The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  The hold also held a huge amount of food: six hundred pounds of rice, the main staple of life to Mende people and others who lived on what was sometimes called the “Grain Coast” of West Africa, as well as substantial quantities of bread, fruit, olives, Spanish beans, sweet potatoes, sausages, and “fresh beef.” Ten barrels of biscuit, 480 bunches of bananas, five hundred pounds of jerked beef, and three dozen fowl stored in hen coops rounded out the extensive edible holdings. There was much less available on board to drink: fourteen demijohns of wine, not to be consumed on the voyage but rather sold at its end, and only six casks of water. As it happened, in the days leading up to the voyage, ship captains in Havana were having “great difficulty of finding a sufficient quantity of water casks,” as one of them put it, a shortage that would have consequences.6

  Unlike the Teçora, the Amistad did not have a lower deck, where the enslaved would be jammed together overnight and in bad weather. It was a single-deck vessel with a hold, which measured six feet six inches from the top of the keel to the underside of the main deck above, with headroom diminishing on both sides as the hull curved upward to meet the outer edges. The bulky cargo already stored in the hold left limited room for the human freight, which was jumbled in with, and on top of, the hogsheads, casks, and boxes. The enslaved, crammed below deck, had very little headroom.

  Indeed, the hold was so crowded that half of the captives would have to be quartered on the main deck and forced to sleep in the open, overnight, in chains for the three-day voyage. The rest were fettered and kept below. Because the Amistad had made numerous voyages in the coastal slave trade, its timbers retained the smell of previous terrified passengers, a condition made worse by the lack of ventilation. The prisoners would sit in the dark, stuffy, cramped hold for long hours at a time, in a painful crouch, enveloped by, and themselves exuding, the sharp odor of bondage.

  The deck of the Amistad was crowded, especially during the day when all sixty people (fifty-three Africans, five crew members, and two passengers) inhabited its 1,200 square feet, much of which was devoted to the masts, the longboat, the hatchway, and other shipboard fixtures. The Amistad lacked not only the size of the Teçora, but several features of larger slave ships, notably a barricado on the main deck, a defensive bulwark behind which the crew could retreat in the event of an uprising and from which they could fire their muskets and pistols down on the insurgents. It also lacked a gun room for the secure stowage of weapons. The Amistad did have a galley with a brick oven for the preparation of the captives’ food—a telltale sign of its slave-trading purpose. It also had a large hatchway amidships for the easier movement of bodies from above and below during the voyage. It had ten sweeps (oars) for self-locomotion and easier maneuvering along the treacherous shoals and inlets of the north coast of Cuba.7

  Because the schooner carried a lot of sail on its tall, light spars—more sail than most other vessels its size—and because the crew was small for the intended three-day voyage, sailors based in port would have helped to prepare the ship to sail. Once at sea, the Amistad was a “great sailer,” that is to say, very fast and maneuverable by the standards of the day. One knowledgeable observer pointed out that it would outsail most United States Navy revenue cutters, which also were designed for speed in order to catch quick and evasive smugglers.8

  A New Middle Passage

  The sailors hoisted the anchor and the vessel slipped quietly past the British antislavery vessel, sailing by Fort Moro at the mouth of the harbor around midnight, just as the evening gun fired. The intended voyage was fairly routine, one hundred ten leagues (three hundred miles) eastward from Havana to Guanaja in Puerto Príncipe (now called Camagüey), a thriving new region for sugar production. Landowners bellowed for slaves as they sought to hew plantations from the verdant forest. Captain Ferrer himself had made the trip many times, as had his bondmen, Antonio and Celestino, and likely too his sailors, Manuel and Jacinto. The regional slave trade was crucial to local, colony-wide, and imperial economic development.9

  The voyage began well, with a good wind. Yet Captain Ferrer, who had made the passage many times, knew that the winds could shift and that the usual three-day voyage could stretch to two weeks, or longer. He immediately put the enslaved on short allowance, conserving food and especially the understocked water for the additional time they might be at sea. On the second day out, the small vessel ran into a storm, no doubt terrifying all of the Africans on board, but probably not the experienced sailors who would have known harder weather. Turbulence without was soon matched by turbulence within.

