The valleys that spread out from both sides of the mountains enjoyed a mild climate, leading settlers to think they could re-create the great feudal estates of Europe in the Americas. Workers, though, were needed to plant wheat, grow grapes, and raise cattle. And before Africans started arriving in great numbers, the colonists tried to turn Indians into slaves. The Mapuche, or araucanos, on the Pacific side of the Andes were difficult to subdue, so the Spaniards turned to the Huarpes, who lived in small villages in the region north of Mendoza. Most of the demand for labor came from Santiago, which sent raiding parties over the mountains. It was the Huarpes who had saved the Spaniards from certain death when they first tried to cross the mountains, teaching them the best trails.
Now they found themselves dragged in irons over those very trails. Many froze to death. “When I crossed the cordillera,” Santiago’s archbishop wrote to King Philip II in 1601, “I saw with my own eyes the frozen bodies of Indians.” Twenty years later, his successor wrote that he had witnessed “things that made my heart cry tears.” Indians were brought over the Andes in chains and collars, and when one collapsed or died, it was easier to cut off his hands or his head rather than break the iron. The weakest were left alive to freeze to death, some of them crawling into caves to find shelter. Many tried to commit suicide by using their iron collars to choke themselves. Enslaved Indians arrived in Chile “thirsty and hungry, treated worse than the barbarians and gentiles treated the Christians of the primitive church.” The Huarpes soon disappeared as a distinct people.2
In 1601, the same year Santiago’s archbishop wrote Spain about the treatment of Native Americans, the first large consignment of Africans made the crossing. Ninety-one “Guinea Angolans” were shipped from Brazil via Buenos Aires to Santiago, with Mendoza as a transit point. They were on their way to be sold in Lima. From this point forward, the overland slave trade steadily increased, though the Crown tried at first to route all slaves into Peru through Panama. As part of the general system of mercantile restrictions, only a small number of merchants were allowed to ship slaves overland from Río de la Plata.3
But slave smuggling, especially of small groups of two or three Africans, was rampant. By the early 1600s, royal officials were complaining that there was nothing they could do to stop it. “Every year,” one wrote the king in 1639, “many unregistered blacks cross the Andes into Chile from the port of Buenos Aires.” If they were caught, merchants simply said that the slaves they were bringing over the mountains to sell in Santiago were their personal servants. In 1762, a slaver named José Matus, in order to gain the cooperation of his two slaves during the trek, told them that a land of freedom existed on the other side of the Andes and that once over they would be emancipated. When they arrived in Santiago, Matus sold them.4
* * *
No record exists of the details of the West Africans’ trip across the Andes, what Aranda’s slaves thought or felt as they began the ascent. If it weren’t for what came next, after they arrived at Valparaiso and boarded the Tryal, their journey would have slipped into history unnoticed.
The first leg of the trip, the road out of Mendoza, is dead flat and wide open, like most of the rest of the pampas. It enters the foothills through a deep valley, turning into a path that winds between two high ridges. At that point, the mules, teamsters, travelers, and about 170 Africans (Aranda had combined his shipment with those of other slavers) would have moved in a single line. After just a few turns on the switchback trail, the open pampas would have disappeared behind them. Officials had built some rudimentary bridges, and, after postmen caught in a storm were forced to burn the mail to stay alive, a few limestone-and-brick shelters to protect travelers. Otherwise, the road had changed little from when those first two Africans died on it in 1551.5
The voyagers went on foot, linked together with neck chokers made of either iron or tightly woven hemp. It was steep going, with no vegetation to bind the loose and slippery soil. The path zigzagged north by northwest along deep ravines and through gaps as narrow as eighteen inches. For much of the way up, a river of rushing snow melt followed the trail on one side, and overhanging rocks on the other. Small wooden crosses marked the places where someone had lost his footing and tumbled into the ravine. At this point, slavers took the time to remove the neck collars, afraid that if one slave decided to commit suicide they would lose the whole procession to the abyss.
