The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  The Europeans at Bonny and elsewhere in West Africa had no idea where the cargo came from. As late as 1803, the British Royal African Company instructed its agent in nearby Cape Coast Castle, on the Gold Coast west of Bonny, to survey the African merchants from whom they brought their slaves: did they come to the coast in “small parties” or “caravans”? What were the names of the “towns or villages passed through”? Were the people in these towns “Mohamedans or pagans”? If they came from the “Great Desert,” “what were the names of their tribes?” If they came “from beyond the Niger,” what did “they know concerning its course”? Did they have any information about the “great chain of mountains that are reported to extend from Manding to Abysinia”? The British had been on the Gold Coast for well over a hundred years—they had controlled Cape Coast Castle since 1664—and yet their agent could give only the vaguest answers to these questions.4

  The Africans embarked at Bonny, even if their enslavers didn’t know their origins, had a reputation for being willful and prone to fatalism. Those two qualities might seem opposing but they often resulted in the same action: suicide. One ship surgeon, Alexander Falconbridge, in his 1788 condemnation of the slave trade, tells of fifteen slaves put on a ship at Bonny who, before the ship left port, threw themselves into a school of sharks. Another voyager on a Bonny slave ship, a young boy kept awake by the “howling of these negros,” described three captives who managed to break free and jump overboard: they were “dancing about among the waves, yelling with all their might what seemed to me to be a song of triumph” until their “voices came fainter and fainter upon the wind.”5

  * * *

  The Neptune was a Liverpool slave ship, which meant that, for Mordeille, its taking was more than potentially profitable. It was personal. The Frenchman had lost his arm escaping from a Spanish dungeon, but it was during a long lockup in Portsmouth, after having been captured by a Liverpool corsair, that he developed his “tenacious hatred” of the British.6

  Liverpool had joined the fight against republicanism with exceptional fervor. When news arrived in early 1793 that the French had executed their king, Louis XVI, city fathers lowered the Union Jack that flew over the city’s Custom House to half mast. Mourning led to anger, and anger to action against the regicides, lest, warned one newspaper, the “red cap of liberty be raised, the flag of death unfurled, the Marseillaise chanted, the age of reason proclaimed, and the goddess and her guillotine be made permanent” in Piccadilly. Liverpool’s slavers, planters, and shippers financed a large mercenary fleet made up of about sixty-seven privateers, trim, fast ships mounted with twenty guns or better to take the fight against Jacobinism to the sea. For a time, French vessels were at their mercy.

  But then Paris began to field its own privateers, including Mordeille, and Napoleon’s rise led to an improvement in the republic’s naval forces. By the time the Hope fell on the Neptune, France could not only better defend itself on the open sea but go on the offensive, harassing British cargo and slave ships as they traveled to and from Caribbean sugar plantations. Sailing under a Dutch flag with a French letter of marque, Mordeille was among the most tenacious of these avengers, hailed by the Napoleonic press as the scourge of Liverpool: “Mordeille! Mordeille! Small and frail, but in the breach he has the strength of heroes.”7

  The Neptune was owned by John Bolton, one of the largest backers of the city’s mercenary fleet and an outfitter of a private anti-Jacobin squad of nearly six hundred men he named Bolton’s Invincibles, armed to protect Liverpool from enemies within and without. Born the “poor boy” son of a village apothecary, he started his career as an apprentice clerk in the West Indies, and legend has it that he parlayed a sack of potatoes and a brick of cheese into the start-up capital of what became a slaving empire. Leaving his “coloured” wife and children behind penniless in the Caribbean, he returned to Liverpool, splitting his time between the bustle of his Henry Street counting house and Storrs Hall, a country mansion built in the middle of an ornamental grove on a wooded promontory overlooking Windermere Lake, where he entertained Tory politicians and Romantic poets, including his friend William Wordsworth.