  The first sign of trouble came early, when on the night immediately following departure “one of the sailors observed that the slaves were coming up from the hold of the forecastle, and that they made some noise, on which account the sailor reprimanded them and told them to be quiet and go down into the hold.” This seemed innocent enough; “murmurings” and commotion were common on slave ships. Crowded conditions produced anger, frustration, and fights among the captives and with the crew. Currents of tension and violence coursed through all slaving vessels, including the Amistad.10

  The hardware of bondage was part of the charge. Grabeau and Kimbo, both leaders in the resistance, remembered that “during the night they were kept in irons, placed about the hands, feet, and neck. They were treated during the day in a somewhat milder manner, though all the irons were never taken off at once.” The captain and crew slapped manacles, shackles, and neck-rings on the captives, especially overnight because some of the prisoners slept near them, on the main deck. Kinna remembered the neck-rings as a special humiliation: “Chain on neck—you know dey chain ox.” Fetters turned human beings into property, but not without a struggle.11

  Casual violence was commonplace on slaving vessels and the Amistad was no exception. Captain and crew alike used whips, clubs, and fists to terrorize and control the captives. On the deck of any deep-sea sailing ship could be found many tools and other items that handily became instruments of violent discipline. Cinqué and Bau recalled, “The captain of the schooner was very cruel; he beat them on the head very hard with any thing he could catch.” Cinqué remembered with fierce anger a time when Celestino slapped him on the head with a plantain. The cook would pay dearly for this mistake.12

  The Amistad Africans also complained that they were given too little to eat and drink on the voyage—“half eat half drink” was how Fuli described short allowance. In concrete terms this meant two potatoes and one plantain twice a day, in the morning and evening. The fare may have been enough for the children on board, but it was too little for the men. Kinna recalled that the captain “gives us but little eat.” Cinqué and Bau added that they were kept “almost starved”—this on a vessel that was full of food.13

  Water was a greater source of strife. Grabeau and Kimbo recalled that “their allowance of food was very scant, and of water still more so. They were very hungry, and suffered much in the hot days and nights from thirst.” The allotment of water was half a teacupful in the morning and half a teacupful in the evening. As the prisoners suffered, they watched the crew wash their clothes in fresh water. To make matters worse, Celestino taunted them by taking long drafts in front of them. Kinna recalled, “he drink plenty, long.” On a craft sailing through the tropics in midsummer, the Africans simply were not given enough water to support nature.14

  At least some of the captives seem to have been able to move around the vessel during the daytime, and they took matters into their own hands. They searched for water and they found it belowdecks. To satisfy their burning thirst, they tapped and drank it, without permission. When they were caught, Captain Ferrer decided to teach everyone a lesson. At least five men—Fuli, Kimbo, Pie, Moru, and Foone—and perhaps as many as seven (Sessi, Burna)—were each, by turn, restrained and flogged.15 “[F]or stealing water which had been refused him,” Fuli “was held down by four sailors and beaten on the back many times by another sailor, with a whip having several lashes.” He referred to the
lacerating cat-o’-nine-tails, the primary instrument of power aboard a slave ship. The sailors then flogged the other four, then repeated the entire cycle of punishment four times on each person. In order to maximize the torture, the seamen, with Ruiz’s permission, mixed together “salt, rum, and [gun] powder” and applied the burning compound to Fuli’s wounds. Not surprisingly—for gunpowder was often used by sailors in tattooing—the marks of the wounds on Fuli’s back were still visible months later. Kinna later pointed out another use of the compound: “Rum, salt, powder—put togedder, make eat dis I tell you.” In October, one of the Africans was still “lame, so as hardly able to walk, as he declares from blows received on board the Amistad.” Tensions aboard the schooner escalated amid the hunger, thirst, violence, torture, and blood. As the Africans later announced, “They would not take it.”16

  Who Is for War?