Born and raised somewhere along the warm flatlands of West Africa, Aranda’s slaves had spent most of their lives in terrain where mangrove swamps and savannas gently rise into foothills. Some of them might have been from one of West Africa’s highland regions, such as Fouta Djallon, made up of sandstone plateaus out of which flow the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal Rivers, as well as some of the tributaries that feed into the Niger. On average, Fouta Djallon stands at about 3,000 feet above sea level, with its tallest point not much more than that. Now, though, the voyagers were climbing up a steep path that passed under the two tallest mountains in America. Mount Aconcagua, at 23,000 feet, is “startling in its magnitude,” wrote one nineteenth-century traveler, “overwhelming in its solitude and isolation.” Behind that, the slightly smaller yet more imposing Mount Tupungato, its vertical face scoured “crude and naked” by a never-ending “fury of wind,” looked like a rock avalanche suspended in motion that at any moment might resume its fall. The whole scene, another traveler observed of the approach to the two peaks, offered an “immense, inanimate but magnificent view of desolation.”6
Everywhere the climbers looked, they would have seen giant overhanging precipices and signs of violent earthquakes, landslides, and avalanches. Turn one way, and there was “nothing but broken, sterile mountains covered with ice.” Turn another, and there was an even “more horrible view” of “even blacker mountains, covered with even more ice.” After three days of climbing, the procession came to the Puente de Inca, a narrow, icy natural rock bridge that spanned a deep gorge. It was here that, nearly three centuries earlier, an observer had commented that Native Americans must have “diamonds on the soles of their feet,” as he watched them glide across. It sounds like an attribution of grace but perhaps merely meant that their feet were rough and hard and had traction. In any case, the bridge terrified the Spaniards. “Only the man who has made his confessions” should venture across it, said yet another traveler.7
The higher the group went and the colder it became, the more intense the disorientation. After about three days, it would have reached the trail’s high point, around the spot where Charles Darwin, traveling along this road decades later, would notice what he called the “perfect transparency of the air” and “increased brilliancy of the moon and stars.” Like Ocampo commenting that the pampas offered “no middle ground,” Darwin said it was hard to gauge perspective and to judge “heights and distance.” Not, as in the case of the flatlands, because of the boundlessness of the view but because the air contained no moisture that might refract light. Darwin described the effect as bringing “all objects … nearly into one plane, as in a drawing or panorama.” The air was so dry that the naturalist’s wooden instruments shrank noticeably and his bread petrified. Static electricity flashed from nearly everything. When Darwin rubbed his flannel waistcoat in the dark, it “appeared as if it had been washed with phosphorus.” The hair on a dog’s back “crackled” and his linen sheets “emitted sparks.”8
All this strangeness must have increased the disorientation Babo, Mori, and the others felt, of moving through a physical world that seemed not of this world. Altitude sickness would have added to their exhaustion. Africans forced along this road suffered horribly from the penetrating cold, and, like the Huape slaves before them, were often found “frozen in place.” Those who hadn’t completely succumbed were whipped to get them moving again. The sweat they built up (despite the cold) on their daylong marches froze on their skin and made the night that much more horrible. Extreme fatigue weakened resistance. The year before, in 1803, smallpox had struck a
group of about a hundred Africans as they were making the crossing, killing two. The rest arrived in Valparaiso “full of scabs.” At least four Africans who left Mendoza around the time Babo and the others started out didn’t make it across. There are stories today that still circulate among the region’s surviving Native Americans, handed down by their ancestors, of coming upon the frozen bodies of Africans, their heads or arms cut off so that their handlers didn’t have to waste time breaking their chains or cutting and then retying the hemp. A Frenchman who witnessed Africans being brought along this route a few years after Aranda’s slaves made the climb said he wished that his “prideful” countrymen could be forced to “travel through such a forsaken, steep, and ice-covered place, so that they would understand suffering.”9
The experience, he said, would strip them of their “pride and soften their hearts.”
* * *
One of the things that must have seemed familiar yet different to Babo, Mori, and their fellow captives would have been the progression of the Southern Hemisphere moon. Lunar phases are the same on both sides of the equator, yet they move in opposite directions. In the Northern Hemisphere, where all the Africans brought by Aranda were from, the bright part of the moon grows bigger from right to left. Then, halfway through the cycle following the full moon, the dark part grows larger from the same direction. But Buenos Aires, Mendoza, and Valparaiso are located well below the equator, where the moon waxes and wanes from the left.
It had to have seemed strange, this inverted moon, made brilliant by the high, dry Andean air. It was yet another sign of not just their world but heaven turned upside down. But since the new moon and the full moon are the same on either side of the equator, the West Africans had been able to mark the passing of lunar months on their more than yearlong journey from the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, then over the American continent to the foothills of the Andes.
And from what happened next, it appears they knew that December 3, 1804, about a week before they started up the mountains, was the first full day of Ramadan. And that December 27, a week after they boarded the Tryal bound for Lima, was the eve of the holiest day of that holy month: Laylat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power.
INTERLUDE
Heaven’s Sense
In Moby-Dick, out of all the Pequod’s many hands, Herman Melville chose to give Pip, a young African American cabin boy, the ability to truly see, a gift that comes to him after he nearly drowns in the Pacific.
