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

by Grandin, Greg

  One of these isolatos was an “English lad, by the name of Bill” who took the idea of freedom further than most did during his day. Having fled his ship, he lived in one of Más Afuera’s many caves, deciding he wanted nothing to do with either shipboard discipline or the modern world’s new master, money. “He keeps at work sealing,” said a sailor who spoke with him, “and says if he can get bread and rum he shall be contented.” Bill sold the sailor sixty skins, asking only to have his “keg filled” in exchange.

  The sixty skins were worth twenty dollars, the sailor said, which would buy much more than two gallons of rum. Bill didn’t care. “He says he was never so happy before; there is no larboard watch, no reefing top-sails, no body to quarrel with, and he sleeps when he pleases and works when he pleases.”13

  “Want nothing else?” the sailor asked. “No,” answered Bill.

  15

  A TERRIFIC SOVEREIGNTY

  Second mate William Moulton also tried to flee from his captain, George Howe, master of the sealing schooner Onico. Howe had become abusive shortly after the Onico left New London in late 1799. At first Moulton and the rest of the crew thought he was afflicted by drink. Howe “clipped his words” and suffered long “spells of hiccupping.” He slept most of the day on the quarterdeck, “so profoundly” that he didn’t wake when the sea broke “over him with an impetuosity that almost threatened to wash him off.”1

  Moulton began to see a deeper malice behind the captain’s cruelty, which couldn’t be explained by alcohol or by the pressure caused by the falling price of sealskins. Howe, decided Moulton, was intoxicated by unchecked power. Maimed and blind in the right eye, he was impressive. One can’t read Moulton’s 1804 account of his eventful voyage without thinking of Melville’s Captain Ahab. Moulton describes Howe as tall and lean, with a sharp nose, thin lips, and a “sneerful smile.” He was a “genius,” a “monocular master,” who compensated for what he lacked in mathematical and astronomical talent by cursing God and nature: “no Son of Neptune can excel him in execrating the elements and their author, the winds, and him that sent them.”

  Where Ahab tapped into wells of dark emotion to bind his men to him, making them think they were joining his mania out of their own free will, Howe ruled only by fear and division. He invented useless chores, like heaving seawater up in a bucket and passing it awkwardly along up a line of men in the rigging, until the bucket was empty and the men soaked. “Discord among his crew was the basis of his strength.” He often ordered one group of hands to give their biscuits to another. Without cause, he lashed men to the deck cannons to be “cobbed,” forcing all hands to participate in the paddling lest they themselves incur “like punishment.” Howe commanded other “victims” of his “vengeance” to “hold their faces fair” to his “strokes.” If they turned away, he would direct his blows to “the more sensitive and vital parts” of their body.

  Disfigured, damning God and nature to hell, and exercising a “terrific sovereignty” over his crew, Howe took pleasure, Moulton said, “proportionate to the misery of others.” When the Onico dropped anchor to hunt seals at Staten Land, a craggy, mountainous island off the tip of Tierra del Fuego, where the sea surged “against all sides of it with great violence,” the abuse continued. Howe forbade his men from building their own shelters until they had raised his own commodious fifty-rafter hut and covered it with the thickest sealskins. He withheld medicine and food, kept them “on seals” till they were sick, and refused to let them wear warm clothing. Howe watered down the ship’s rum and taxed the crew’s own liquor supply, whipping all who dared protest until they were bloody. Howe became obsessed with Moulton, who, having fought in the American Revolution, represented a living symbol of rights and a challenge to arbitrary authority.

  Moulton tried to escape. Setting out on a twelve-day trek to the other side of the island, he slept in caves, climbed precipices, and slipped down into deep valleys, barely avoiding landslides. With Howe following on his heels carrying “fire arms well loaded with powder and ball” and swearing “revenge,” Moulton crawled “up a gulch to gain the top of a mountain” and called to God to rescue him from “covetous one-eyed self interest.” “Oh! Pride and ambition, what havoc have you made,” he cried, “let me be delivered from malice, deceit, and envy.… Lord, save or I perish.” Howe caught him on the far side of the island and dragged him back to the Onico.