  Shortly after the morning meal of Sunday, June 30, Cinqué and Celestino squared off in a fateful encounter on the main deck of the Amistad. Tension had been rising between the two. Celestino had cuffed Cinqué and had likely been greeted in return by fiery eyes of resistance. He expanded his campaign by taunting the proud prisoner, of whom it could have been said, “Dat man ha big heart too much.”17

  Because the two men shared no common language, Celestino communicated by signs and gestures—“talking with his fingers,” as one African recalled—and the menacing cook’s knife he held in his hand. In order to answer the questions that were on every captive’s mind—where are we going and what will become of us at the end of the voyage?—Celestino drew his blade’s edge across his throat: they were going to a place where they would all be killed. The cook then made a chopping motion with his knife to show that their bodies would then be hacked to bits by the white men. He took the imagined bits of flesh to his mouth: they would be eaten. He gestured to a cask of salt beef, implying that it was filled with the bodies of Africans from a previous voyage; he gestured again to an empty cask indicating that therein lay their fate. As Cinqué noted, “The cook told us they carry us to some place and kill and eat us.” Kinna added that Celestino “with his knife, made signs of throat-cutting. &c., and pointed to the barrels of beef, and thus hinted to Cinquez, that himself and his companions were to be cut up and salted down for food like beef.” He pointed to “an Island ahead where the fatal deed was to be perpetrated.” His words had direct impact, although they did not terrorize and pacify, as he had intended they should. Instead, they galvanized the Africans to action. Every account of the uprising told by any of the Amistad Africans emphasized the decisive importance of Celestino’s threat as a catalyst of rebellion.18

  The slave-sailor’s taunt resonated with a potent set of beliefs held by the Amistad Africans. In their African homelands, people had long believed that the strange white men who showed up on the coast in “floating houses” were cannibals. Those forced aboard slave ships often thought that the casks of beef they saw held the flesh of previous captives and that puncheons of “red wine” held their blood. Slaveholders in many parts of West Africa had tried to strengthen discipline in their own societies by threatening to sell slaves to the white men, who would, they explained, carry them across the “great waters” and eat them. Since many of the Amistad captives came from deep inland and had never seen white men, their ships, or even the sea, Celestino’s threat of cannibalism was believable.19

  Strengthening that grim prospect was another belief, common among the Mende, the Temne, and other groups that cultural power was often wielded through the control and manipulation of body parts, which provided access to the world of malevolent spirits. Witches and sorcerers made special efforts to secure the hair, teeth, and bones of famous warriors, which might be used to create potent “medicine.” Was Celestino a sorcerer, a honei, who used his powers on behalf of the white men? Did Cinqué the warrior feel threatened by the taunt? One of the main functions of the Poro Society was to punish, and at times to execute, witches and sorcerers who worked against the common good.20

  That night, after the vexed encounter between Cinqué and Celestino, as the Amistad sailed past Bahia de Cadiz a little before midnight, a storm arose from the shore. Rain poured from a dark, cloudy, moonless sky. Ruiz remembered it as a “black night.” High winds prompted Captain Ferrer to order all hands aloft to take in the topsails to reduce the power of the wind to buffet the vessel. In a couple of hours, the rain stopped and the storm abated. All of the crew and passengers, except the helmsman, retired and were soon “sunk in sleep.”21

  A bigger storm was brewing in the hold of the vessel. Celestino’s murderous sign language had created a crisis among the captives. As Grabeau stated and Kimbo affirmed, his sinister threat of death and cannibalism “made their hearts burn.” Kinna remembered, “We very unhappy all dat night—we fraid we be kill—we consider.” Soon, “We break off our chains and consider what we should do.” Crowded together in the hold of the ship, where their broad capacity to communicate allowed them to “consider,” they held a palaver and urgently debated what to do in the face of an unspeakably horrible mass death.22

  An “old man” named Lubos had earlier reminded everyone that “no one ever conquered our nation, & even now we are not taken by fair means.” They were warriors, after all, and someone, perhaps Cinqué, soon asked, “Who is for War?” Everyone was, except a few Bullom men, who did not want to “make war on the owners of the vessel.” Lubos responded to their reluctance by asking whether they would rather be “slaughtered for Cannibals” or “die fighting for life.” The latter was at least an honorable death.

