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

by Grandin, Greg

  The weight grew heavier as Amasa made ready to leave. “Almost the whole of our connections, whom we left behind, had need of our assistance,” he wrote, and “our absence would not be less than three years.”

  He noted feeling “more anxiety than I had ever experienced at the beginning of any enterprise.” He was taking from his “parents all the sons they had, and one grandson, and from my sisters all their brothers.” And he was feeling his forty years: “I found myself less active in body and mind than I was at the age of twenty-five.” He had no choice, though, but to face “storms, dangers, and breakers” to take what he could “from barren rocks in distant regions.”3

  The Perseverance and Pilgrim first picked up a load of salt at the Cape Verde islands, where they signed up some Portuguese sailors and a few wayward “Sandwich Islanders.” Then they sailed down the western coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean toward the Pacific, gaining additional men along the way.

  The brothers had heard that seals were scarce in the waters off Chile but the captain of a French ship had told them that the rookeries were full at King Island, in the eastern mouth of Bass Strait, the wide, windy passage that separates Tasmania from mainland Australia. The island had been home to the plentiful dark-plumed black emu. By the time the Delanos arrived in early 1804, the seals were gone and so were the emus. Over the millennia, the ostrichlike birds had evolved to be able to kick most predators to death, but within just about five years sealers hunted them to extinction, using dogs specially trained to grab the birds by the neck.4

  “Greatly disappointed at not finding any Seal on the Island of any Consequence,” the brothers headed to the western side of the strait, to Cape Barren Island. Along the way, they found the stranded Integrity, a British cutter helping to found a new prison colony up the Derwent River (which would eventually grow into the city of Hobart, Great Britain’s first and largest settlement in Tasmania). The Perseverance stayed with the ship and helped fix its broken rudder, while the Pilgrim took its cargo and passengers up the Derwent. Afterwards, Amasa sent Samuel to Sydney to present the British governor with an invoice for 400 pounds for “services performed.” The governor complained that the bill was excessively high but he had to pay it since the Integrity’s captain had signed off on the invoice. Delano, he thought, was a “piratical fellow” for taking “extortionate advantage.”5

  The Perseverance arrived in Kent’s Bay on Cape Barren Island on March 3 and set up camp. The surrounding waters were filled with “rocks, shoals, and dangers,” and the land was made up of broken granite and deep, wavy loams covered with grass trees, heath, and brushwood. Sealing had just started here and elsewhere in the strait a few years earlier. Already, though, British officials were concerned about the promiscuous slaughter of adult seals, which was leaving pups to starve to death on the beach by the thousands. If the market price had been high enough, it would have been worth it to kill young seals, since their small patches of fur could be used to make wallets and gloves. But with the China market saturated and the price of fur dropping, profit margins weren’t enough to pay for the time and effort it took to skin small seals (it was easier to just cut larger pelts into smaller pieces).6

  Delano’s most immediate problem at Cape Barren was not too few seals but too many sealers. Some of them were fugitives from mainland Australia, working for Port Jackson and Sydney merchants. Others were escapees from the convict colony on the Derwent River, where the British had started sending its “worst class” of criminals. “Ill-behaved, useless, and lazy,” many of these “abandoned hardened wretches” fled as soon as they arrived, stealing boats, muskets, gunpowder, and food and escaping into the dark of Bass Strait. They hoped to make it to New Zealand or Timor though most got only as far as Cape Barren, swelling the “number of lawless runaways who for so long a time infested” the island. These “sea-rats” joined already established merchant-contracted seal gangs or worked as alone men, living in wretched hovels and kidnapping indigenous women from Tasmania to keep as slave wives. They lit false guide fires to lure ships into shoals and then pillaged them when they wrecked.7

  Amasa said later that he had tried to avoid “open rupture” with the other sealers. It was hard, though, to withstand so many “insults from such villains.” His boats were stolen and his ships cut adrift. Many of his men couldn’t take the harassment. They deserted, either joining rival seal gangs or enlisting in the military service of “His Britannick Majesty.” With his crew dwindling in numbers, Delano was forced to replenish its ranks with escaped convicts.8

