leone. “Prospects of liberation” are at hand.26

  Act II shifts to the captain’s cabin, now occupied, after the rebellion, by Zemba Cinques, while Montes and Ruez sit as prisoners in the dark hold of the vessel (as they actually did). The world has been turned upside down: those who were below are now above and vice versa. The reversal poses great danger to Inez, who apparently has fallen into the clutches of Cudjo and now faces “terrible doom.” Someone, probably Zemba Cinques, rescues her, forcing Cudjo to “surrender his intended victim.” Did the audience see a black hero rescue a white woman from the hands of a black villain? This is a theme of no small significance given prevailing popular fears of racial “amalgamation,” which had ignited recent anti-abolition riots.

  Zemba Cinques then sees a vessel (the US brig Washington) sailing toward them and holds a council among his fellow mutineers to decide what to do. They choose death over slavery, a sentiment repeatedly ascribed to Cinqué in the popular press, and decide to “Blow up the Schooner!” (The Amistad rebels made no such decision, as many of them were ashore on Long Island when the sailors of the Washington captured their vessel, but pirates frequently threatened to “blow up rather than be taken,” and some actually did). Alas, it is too late as the “Gallant Tars” of the Washington drop into the cabin from its skylight, taking control of the Amistad.

  The end of the play is left uncertain, much like the fate of the Amistad captives, who sat in the New Haven jail awaiting trial on charges of piracy and murder as the play was being performed. The playbill states: “Denoument—Fate of Cingues!” What indeed will be his fate? Did the play enact his execution, an ending that many, including Cinqué himself, expected? Or did it dramatize his liberation along with all of his comrades?27

  The Long, Low, Black Schooner was not an unusual play for its time. Slave revolt and piracy were common themes in early American theater. Rebellious slaves appeared in Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack, a play about a Jamaican runaway slave-turned-bandit, which was a staple after its American premiere in 1801, and in The Slave, an opera by Thomas Morton about a revolt in Suriname acted first in 1817 and many times thereafter, into the 1840s. The Gladiator dramatized the famous slave revolt led by Spartacus in ancient Greece. It premiered in 1831, starred working-class hero Edwin Forrest, and may have been the most popular play of the decade. Pirates headlined popular nautical melodramas of the 1830s, such as Captain Kyd, or the Wizard of the Sea, performed first in 1830 and numerous times thereafter, then published as a novel by J. H. Ingraham in 1839. John Glover Drew adapted Byron’s The Corsair for performance at Brook Farm in the early 1840s. The great African American actor Ira Aldridge would soon act the lead in The Bold Buccaneer. Slave rebels and pirates sometimes appeared in the same plays, as they did in The Long, Low, Black Schooner: “Three-Finger’d Jack” was something of a pirate on land, and indeed had been called “that daring freebooter.” Pirates also played a significant role in The Gladiator.28

  Like other melodramas of the times, The Long, Low, Black Schooner featured virtuous common people, usually laborers, battling villainous aristocrats—in this case, enslaved Africans striking back against the Spanish slave owners Montes and Ruez. “Low” characters like Zemba Cinques performed heroic action and spoke poetic lines and were thus were routinely celebrated for their honorable resistance, encouraging some degree of popular identification with the outlaw who dared to strike for freedom. As Peter Reed has noted, audiences “could both applaud and fear low revolts, both mourn and celebrate their defeats.”29

  The theater not only spread the news of the Amistad rebellion; it shaped it. Cinqué’s poised and dramatic personal bearing during the legal proceedings earned him comparison to Shakespeare’s Othello.30 He was also likened to “a colored dandy in Broadway.” He clearly had the “outlaw charisma” so common to the “Rogue Performances” of the era. Having captured the attention of the theater world and the public at large, it was fitting that The Long, Low, Black Schooner should be followed, in December 1839, by a production of Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber!, also written by Jonas B. Phillips. Like Sheppard, whose jailbreaks became “the common discourse of the whole nation” in Britain in the 1720s and to whom the public flocked, paying admission to see his him his cell, the “black pirates” of the Amistad were winning in their own bid to take the good ship Popular Imagination. A “Nautical Melo-Drama,” based on real people and dramatic current events, was playing out in American society as a whole.31

  Cinqué as Heroic Pirate

  One of the most arresting images of the Amistad rebellion, Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Gang of Negroes, appeared around the same time as The Long, Low, Black Schooner, perhaps a day or two earlier. Cinqué is featured on the deck of the Amistad, dressed in a red sailor’s frock (what is today called a buccaneer’s shirt) and a pair of white duck pantaloons. (He was actually wearing similar clothes at the moment of capture; he took them from the ship’s cargo en route to Puerto Príncipe.) He strikes a gallant pose, with his cane knife at the ready. Here is the consummate image of the conquering, swashbuckling hero. A man who was, at the time the image was published, soon to stand trial for piracy and murder is depicted, at the scene of the crime, with the deadly weapon in his hand, as transcendently good and noble in his cause. Indeed he appears as an executioner of justice, a slayer of tyrants. His history of resistance is simultaneously celebrated and commodified in the form of an image to be bought and sold.32