  These warriors would not be transformed into slaves easily. The Amistad Africans had actually begun to organize themselves much earlier, at Lomboko, where Cinqué and Grabeau met. The former was a warrior, perhaps a head war man; the latter was apparently a high-ranking member of the Poro, as suggested by his extensive scarification and a comment by someone who knew him in Mende country before his enslavement, that he was “connected with a high family, though poor himself.” Cinqué and Grabeau used their combination of military, spiritual, and political authority to expand the core group that would lead the rebellion: Burna, the third leading figure, and Moru, both Gbandi; Shule (“fourth in command, when on board the schooner”) and Kimbo, both Mende; and Fa and Faquorna, nationality unknown, but likely Mende. All had probably been warriors of reputation in their native societies. Their knowledge, experience, and mindset of combat would now be crucial components of self-defense and emancipation. Other experienced warriors included Gnakwoi, who had fought with Goterah’s mercenary army, and Grabeau, who had battled “insurgent slaves” not far from the American colony of Liberia. Cinqué, Bau, and no doubt many others “had been in battles, in their own country” and were trained in the use of muskets, likely as members of the army of King Amara Lalu, who fought the aggressive expansion of King Siaka, the aging, almost blind but still paramount king allied with the Spanish.23

  The rebels had even more recent and relevant experience in warfare: they had engaged in an uprising aboard the slave ship Teçora. Their reputation had followed them ashore into the barracoons of Havana, where Captain Ferrer of the Amistad was “warned, previous to sailing, to keep a look out for the negroes, as they had attempted to rise and take the vessel in which they were brought from Africa.” That rebellion failed. Some of its makers may have been executed at El Horcón; others would get another chance to seize a vessel and free themselves. They studied the ship and whispered their findings to each other in the hold. They wanted to know how the vessel worked (some had probably worked on the Teçora), how many were the crew, what were their habits, what were their arms. (The crew was small; they kept no regular watch; they had muskets, pistols, and whips.) The warriors saw that the prospects for rebellion aboard the Amistad were much greater than they had been on the Teçora.24

  Their hearts aflame over Celestino’s threat, the Africans met as a kind of displaced but reconstituted floating Poro Society, far from its normal
meeting places inland in West Africa, to “consider” the situation. United by the “fictive kinship” that grew ever stronger out of their common ordeal at Lomboko, on the Teçora, in the Havana barracoons, and now on the Amistad, they made a fateful collective life-and-death decision: together they would rise up, throw off their slavery, regain their freedom, seize the vessel, and try to sail it home to Sierra Leone. At the end of the palaver, everyone had “one word WAR!! and war immediately.” The Poro had created ngo yela—“one word” or “unity”.25

  The decision made, the Africans now faced a literally iron dilemma. How would they get out of the manacles, shackles, neck-rings, chains, and padlocks that rendered them unable to move about the ship? Cinqué later remarked that “the chain which connected the iron collars about their necks, was fastened at the end by a padlock, and that this was first broken and afterwards the other irons.” Kinna also stated, “We break off our chains,” but he added a second, somewhat different description of what they did: Cinqué found a loose nail on deck and used it to pick the central padlock. Whether the locks were broken or picked, it was significant that two of the forty-nine enslaved men were blacksmiths, who knew the properties of iron intimately from their work. Sessi was described as “a blacksmith, having learnt that trade of his brother; he made axes, hoes, and knives from iron obtained in the Mendi country.” When speed was crucial to avoiding detection, getting so many people out of irons was necessarily a communal undertaking. Soon a substantial number of men were free of their chains and ready to fly into action, awaiting Cinqué’s “signal for them to rise upon their vile masters and the crew.”26