  Around mid-October, occasional hit-and-run skirmishes erupted into a full-on battle between Amasa’s away team and a sealing gang led by James Murrell, who worked for the Sydney merchant house of Kable and Underwood. After Murrell and his crew broke up a camp set up by Delano, Delano’s sailors retaliated. They pulled Murrell and a few of his men out of their cabins by their hair, dragging them over rocks and nettles to the beach, stripped them naked, tied them to trees, and flogged them till they bled. Murrell got loose and ran into the sea. He was chased down by a “Sandwich Island savage”—one of the Hawaiians in Delano’s crew—and given “several violent blows with large stones.” Murrell raised his arm in defense and was struck lengthwise between his wrist and elbow “so heavy as to cause the flesh to burst open.” He was finally dragged out of the surf half dead, abandoned on the beach in the “most excruciating pains.”

  The Perseverance and Pilgrim fled New South Wales the next day. The ships carried hardly any skins but left with at least seventeen English, Welsh, and Irish deserters or escaped convicts, along with canvas, tackle, and rigging pilfered from Murrell’s sealing camp.9

  * * *

  The Delano brothers headed east to the more familiar hunting grounds off Chile, calling on one island after another yet still finding no seals. Realizing the voyage was a bust, their men began to jump ship, a few at each anchorage. The two brothers, deciding that if they split up they could cover more territory and perhaps find a full hunting ground, made a plan to rendezvous at an island called Santa María and went their separate ways. Samuel headed to the islands of San Ambrosio and San Félix and Amasa went north, to Juan Fernández, located between Más Afuera and the mainland.

  The Perseverance dropped anchor about six miles off the island’s northwest shore. Most of the men Delano could rely on had been left elsewhere to try to find seals, leaving him feeling isolated. Captain of his ship, he felt like its prisoner. His brothers were far away and he had no one on board he had confidence in to leave in command. Nor did he trust any of his ship’s hands, especially the Tasmanian convicts, to take out the whaleboat on their own. He feared that if they made it to the island they wouldn’t come back or, if they met up with other away men, they might ally with them against him. Delano, despite his misgivings about leaving the ship, had no choice but to lead the away team himself.

  High breakers blocked his landing and his boat drifted east with the wind. The weather was overcast, and before long Delano noticed that his ship was receding away from the island, apparently having hauled anchor. It was disappearing into the west and soon looked as if it were only “as big as a man’s thumb.” Delano’s men pulled hard on the oars but couldn’t make headway. They came on a calmer bay with a small pier. The island’s governor, who was there on the dock as if waiting for them, refused to let them come ashore. Delano begged to be allowed to stay the night. The governor, under orders from Lima not to let foreigners on the island, wouldn’t relent. Delano had no choice but to head back out past the surf, where the wind and sea had grown even rougher.10

  Waves began to break over the boat. The men rowed and bailed until ten at night and still couldn’t find the Perseverance. Delano fired his musket, hoping his ship would see the flair, but the thick air muted the light. “There was such a cross sea” that with each pull of the oars water filled “half way up to the boat’s thwarts.” Yet they couldn’t wait out the storm by riding th
e waves without some kind of ballast. Every lift up by a crest of a wave was followed by a wet dive down into the trough of its swell. Delano had his men lash their oars together to make two spans, one on either side of the boat, each weighted down with stones to improvise a catamaran that helped steady the wave-tossed vessel.