  The original image for this color print was “Drawn from Life by J. Sketchley, Aug. 30, 1839” in New London. Sketchley had probably gone aboard the US brig Washington and observed the legal hearing held there soon after the v
essels came to port. Below the image is a caption: “Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Piratical Gang of Negroes, who killed Captain Ramon Ferris and the Cook, on board the Spanish Schooner Amistad, taken by Lieut. Gedney, commanding the US Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, 24th Augt 1839.” Beneath the caption was a speech delivered by Cinqué in which he exhorted his mates to fight back against slavery. The leader of the pirates resembles a Roman hero.33

  “Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Gang of Negroes” (Stanley Whitman House)

  A related image, Joseph Cinquez, the Brave Congolese Chief, drawn by a New London artist named Sheffield, appeared as a broadside the following day, August 31, 1839, again during the first week after the Amistad had come ashore. It contained another sympathetic image of Cinqué, dressed in the same frock, but this time with more explicit antislavery commentary: “JOSEPH CINQUEZ, the brave Congolese Chief, who prefers death to Slavery, and who now lies in Jail in Irons in New Haven Conn. awaiting his trial for daring for freedom.” Below the caption appeared another stirring speech Cinqué gave to his comrades. The image and text, in broadside form, were hawked in the streets of the cities, spreading the association of piracy and slave revolt and the sensational news of the rebellion itself.34

  “Joseph Cinquez, the Brave Congolese Chief” (Library of Congress)

  These glorifications of armed struggle were not, as they might appear, the work of an underground group of militant abolitionists. They were, rather, commissioned by, advertised in, and distributed by the penny paper the New York Sun. Moses Yale Beach, editor of the Sun, used the trope of piracy to frame the Amistad rebellion, to sensationalize the case, and to appeal to the popular appetite for heroic sea robbers, thereby to sell newspapers and prints to a mass public. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He and the other editors of the Sun were shocked by the popularity of the images. Having published portraits of Cinqué on Saturday, August 31, 1839, they noted the following Monday that the supply of prints had been exhausted immediately and that they had been unable to meet the clamor for more. They announced to their readers that they would, “by an early hour this morning, have another and a very large edition printed, and shall be prepared, on the opening of our office, to supply demands for any number.” They explained that they had printed enough on Saturday to satisfy “any ordinary demand” but encountered a “tremendous run for them” for which they were not ready. This “was as unexpected to us as it was astonishing in itself.” They printed the image on “thick, fine paper, in a style of excellence,” which presumably made it suitable for saving and even framing. They also noted that the print had been republished in the Sunday editions of other newspapers. They were clearly proud of what they had done. Their use of pirate imagery had worked.35

  James Gordon Bennett and his colleagues at the proslavery New York Morning Herald felt otherwise. They howled in protest against the sympathetic depictions of Cinqué the pirate and declared the Sun to be “the New York penny nigger paper.” During a time of polarization on the issue of slavery, the correspondents for the New York Morning Herald drew a different picture. Against the “preposterous twaddle” of other publications, these writers angrily sought “to destroy the romance which has been thrown around [Cinqué’s] character.” They denied that he “is dignified and graceful with the bearing of Othello.” Rather, he was a “blubber-lipped, sullen looking negro, not half as intelligent or striking in appearance as every third black you meet on the docks of New York.” The entire lot of the Amistad Africans represented nothing so much as “hopeless stupidity and beastly degradation”—they were likened to baboons. Back in Africa, they had been “slothful and thievish,” and were “sunk in a state of ignorance, debasement and barbarism, of which no adequate conception can be formed.” They were in no way “fit to associate on terms of equality with the whites.” They were “a distinct and totally different race, and the God of nature never intended that they should live together in any other relation than that of master and slave.” The depictions of Cinqué the pirate by the New York Sun were, it seems, egalitarian and subversive.36

