Apart from a wholly invented ending, Benito Cereno, published in installments in a magazine called Putnam’s Monthly in late 1855, is mostly faithful to Delano’s account: after the ruse is revealed, the ship is captured and its rebels turned over to Spanish authorities. But it is what happens on the ship, which takes up two-thirds of the story, that led reviewers at the time to comment on its “weird-like narrative” and to describe reading it as a “creeping horror.”4
Most of Benito Cereno takes place in the fictional Delano’s mind. Page after page is devoted to his reveries, and readers experience the day on board the ship—which was filled with odd rituals, cryptic comments, peculiar symbols—as he experiences it. Melville keeps secret, just as it was kept secret from Delano, the fact that the slaves are running things. And like the real Delano, Melville’s version is transfixed by the Spanish captain’s relationship to his black body servant. In the story, Melville combines the historical Babo and Mori into a single character called Babo, described as a slight man with an open face. The idea that the West African might not only be equal to the Spanish captain but be his master was beyond Delano’s comprehension. Amasa observes Babo gently tending to the unwell Cereno, dressing him, wiping spittle from his mouth, and nestling him in his black arms when he seems to faint. “As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white,” Melville writes, “Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other.” At one point, Melville has Babo remind Cereno it is time for his shave and then has the slave psychologically torture the Spaniard with a straight razor, as Amasa, clueless, watches.
Melville wrote Benito Cereno midway between the critical and commercial failure of 1851’s Moby-Dick and the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, at a moment when it seemed like the author and the country were going mad. Crammed into one day and onto the deck of a middling-sized schooner, the novella conveys a claustrophobia that could be applied either to Melville (he had at this point shuttered himself away from the world, in the “cold north” of his Berkshire farm) or to a nation trapped (as Amasa Delano was trapped) inside its own prejudices, unable to see and thus avert the coming conflict. Soon after he finished it, Melville collapsed and America went to war. It’s a powerful story.5
So powerful, in fact, that it is easy to forget that the original incident it is based on didn’t occur in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War, or in the usual precincts where historians of the United States study slavery, such as on a ship in the Atlantic or on a plantation. It happened in the South Pacific, five thousand miles away from the heartland of U.S. slavery, decades before chattel bondage expanded in the South and pushed into the West, and it didn’t involve a racist or paternalist slave master but instead a New England republican who opposed slavery. The events on the Tryal illuminate not antebellum America as it headed to war but an earlier moment, the Age of Revolution, or the Age of Liberty. The revolt took place in late 1804, nearly exactly midway between the American Revolution and the Spanish American wars for independence. 1804 was also the year Haiti declared itself free, establishing the second republic in the Americas and the first ever, anywhere, born out of a slave rebellion.
* * *
Writing in the 1970s, Yale’s Edmund Morgan was one of the first modern historians to fully explore what he called the “central paradox” of this Age of Liberty: it also was the Age of Slavery. Morgan was writing specifically about colonial Virginia, but the paradox can be applied to all of the Americas, North and South, the Atlantic to the Pacific, as the history leading up to and including events on the Tryal reveals. What was true for Richmond was no less so for Buenos Aires and Lima—that what many meant by freedom was the freedom to buy and sell black people as property.6
To be sure, Spain had been bringing enslaved Africans to the Americas since the early 1500s, long before subversive republicanism, along with all the qualities that a free man was said to possess—rights, interests, free will, virtue, and personal conscience—began to spread throughout America. But starting around the 1770s, the slave trade underwent a stunning transformation. The Spanish Crown began to liberalize its colonial economy and the floodgates opened. Slavers started importing Africans into the continent any which way they could, working with privateers to unload them along empty beaches and in dark coves, sailing them up rivers to inland plains and foothills, and marching them over land. Merchants were quick to adopt the new language associated with laissez-faire economics to demand the right to import even more slaves. And they didn’t mince words saying what they wanted: they wanted más libertad, más comercio libre de negros—more liberty, more free trade of blacks.
More slaves, including Babo, Mori, and the other Tryal rebels, came into Uruguay and Argentina in 1804 than any year previous. By the time Amasa was cruising the Pacific, a “slavers’ fever,” as one historian has put it, had taken hold throughout the continent. Each region of America has its own history of slavery, with its own rhythms and high points. But taking the Western Hemisphere as a whole, what was happening in South America in the early 1800s was part of a New World explosion of chattel bondage that had started earlier in the Caribbean, and was well under way in Portuguese Brazil. After 1812, it would hit the southern United States with special force, with the movement of cotton and sugar into Louisiana and across the Mississippi, into Texas.