  Bolton might have come into life humble, but the wealth produced by at least 120 slave voyages let him leave it in a fine coffin shrouded in black velvet and studded with silver nails. His funeral cortege included:

  eight gentleman abreast, three hundred boys from the Blue Suit School six deep, two hundred and fifty Gentlemen on foot, six deep, sixty gentlemen on horseback, thirty gentlemen’s private carriages in a line. Several gigs.… Four mutes on horseback. Three mourning coaches, each drawn by four horses. Mr. Bolton’s private carriage, drawn by four, beautiful blood horses, bringing up the rear.

  It was a Scouser send-off to remember, and observers thought the bells of St. Luke tolled with exceptional beauty the day Bolton was laid to earth.8

  * * *

  As they made ready to sail across the Atlantic, the Hope and the Neptune were floating contradictions of the Age of Revolution. On board one ship were enslaved Africans understood to be property, which meant that according to some interpretations of natural-law liberalism they could be bought, sold, and traded as cargo. On board the other, a multihued crew lived the French Revolution’s promise of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Europeans, mostly French and Spanish, worked alongside dark-skinned Portuguese mulattos and black Africans and Haitians who served as gunners and musketeers. They assigned no title to skin color and spoke an egalitarian patois sounding sort of like French but with traces of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and old langue d’oc, along with words picked up from around the Caribbean and the coasts of West and East Africa. Mordeille himself, born on the Mediterranean, not far from Marseilles and a short sail from North Africa, was once described as “black as an Ethiopian.”9

  The color line did not, strictly speaking, divide the Atlantic between masters and slaves. In the navies and merchant fleets of all the seafaring empires and republics at the time, men of color—among them, Africans, South Sea islanders, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, and freed American blacks—worked on ships, including slave ships, as cooks, cabin boys, sailors, and even, in a few instances, captains. Nor did white skin protect against the kind of arbitrary rule over body and will associated with chattel slavery. Press gangs roamed the wharves and piers of port cities throughout the British realm on the hunt for men to fill the ships of the Royal Navy, looking nothing so much as like the slave gangs that stalked the coasts and rivers of Africa.10

  In Liverpool, the vanguard of merchant reaction, savage fellows patrolled the streets, often led by a “dissipated, but determined-looking officer, in a very seedy uniform and shabby hat.” Men would flee and children scream upon catching sight of them. Word quickly went out that there were “hawks abroad.” Pity the poor sailor who didn’t keep his door bolted and shades drawn: “he was seized upon as if he were a common felon, deprived of his liberty, torn from his home, his friends, his parents, wife or children, hurried to the rendezvous-house, examined, passed, and sent on board the tender, like a negro to a slave-ship.”11

  Once at sea sailors were subject to rule as feudal as the ancien régime and as brutal as the plantation. They could be flogged, tarred, feathered, keelhauled—dunked in the ocean and dragged under the hull, barnacles doing to backs in a minute what it took the whip fifteen lashes—or executed, made to walk the plank or hung by the yardarm. Even on ships like the Hope, which sailed with an insurgent élan and did away with rank, the authority of Mordeille, whether he be called citizen or captain, was absolute.12

  The African slave trade, however, was a different kind of bondage. It not only survived the dawn of the Age of Liberty but was expanding and becoming even more lucrative. And so back on the Neptune, after it had been secured, its dead heaved overboard, its British prisoners shackled, and its African cargo counted, Mordeille did the math and guessed that the ship’s slaves were worth, wholesale, at least 80,000 silver pesos (it’s nearly impossible t
o do a straight conversion into today’s currency, but this princely sum was roughly equal to the annual salaries of the viceroys of Mexico and Peru, the highest Spanish officials in the Americas).

  It doesn’t seem that Mordeille gave much thought to the contradiction, the fact that he was a Jacobin believer in the rights of man and the liberties of the world who made his living seizing British slaves and selling them to Spanish American merchants. After all, he swore allegiance not to ideals but to the French nation, which had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794 only to restore it eight years later. Napoleon’s 1802 announcement of its restoration was terse: “Slavery shall be maintained”; the slave trade “shall take place.” In any case, the revolution’s to-ing and fro-ing when it came to slavery and freedom mattered little to the privateer or, apparently, to his men.