  * * *

  The extent of George Howe’s hatred of Moulton was extreme, but his power over his crew was typical. Both maritime law and custom granted captains of whalers, slavers, merchantmen, sealers, and naval vessels absolute authority over their men. “A Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession,” thought one eighteenth-century mariner. Captains could whip at will; the quarterdeck where floggings took place was often referred to as the “slaughter-house.” Sailors were punished for the most minor offenses: losing a whaleboat’s oar, breaking a dish, or letting an African slave drink out of the wrong water cask. Captain Francis Rogers of the Crown told his crew that he would “skin them alive,” while another shipmaster told a sailor that he would “split his Soul or Stab him and eat a piece of his Liver.” Captains doled out their punishment with a “brutal severity,” said one account, describing what happened when an old hand on a slave ship anchored off Bonny Island complained about his water allowance: a deck officer beat him until his teeth fell out and then jammed “iron pump-bolts” in his mouth, forcing him to swallow his blood.2

  Legally, ships remained redoubts of the old regime well through and beyond the Age of Revolution. It wasn’t until 1835 that the U.S. Congress passed an act that tried to place merchant ships under the rule of law and due process, making it a crime punishable by $1,000 or five years in prison for “any master or other officer, of any American ship or vessel on the high seas” to, with “malice, hatred, or revenge, and without justifiable cause, beat, wound, or imprison, any one or more of the crew … or withhold from them suitable food and nourishment, or shall inflict upon them any cruel and unusual punishment.” And it wasn’t until 1850 that the navy outlawed flogging on its vessels. But these practices continued well past their legal abolitions. “No southern monarch of the slave,” said a sailor in an account of his voyages in 1854, could best the “brutality” and “want of moral principle” of sea captains.3

  Still, the new language of rights spreading around the Atlantic and Pacific following the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions provided sailors with new ways to think about shipboard sovereignty, along with ways to contest it when they felt it was unfairly exercised.

  * * *

  By the time Moulton returned to the Onico’s sealing camp, he found most of the rest of his shipmates ready to join him against Howe. They were younger than Moulton, but most of their fathers had fought in the revolution, so they did what their parents’ generation did: they elected an assembly, drafted a declaration, and voted to rebel against a man named George.

  Like the Declaration of Independence, on which it was clearly modeled, the document the sealers of the Onico composed in September 1800 was both a litany of specific grievances and a treatise on natural law and just rule. There, on a remote island at the bottom of the world, its drafters identified themselves as “citizens of the United States of America” and announced they were opposing Howe’s “authority without reason.”

  They listed many of the captain’s specific abuses and quickly moved on to their main point: “It would be an endless, endless talk, should we attempt to enumerate all the instances of your tyranny, though of sufficient magnitude to deserve particular notice. What power is there that you could have assumed, which you have not assumed?” “If you exercise this mighty power by right,” they asked, where “did you derive this right?”

  Most of the Onico’s sealers deliberated on every stage in planning their mutiny, taking direct votes before proceeding on any action. As in the American Revolution itself, there were limits. The crew’s
one unnamed “negro” was, Moulton wrote in his journal without further comment, “excluded from the knowledge of these proceedings.”

  * * *

  The rebellion was called off before it started. Faced with the threat of having his ship seized and being placed in chains, Howe not only capitulated but “embraced substantially” the spirit of the crew’s petition. With goodwill restored, the near-mutinous men boarded the Onico, hauled anchor, and made for Más Afuera.