Pip has already jumped out of the whaleboat on that “beautiful, bounteous, blue day,” frightened by a rap a harpooned whale gives to the boat’s bottom with its tail. The whale has to be lost so that Pip can be saved, a trade that earns him a rebuke from Stubb, the Pequod’s second mate. “Stick to the boat,” Stubb says. “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.”
But Pip is soon in the water again. True to his word, Stubb leaves him to drift while he chases another whale. The young boy is absolutely alone. “Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves,” the “ringed horizon” expanding “around him miserably.” “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”
Pip is finally rescued, but before he is pulled from the sea he has a vision. He sees the totality of the world, its origins and inner workings, in a single moment:
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.1
Pip is not the only one on the Pequod given a glimpse into the absolute. Ishmael, standing among a pile of whale bones, is also “borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.” But the vision doesn’t disturb Ishmael the way it does Pip. The two characters are about as distant from each other in social status as possible. Ishmael makes it clear that his decision to sign on the Pequod is entirely his own. He does say his purse is light. But the main reason he joins the voyage is because he is bored by and alienated from the artificiality of modern city living. Ishmael hopes going to sea will be a bracing experience, or at least provide entertainment to distract him from his ennui. And he makes clear that he could have joined as an officer rather than as a common sailor, but preferred not to. “Who aint a slave? Tell me that,” he says to explain his decision.
It is a curious question coming from Ishmael, who is about as free a man as one can imagine. White, educated, mobile, and a man, he has, as far as we know, no family and no debt. Yet he thinks his own condition can be generalized—and in antebellum America, no less—to all humanity. And so, standing amid the whale bones, Ishmael sees infinity but isn’t troubled. He still thinks that he is the subject of history, that “time began with man.”
Pip, though, comes out of the sea seemingly made mad by God’s indifference, and his madness is Melville’s. Melville had read the geologists, naturalists, and other scientists of his day, including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and immediately grasped the frightening potential of their arguments: that existence had no meaning, that the earth was so old, that time itself was so incomprehensible, that it rendered belief and faith in man’s centrality in the order of the universe impossible.
Over the last decades, literary scholars have scoured Melville’s writings for political meaning. Some have found the influence of a racist, expansionist culture. Others see a generous humanism, reading works like Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno as sophisticated indictments of “American values and institutions,” of slavery, empire, alienating individualism, and white supremacy. There are, though, many Melvilleans who resist turning the author into a scolding social critic. Melville could, they admit, write in sly and cutting ways about his country’s shortcomings, but he was too much of a metaphysician, and too much of an agnostic concerning his metaphysics, to turn his criticism into a political program. Melville would later pay close attention to the Civil War. There is no evidence, though, that in the 1850s he was especially concerned about the plight of actual existing slaves in the South. After the disappointment of Moby-Dick, he became preoccupied with philosophy, with larger questions of ethics, withdrawn into himself to the point that he broke down. His disquiets were at once psychic and cosmic but not, apparently, primarily political.2
Yet it is exactly Melville’s existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity. Melville wrestled with whether life had meaning, and if it had, whether its meaning was rooted in radical individualism, in human interconnectivity, or in larger moral structures; he grappled with the despair of losing one’s self in a godless cosmos, with the conflict between notions of free will and predestination and thus between belief and disbelief, with the idea that the physical world was a mirage, that one needed to punch through the pasteboard mask of surface things and grasp the underlying reality. Slavery, in a way, was the concrete manifestation of such metaphysical terrors, for it represented the same threat to real individuals as the possibility of a meaningless universe posed to the idea of the individual: oblitera
tion.
And so it is Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” told just before his near death that his labor is worth less than the energy produced by an animal’s oil, whose free will consists entirely of choosing between life on board a whale ship and life on an Alabama slave plantation (if he even had that choice; the terms of Pip’s service are not revealed), whom Melville has fully realize the implication of infinity: that man’s existence itself is insignificant. And it is Pip to whom Melville gives the power to see. What the rest of the crew thinks is babble is really an expression of his ability to take in everything all at once from every perspective; Melville has him going about the deck chanting a visionary conjugation: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
Melville read Darwin’s account of the voyage of HMS Beagle, most likely during his own sea travels in the early 1840s, when he visited many of the same shores and islands Darwin had less than a decade earlier. And Pip’s vision might have been inspired by one of its most dramatic passages.
There is a section where Darwin, during his trek over the Andes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, comes across a grove of calcified trees standing white and straight “like Lot’s wife.” He looks back behind him toward the pampas and realizes he is standing in what had once been a sea, a vast tectonic elevator that had been lifted up, brought down, and then raised up again. Darwin unfolds a quarter-billion-year history in a single burst:
I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now driven back 700 miles) came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out. The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now beheld the bed of that ocean forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height.
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 13