  When everything was ready on board the Neptune, the inventory complete, the rudder repaired, the damaged sails replaced, and the rigging redone, the two ships, the victor and its vanquished prize, set sail for Montevideo. The British, including the officers, had been placed in a hold, not the one that contained the Africans but a smaller one, below the Neptune’s quarterdeck.

  * * *

  Until about the 1770s, most Africans who made the Middle Passage to America didn’t travel much farther once they crossed the Atlantic. The main slave harbors of the Americas—New Orleans, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Alexandria, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, Baltimore, and Charleston—were portals to coastal, river, and island plantations, haciendas, and cities where most of the captives who survived the voyage would spend the rest of their lives.

  But the West Africans brought into Montevideo by Mordeille on the Neptune were arriving as part of slavery’s new extreme, the motor of a market revolution that was remaking Spanish America. They had already traveled more than five thousand miles from Bonny to Río de la Plata. They were about to be thrust into the wheels of mercantile corruption, though for them there would be no difference between what was called crime and what passed for commerce. And for those captives who would be driven on toward the Pacific, including those who would find themselves on the Tryal, their journey was not even half over.

  2

  MORE LIBERTY

  Montevideo was a city of roof dwellers, much like how Nathaniel Philbrick describes Nantucket in the 1800s. Its houses were tightly packed on a small spit of land wedged between a handsome hill and a curved bay, leaving little room for gardens. Women arranged plants and flowers on rooftop promenades, where men in the evenings relaxed over coffee and cigars. From below came the ballads of strolling minstrels. “Love is, in general, the subject of these songs,” one British traveler to the city reported.1

  Another sound rising from the narrow streets was the long, drawn-out cries of itinerant peddlers. These hawkers were all slaves, many of them recently arrived from Africa, a fact they worked into their sing-song pitches for empanadas, sweets, milk, bread, and fish. They switched Spanish r’s for African l’s and rolled out the vowels in a great lamenting dirge, as if all the pain in the world were needed to announce that the barley cakes were made that morning:

  ¡Toooltas … toooltítas! ¡Toltitas son de cebáa!

  (Cakes … cakes … Cakes made of barley!)

  ¡Chaá que soy negla boba, pala que tanto glitá!

  (I’m a black straight from Africa, that’s why I’m shouting!)

  Toooltas … toooltítas! ¡Ya no me queda ná!

  This last sentence meant the item was sold out. But its literal translation is more plaintive, especially considering the circumstances of the vendor’s arrival: Now I’m left with nothing. The free people of the city had to have liked this mix of melancholy and commerce, the bittersweet sound of slaves selling their wares, for later residents would remember these rhymes long after the vendors had disappeared from the city streets. Today in Uruguay, children recite them in school pageants.2

  Montevideo was smaller than its sprawling sister city, Buenos Aires, which with its cowboys and muleteers still wasn’t even sure it was a port town. The waterfront in Buenos Aires was a muddy slope to a shallow river, filled with taverns, drunken sailors, and garbage. The biggest ships couldn’t get closer than eight miles to the coast. Cargo had to be put on small tenders, brought near to the shore, transferred again to amphibious carts with large wheels that jacked the wagon bottom over the surf, and then pulled by horses to the beach. Later, after the river had been dredged and adequate docks built, its residents would come to call themselves porteños—people who live in a port city. In the very early 1800s, though, most “had their back to the river.” They looked inward toward the pampas.3

  Montevideans looked to the sea. Many of the city’s sky lounges were crowned with a watch tower and telescope, which, when viewed from the harbor, made Montevideo seem like a ramparted monastery. Merchants would climb their towers like monks up the bulwarks, scanning the sky for storms and the estuary for ships, with “many an anxious feeling for the safety or expected arrival of some vessel.”4

  Most goods out of and into Argentina, which was fast becoming butcher and breadbasket to the Atlantic world, passed through Montevideo’s deepwater bay. Out went hides, lard, dried beef, wheat, brass, copper, wood, cacao, Peruvian bark, yerba maté, and vinegar. In came Havana rum, Boston and British textiles, English furniture and paper, French hats, candy and gilded bracelets from Cádiz, and sugar, tobacco, and hard cane liquor from Brazil.