  They arrived on the island—which at this point was serving as the capital of what might be called the Oceanic Republic of Sealers—on October 30, finding it crowded with the gangs from at least ten ships, along with the hundred or so unattached “alone men.” Amasa Delano was there with the Perseverance, as were the Nantucket Swain brothers, captains of the Mars and the Miantonomoh. Out of New Haven was the Oneida, which had on board an “apostate Methodist priest.” Though he declared himself an atheist and spent his nights “drinking and carousing,” the minister continued to preach during the day.

  Open-minded Amasa Delano believed the doubting priest to be a “man of fine sense and liberal principles” and invited him to give a sermon on board the Perseverance. Moulton, having befriended the cleric, suggested he take 2 Corinthians 4 as his text:

  We faint not. But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.… We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.

  Good republicans like Moulton interpreted the verse as supporting natural, inherent rights: the fact that every man had his own God-given conscience shining in his heart—the “light of nature,” as Delano put it elsewhere—meant that sovereignty, reason, morality, and justice were vested in individuals and didn’t spring from “fountain head” despots like George Howe.

  * * *

  Once at Más Afuera, Howe didn’t return to his old generalized arbitrariness but rather concentrated his bile on Moulton, threatening to leave him stranded on the mainland, where the Spaniards would take him prisoner and put him to work “in the mines.” Moulton responded by composing another declaration, this time directed not to Howe but to all the “American Masters” at Más Afuera, including Amasa Delano, who were acting like the informal island colony’s ad hoc governing council. Once again, Moulton recounted Howe’s many insults, concluding his defense by asking to be released from all his obligations to Howe and the Onico’s owners.

  The council of captains convened a hearing on March 15, 1801, hosted by Valentine Swain, master of the schooner Miantonomoh. Around a head table in the captain’s quarters sat Delano, the Swain brothers, and four other seal shipmasters, who conducted the inquiry with decorum and solemnity. They called witnesses and considered evidence but the case came down to the balance of Moulton’s portage bill, the record kept by ships listing a sailor’s credits and debits. Moulton didn’t contest that his share of the voyage was worth less than what he owed on cash advances and for the tobacco and other provisions he had taken from the Onico’s slop chest. But he said his debt should be deducted from Howe’s earnings, since it was Howe’s erratic rule that made the voyage unprofitable.

  The captain-judges decided in Moulton’s favor, ruling that he was no longer obligated to Howe. Moulton was elated, until he realized that the Swain brothers, who were employed by the same Norwich merchant company that owned the Onico, were using the dispute to best Howe. They wanted his ship, crew, and what few skins he had. They weren’t so much absolving Moulton’s debt as transferring it to Valentine Swain and the Miantonomoh. That’s why Valentine Swain had had Moulton’s chest brought on board his ship before the hearing, to make it difficult for Moulton to flee.

  Captain Swain demanded to know Moulton’s intentions, but Moulton hedged. He was fighting here for a principle, the doctrine of “free labor,” the idea that since every man possessed his own conscience in the eyes of God, he also possessed his own labor. For Moulton, this meant “sealing for myself or whomever I pleased.” Yet now he was being passed from one master to another like, as he put it, a “tool.”

  Standing before these lords of the island in the oak-lined cabin of one of their “most consequential,” Moulton was acutely aware that there were forms of power that might not exactly be called slavery yet were coercive nonetheless. The captains’ recommendation that he join the crew of the Miantonomoh was presented to him merely as “advice.” Moulton, however, had no doubt that it was the “advice of those who commanded nearly all the ships and property of merchants belonging to the United States in this ocean, and who dictated, divided, and parceled out the sealing ground on this island.”

  “You will at once see how near that advice approached to a command,” was how Moulton described his predicament in his memoir.

  Moulton thanked the captains for releasing him from Howe’s authority. He then muttered “some ambiguous expressions” to evade Swain’s question and conceal his intentions. The Miantonomoh, set to sail the next day for Valparaiso, was leaving a sealing gang behind, which Moulton said he would join. That night, he removed his chest and bedding from the ship and fled to the interior of the island.