  Cinqué as Barbary Corsair

  A True History of the African Chief Jingua and His Comrades was anonymously written by someone who hoped to capitalize on, and contribute to, the swell of popular interest in the rebels and their now widely known leader. It was published in October 1839 and based to a large extent on early newspaper coverage of the rebellion and its aftermath.37 The title page indicates that it was published simultaneously in Hartford, Boston, and New York, but this may have expressed a hope for sales rather than a fact of publication. It was most likely published in Hartford after the Amistad captives had appeared in court there September 19–23, 1839, and in anticipation of a return visit for a second round of legal hearings scheduled for November (continued in January 1840, in New Haven). Both Hartford events drew throngs of people to the city from as far away as New York and Boston. “All inquiries” around Hartford involved the question “where is the jail?” The author of the pamphlet fleshed out the newspaper reports in the twenty-eight-page account with a variety of plagiarized sources, in large part narratives of travelers to Africa. Most of them had not been to Sierra Leone, nor the Gallinas coast, least of all to the inland areas where the Amistad Africans had lived before they were enslaved.38

  The pamphlet was based, in its central assumption, on a misunderstanding. And a revealing one it was. The author wrote A True History in September 1839, when the ability of lawyers, judges, abolitionists, and correspondents to communicate with the Amistad Africans was limited by the problem of language comprehension. The mostly Mende-speaking rebels had been separated from the Afro-Cuban cabin boy Antonio, who had managed to translate between them and the two Spaniards from the time of the rebellion to their capture by the United States Coast Guard. Only one of the rebels, Burna, spoke English, and that but poorly. The time had not yet come when the Mende sailor James Covey would be found on the docks of New York to translate for the captives.

  The misunderstanding occurred when people asked the Amistad Africans who they were and whence they came. Most of them replied that they were “Mende.” But the Americans asking the questions had never heard of the Mende, who were not located on any maps of the period and not described in any of the travel literature about Africa. They therefore interpreted “Mende” to be “Manding”—a group of Senegambians (now better known as the Mandinka) who had been in contact with European and American traders for centuries and of whom they had heard.39 This is why the anonymous author of the pamphlet includes “a Description of the Kingdom of Mandingo, and of the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants.” Because so many Mandinka had converted to Islam, the author assumed, wrongly, that the Amistad captives were Muslims.40

  Pirates played a crucial role in this piece of popular writing. The author not only plagiarized from the text of the recently published The Pirates Own Book, by Charles Ellms, he ended the essay by referring to the recently hanged pirates of the Panda.41 He concluded by calling Cuba a “receptacle of the buccaneers” and slave traders, who were also deemed pirates. Since Cuba was like the “piratical state of Barbary,” the United States should take possession of it and bring it to heel as Britain, France, and the United States had recently done with Algiers.42

  The Muslim pirates of the Mediterranean thus influenced an Orientalist engraving of Cinqué that appeared in A True History. The leader of the rebellion appears as a Barbary corsair, with a keffiyah (headdress), a shemagh (a traditional Muslim scarf), and a kaif (a curved Arabian sword), facing a rising sun with a spyglass in his hand. The Amistad’s rigging, a block, and a mast are in the background. Another engraving featured “The Sugar Knife, with which the Captain of the Amistad was killed,” thereby dramatizing the rebellion itself. A global discourse on piracy clearly shaped the perception of the writer and illustrator of A True History of the African Chief Jingua and His Comrades, and thereby their readers too.43

  African Chief Jingua (Beine
cke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  The Legal Battle over Piracy

  The issue of piracy was central to the legal debate about the fate of the Amistad captives. The grand jury charged to look into the allegations of piracy and murder found that the Africans, “not having fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil,” did, “with force and arms, upon the high seas, about ten leagues from the island of Cuba aforesaid within the Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States, and without the jurisdiction of any particular state,” kill Ramón Ferrer and his slave Celestino, using “certain machetes, or cane knives,” whereafter they turned pirate.44

  The formal charges would be argued and decided by middle- and upper-class judges, attorneys, and government officials, whose attitudes to piracy were rather different from those reflected in the romantic popular accounts of the day. To these important people, piracy represented not a heroic quest for ready money and liberty; it was, first and foremost, a crime against property. The pirate was hostes humani generis, the “enemy of all mankind.” Still, the debate about piracy kept the issue alive and before the public.

  The piracy issue to be adjudicated by the courts emerged from Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795, in which the United States and Spain agreed to mutual assistance for ships in distress. Article 8 stipulated that if a ship “be forced through stress of weather, pursuit of pirates or enemies, or any other urgent necessity” to seek shelter, it “shall be received and treated with all humanity” and properly assisted. Article 9 added that all ships “rescued out of the hands of any pirates or robbers on the high seas, shall be brought into some port” and restored to its original owners. The Spanish slave owners Montes and Ruiz made claims based on these articles of the treaty, as did the government of Spain through its ambassador, Angel Calderón de la Barca. If the Amistad Africans were pirates, they, the vessel, and the cargo would be turned over to Spain. They would be returned to Cuba and probably hanged, a proper fate for the “enemies of all mankind.”45