  And slaves. There was a “hunger” for slaves, said an observer at the time, a “thirst.” Montevideo was Río de la Plata’s official slave harbor. All slave ships, even if they were bound for Buenos Aires, had by law to stop there and be inspected by the port’s doctor and assessed by its tax collector. Slaves headed to upriver ports would be transferred to regularly scheduled cargo ships connecting the gulf to Paraguay. Most of the slavers that came in were accounted for, their cargo part of an importer’s consignment.

  Every day, though, merchants would mount their roof towers to see what else the tide brought in, hoping to make a little extra money with the arrival of an unanticipated ship. In late January, one expectant merchant noticed the Neptune shortly after it had dropped anchor, its deck filled with what he underestimated to be a “hundred and something” slaves. “I doubt they will permit their sale,” he wrote in a note to Martín de Alzaga, among Buenos Aires’s wealthiest men, “but I’m sure it will happen anyway.”5

  * * *

  When Mordeille arrived in Montevideo, its half-moon harbor was filled with moving men and ships sitting low in the water, their holds heavy with cargo and sails struck in repose. There was a busy wharf beach, lighted with fires burning pitch, and back behind that a crescent row of workshops where blacksmiths and colliers, carpenters, joiners, block makers, junk pickers, and caulkers readied vessels for their return to the sea. Stevedores, many of them black- and brown-skinned slaves themselves, hauled casks and crates and other slaves from the newly arrived ships. In the counting rooms of the city’s warehouses, clerks and cash keepers in high-backed chairs recorded who owed what to whom in the business of moving humans halfway across the world. They managed the long trail of paperwork—promissory notes, exchange bills, current account books, insurance policies, consignment invoices, freight and tax receipts—that tied the ports of the Río de la Plata to interior cities, Chile, and Peru and, in the other direction, out into the Atlantic, to London, Liverpool, Boston, New York, and trading ports in Africa and Brazil.

  This was what historians call Spanish America’s market revolution, and slaves were the flywheel on which the whole thing turned.

  For centuries, the Spanish Crown had tried to regulate slavery, along with all other economic activity in the Americas, under a system called mercantilism. Spain prohibited its colonies from trading with one another, banned foreign ships from entering American ports, prohibited individual merchants from owning their own fleets of cargo ships, and limited manufacturing. Selected countries or companies were granted the monopol
y right to import slaves, and only into a handful of ports, principally Cartagena in Colombia, Veracruz in Mexico, and Havana in Cuba. The idea was to prevent the development of a too-powerful merchant class in America, making sure its colonies remained a source of gold and silver and an exclusive for goods made in or shipped through Spain.

  That was the theory, anyway. The practice was something else. Contrabanding flourished from the early days of the Conquest. The city of Buenos Aires was conceived in corruption. During its early years in the 1500s, its Spanish founders did well skimming off the Andean silver that passed through the city to Spain, and over the centuries smuggling made up a large part of Río de la Plata’s trade. When one early Spanish governor tried to stop the smuggling of slaves by Portuguese traders from Brazil, he was poisoned to death. By the late 1700s, illegal, untaxed trade, much of it coming from the new United States or Great Britain, made up nearly half the gulf’s commerce. Merchandise flowed in and out of the Atlantic, back and forth through the porous border with Brazil, and up and down the Paraná River, which connected both Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Paraguay.6

  Africans were often the contraband. They might be unloaded at night on a dark beach down the coast from Buenos Aires and brought unnoticed into the city’s market. Or their importer could march them into the city during the day and simply say they were negros descaminados—“lost blacks”—found someplace in the interior, which meant their sale was exempt from import licenses or tax receipts. At times, though, Africans were the cover for what was really being smuggled, with merchants using permission to import a small consignment of slaves to mask a hold full of Parisian toilet water or New York pickles. And on some British ships coming into Spanish American ports, black sailors temporarily pretended to be slaves, just long enough to convince customs inspectors that they were the ship’s cargo and not whatever it was that was being smuggled.7