In both the United States and Spanish America, slave labor produced the wealth that made independence possible. But slavery wasn’t just an economic institution. It was a psychic and imaginative one as well. At a time when most men and nearly all women lived in some form of unfreedom, tied to one thing or another, to an indenture, an apprentice contract, land rent, a mill, a work house or prison, a husband or father, saying what freedom was could be difficult. Saying what it wasn’t, though, was easy: “a very Guinea slave.” The ideal of the free man, then, answerable to his own personal conscience, in control of his own inner passions, liberated to pursue his own interests—the rational man who stood at the center of an enlightened world—was honed against its fantasized opposite: a slave, bonded as much to his appetites as he was to his master. In turn, repression of the slave was an often repeated metaphor for the way reason and will must repress desire and impulse if one were to be truly free and be able to claim equal standing within a civilization of similarly free men.7
It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776.8
* * *
The South Pacific pas de trois between the New Englander Amasa Delano, the Spaniard Benito Cerreño, and the West African Mori, choreographed by Babo, is dramatic enough to excite the wonder of any historian, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, ideas, and faiths that was New World America in the early 1800s. That Babo, Mori, and some of the rest of their companions were Muslim means that three of the world’s great monotheistic religions—Cerreño’s Catholicism, Delano’s Protestantism, and the West Africans’ Islam—confronted one another on the stage-ship.
Aside from its sheer audacity, what is most fascinating about the daylong deception is the way it exposes a larger falsehood, on which the whole ideological edifice of slavery rested: the idea not just that slaves were loyal and simpleminded but that they had no independent lives or thoughts or, if they did have an interior self, that it too was subject to their masters’ jurisdiction, it too was property, that what you saw on the outside was what there was on the inside. The West Africans used talents their masters said they didn’t have (cunning, reason, and discipline) to give the lie to the stereotypes of what they were said to be (dimwitted and faithful). That day on board the Tryal, the slave-rebels were the masters of their passions, able to defer their de
sires, for, say, revenge or immediate freedom, and to harness their thoughts and emotions to play their roles. Mori in particular, as a Spanish official reviewing the affair later wrote, “was a man of skill who perfectly acted the part of a humble and submissive slave.”9
The man they fooled, Amasa Delano, was in the Pacific hunting seals, an industry as predatory, bloody, and, for a short time, profitable as whaling but even more unsustainable. It’s tempting to think of him as the first in a long line of American innocents abroad, oblivious to the consequences of their actions, even as they drive themselves and those around them to ruin. Delano, though, is a more compelling figure. Born in the great upswell of Christian optimism that gave rise to the American Revolution, an optimism that held individuals to be in charge of their destinies, in the next life and this, he embodied all the possibilities and limits of that revolution. When he first set out as a sailor from New England, he carried with him the hopes of his youth. He believed slavery to be a relic of the past, certain to fade away. Yet his actions on the Tryal, the descent of his crew into barbarism, and his behavior in the months that followed, spoke of a future to come.
* * *
Herman Melville spent nearly his whole writing career considering the problem of freedom and slavery. Yet he most often did so elliptically, intent, seemingly, on disentangling the experience from the particularities of skin color, economics, or geography. He rarely wrote about human bondage as an historical institution with victims and victimizers but rather as an existential, or philosophical, condition common to all. Benito Cereno is an exception. Even here, though, Melville, by forcing the reader to adopt the perspective of Amasa Delano, is concerned less with exposing specific social horrors than with revealing slavery’s foundational deception—not just the fantasy that some men were natural slaves but that others could be absolutely free. There is a sense reading Benito Cereno that Melville knew, or feared, that the fantasy wouldn’t end, that after abolition, if abolition ever came, it would adapt itself to new circumstances, becoming even more elusive, even more entrenched in human affairs. It’s this awareness, this dread, that makes Benito Cereno so enduring a story—and Melville such an astute appraiser of slavery’s true power and lasting legacy.
I first learned that Benito Cereno was based on actual events when I assigned the novella for a seminar I taught on American Exceptionalisms. That class explored the ways an idea usually thought of exclusively in terms of the United States—that America had a providential mission, a manifest destiny, to lead humanity to a new dawn—was actually held by all the New World republics. I began to research the history behind Benito Cereno, thinking that a book that focused narrowly on the rebellion and ruse could nicely illustrate the role slavery played in such self-understandings. But the more I tried to figure out what happened on board the Tryal, and the more I tried to uncover the motives and values of those involved, of Benito Cerreño, Amasa Delano, and, above all, of Babo, Mori, and the other West African rebels, the more convinced I became that it would be impossible to tell the story—or, rather, impossible to convey the meaning of the story—without presenting its larger context. I kept getting pulled further afield, into realms of human activity and belief not immediately associated with slavery, into, for instance, piracy, sealing, and Islam. That’s the thing about American slavery: it never was just about slavery.
* * *
In his memoir, Delano uses a now obsolete sailor’s term, “horse market,” to describe the explosive pileup of converging tides, strong enough to scuttle vessels. It’s a good metaphor. That’s what the people on board the Tryal were caught in, a horse market of crashing historical currents, of free trade, U.S. expansion, and slavery, and of colliding ideas of justice and faith. The different routes that led all those involved in the drama to the Pacific reveal the fullness of the paradox of freedom and slavery in America, so pervasive it could trap not just slaves and slavers but men who thought they were neither.
PART I
FAST FISH
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK
1
HAWKS ABROAD
In early January 1804, a one-armed French pirate cruised into Montevideo’s harbor. The Spaniards in his multinational crew had trouble saying his name, so they called him Captain Manco—manco being the Spanish word for cripple. François-de-Paule Hippolyte Mordeille didn’t mind the nickname. It was the rank he didn’t like.