  Swearing never to sign his name to “another portage bill, under any ship-master whatever,” Moulton set out to live “independently in every respect,… to seal by and for myself.”

  * * *

  Swain’s crew didn’t make it easy. Moulton built a hut and started to hunt seals, joining the ranks of Más Afuera’s hundred or so masterless alone men. He was treated as a deserter, constantly harassed by the men of the Mars and the Miantonomoh, who stole his skins and chased him from the island’s rookeries.

  Moulton had made his bid for freedom in mid-1801, just as the skinning season was about to start. After six or seven years of intensive slaughter, there were fewer seals on the island. By the end of the year, “very few clapmatches” or “young seal pups” were to be found. The only seals coming on shore were “old whigs.” Despite the shortage, the market in Canton was still saturated and prices were still falling. The result was more clashes among the seal gangs attached to specific ships on Más Afuera, more stealing, and more fighting over territory.

  In response to what today would be called an ecological crisis, some of the alone men formed an association. Having recently helped draft a “declaration of independence,” Moulton now joined with others to compose a constitution. The alone men’s “rules for their government” stipulated that any motion that was made, seconded, put to a vote, and carried by a majority would be “binding on all.” The association was an almost perfect example of the principle of government by consent, of men coming together in a state of (despoiled) nature and agreeing on a set of laws to protect their interests and freedoms.

  The charter mandated that all the alone men would collectively decide when the skinning season was to start. It allowed that whigs that wandered inland could be hunted freely but permitted “not a seal to be taken” on the beach until “we all go a sealing.” The idea was to give rookeries a chance to form and grow before they were assaulted. The members of the association would club, rip, and flipper the seals collectively as a group but they would flay the carcasses individually, with “every man” taking “what he skins” as the product of his labor. No sealing would be done on Sundays and any man caught violating the rules or stealing the skins of another member would be fined appropriately. Members, if possible, would sell their skins to ships as a group, to get a better price.

  It would have been remarkable if all the association did was to try to regulate hunting in response to vanishing seals and the predations of captains and shore gangs. Yet one of its rules went beyond that, expan
ding the idea of freedom to mean not just individual liberty but mutual interdependence and social security: “If any of us get disabled by sickness, or being bitten or wounded,” the members agreed, “there shall be an equitable proportion of sealing ground set off for the disabled person or persons; or that his deficiency of skins occasioned thereby, shall be made up to him by the rest of us, in an equal ration proportionate to the number of skins taken by each individual.” Each would do what he could, but each would have what he needed.

  For the brief few years in the late 1700s and early 1800s when the council of American sea captains, among them Amasa Delano, governed Más Afuera, they ruled less like republican emissaries than like rival emperors divvying up a continent: they signed treaties defining boundaries, commanded expeditions that fought one another over resources and wealth, came together to enforce common rules governing property and debt, and even issued their own currency.* At the same time, an odd lot of “felons, pirates & murderers” survived in the nooks and crannies of this “terrific sovereignty,” men who might either renounce Jesus and money and live in caves or decide that being free “in every respect” meant organizing a half-anarchic, half-social-democratic seal-hunting guild.

  * * *

  As to Captain George Howe, he fell apart after Más Afuera’s captain’s council ruled against him. The Onico became infested with rats, which he couldn’t smoke out. Depressed and anxious, he was, as Moulton guessed he would be, relieved of his command by the Swain brothers, who took his skins and crew.

  Howe wound up in Valparaiso, confined to the back room of a home of a respected Spanish family, gravely sick with fever. Amasa Delano considered Howe an honest and noble-minded friend, despite joining the Swain brothers to rule against him, and was surprised to learn of his whereabouts. Delano himself had dined a number of times in the house, yet his hosts never once told him that Howe was a few feet away, dying. When he paid a visit, he found the captain untended, in a room “no better than a hovel, in a most deplorable situation.” Alone in a “miserable bed,” Howe looked “wasted,” like a skeleton.