Mordeille was a seafaring Jacobin. He presided over men who wrapped red sashes around their waists, sang the “Marseillaise,” and worked the deck to the rhythms of revolutionary chants. Long live the republic! Perish earthly kings! String up aristocrats from the yardarms! Commanding ships called Le Brave Sans-Culottes, Révolution, and Le Démocrat, he patrolled the coast of Africa from Île de France (now Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean to Senegal in the Atlantic, harassing the French Revolution’s enemies and guarding its friends. Mordeille, true to his republican spirit, preferred to be addressed as citoyen—citizen—or Citoyen Manco if need be. But not captain.
Coming south from Brazil, Mordeille tacked to starboard and hugged the coastline as he entered Río de la Plata, the great water highway to Montevideo and Buenos Aires and points beyond. The broad sea gulf seemed welcoming. But it was shallow, shoaled, and rock strewn. Its fast-flowing tributaries—it was the mouth of several rivers—ran through some of the driest regions in South America, pouring tons of silty sediment into the estuary, raising sandbars, and rerouting sea lanes. Strong dark-cloud winds coming off the pampas were especially treacherous when they hit the water at low tide. Just a few years earlier a windstorm had wrecked eighty-six ships in a single blow. Even the north shore, considered the safest route in and along which Mordeille sailed, was known as “carpenter’s coast,” since woodworkers made a living salvaging the timber of washed-up broken ships.1
Of Río de la Plata’s two cities, Buenos Aires, located farther in on the south shore, was wealthier. But sailors preferred Montevideo on the north. It was littered with sunken hulls and still didn’t have a wharf or a pier, but its harbor was deeper than the shallow riverbed off of Buenos Aires and thus preferable for loading and unloading cargo. Mordeille sailed in, driving his ship, the Hope, through the bay’s muddy water to safe anchorage. Behind him came the Neptune, a prize Mordeille and his crew had taken near the Bight of Biafra.2
* * *
Copper-bottomed, teak-framed, three-masted, and three-decked, the 343-ton Neptune had a sharp-angled cutwater topped with an ornately carved prow: a lion without a crown, as the Spaniards would later describe the figurehead. It was big and looked warlike. Its purpose, though, was to carry cargo and not to fight. It was no match for smaller, better-armed vessels like the Hope, a fact that its captain, David Phillips, learned at great cost.
While the ship was anchored off Bonny Island, Phillips had heard reports that a French corvette was cruising the sea lanes, standing between him and open water. But with his hold full, he decided to risk a confrontation and make for Barbados. When he saw the Hope coming in fast on portside, Phillips gave the order to run. But his pursuer was faster, sweeping the trader’s bow, forcing it to give up the wind. Mordeille then boxhauled around, bracing his ship’s sails and returning on the Neptune. Phillips was trapped.
If the objective was to destroy the target, the fight would have been over quickly. But the rules of privateering meant that Mordeille got to keep what the Neptune was carrying, so his men aimed their guns not at its hull but at its rigging. The firing continued as boys ran back and forth watering the Hope’s deck to make sure blown powder didn’t set it alight. A party of men readied themselves with boarding axes to take the Neptune by hand. The weapons weren’t needed. A ball hit the rudder head, making it i
mpossible to steer, and after about an hour more of firing, with eleven of his crew dead, another sixteen wounded, and his sails pocked and rigging frayed, Captain Phillips surrendered.
When Mordeille’s men opened the Neptune’s hatch, they found close to four hundred Africans, mostly boys and men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, but also a number of women and children.
They were in chains and dressed in blue cotton smocks.
* * *
Spanish documents indicate that some of the Tryal rebels were among them. But they don’t say who or how many. The name Mori was common for captives embarked at Bonny. According to one database of African names, of all the recorded men called Mori to leave Africa as slaves, a plurality of them, just under 37 percent, did so from Bonny. Variations of Babo—Baboo, Babu, Baba, and so forth—were likewise found among slaves put on ships at nearby ports. Court records give the names of only thirteen other participants in the uprising, all men: Diamelo, Leobe, Natu, Quiamobo, Liché, Dick, Matunqui, Alasan, Yola, Yan, Malpenda, Yambaio, or Samba, and Atufal. The Tryal’s fifty-seven other West African men and women remain anonymous.
Most of the men and women Mordeille found on the Neptune would already have traveled weeks, in some cases months, moving along the trunks and tributaries of the enormous Niger, an ever-expanding grid reaching deep into the interior. Bonny was a popular station during these years, as big ships of considerable draft could anchor on the hard sand bed and take on large cargos, as many as seven hundred Africans in some cases. The river was “spacious and deep,” reported one English sailor around the time the Neptune would have arrived, “wider than the Thames.” At any given moment there’d be a queue of up to fifteen vessels, many of them Liverpoolers, forming along the island’s shoreline, waiting for the black traders who came down from the inland once a fortnight. The traders would arrive in flotillas of twenty to thirty canoes, each holding as many as thirty captives, to be bartered for guns, gunpowder, iron, cloth, and brandy.3
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 2