  The away team stayed like that through the night, “suffering hardships in the extreme.” Amasa had almost drowned once already at Cape Barren. He, his brother William, and four other sailors were bringing barrels of fish to the shore in a small boat to smoke. But as they pulled toward land, they got caught in a horse market. Two colliding tides forced the waves to rise in a heap: their boat went up and then down and then filled with water and sank, leaving Amasa and the others “floating on the surface.” Amasa took hold of a piece of wood to keep afloat. When he looked up, he saw one of his men, a Swede named John Fostram, swimming toward him. Panicked that Fostram would pull him under, Delano began to kick furiously to get away. He looked back to see Fostram drown. “I remember but few incidents in the course of my life,” Delano later wrote, “that were more gratifying to me than that of Fostram’s sinking.” Then he saw that another sailor was also trying to reach him. He too went under. “I never until then had experienced any satisfaction at seeing a man die, but so great is the regard we have for ourselves when in danger, that we would sooner see the whole human race perish than die ourselves.” Eventually the sea calmed and Amasa, along with William and two other men, was rescued.11

  This time, though, Amasa couldn’t count on his brothers. Samuel was far to the south looking for seals and William was on a nearby island. He began to fear that the Perseverance had intentionally abandoned him. Cliques had formed on the ship, and on the sail from New South Wales to South America their leaders were constantly testing his authority. Absent the rousing power of an outside enemy to fight, like Murrell, and no seals to kill, and therefore no money to be made, some of his men had turned against him. Sailors who had been with the brothers since leaving Boston a year earlier had begun to complain that their “share” of the voyage was so far pitifully small. Those who joined along the way, especially the escaped convicts, felt little loyalty to the Delanos. Fights broke out among the crew. Acts of petty insubordination grew in frequency. His men ignored his orders. Worse, they started to mock him. “My crew were refractory, the convicts were ever unfaithful.”

  He began to rely on his chief officer, Rufus Low, to administer more frequent and heavier punishments. These retaliations worsened the situation, quickening the cycle between transgression and reprimand. Soon, a desperate Delano was meting out floggings and withholding food for only “minor offences.”* In turn, deckhands began to see Delano’s command as increasingly capricious. “Nothing pleases him,” one sailor later testified.12

  Floating in the rough sea on his rigged catamaran, Delano thought that he had lost his ship and that his crew had cast him away to die. He was thinly dressed, only in Nanking pantaloons, which were “very tight,” and a waistcoat and sleeved jacket of thin white cotton cloth. They were tight, too. Amasa laid down in the bottom of the boat and passed the night soaking wet, “with the water washing over me all the time.” The sea continued rough through the morning. By ten the storm had finally broken, allowing the boat’s men to dismantle the drag and begin again to row. Finally, after another five hours, they came upon the Perseverance. A rope and pulley had to be used to haul Delano onto his ship, since he was temporarily paralyzed from spending the cold night bound in waterlogged cotton. He asked the sailor he left in charge why he hadn’t kept track of the boat and was given only a vague answer. The storm prevented the men from doing so, he told Delano, and the strong wind made them drop their masts.

  Delano then gave an order to pick up the nearby away teams and proceed to Santa María. He needed to find his brother.

  21

  DECEPTION

  The Tryal came down along the rough, windy side of Santa María Island hard around its southern head, rocking and pitching. Only by luck did Cerreño give a wide berth to a low ledge that ran about a mile out from the point, to land full stop in a quiet bay about half a league from the Perseverance, bow to stern.

  Falling in with the Duxbury brig jolted the ship’s voyagers out of their trancelike state. For fifty-three days since the uprising, Cerreño had sailed undetected, avoiding the busy sea lanes between Valparaiso and Lima crowded with merchant vessels and naval ships. Two West African women, along with their two babies, had died of hunger and thirst, leaving a total of eighty-seven people on board: sixty-eight West Africans, their three allies—Joaquín, Francisco, and José—ten surviving sailors, four cabin boys, one passenger left from Alejandro de Aranda’s entourage, and Captain Cerreño. It had been a month since the rebels threw Aranda into the sea, and his murder had eased tensions. As did the pledge Cerreño signed to take the rebels to Senegal.

  But the situation was dire. Food was short and water gone. There would have been dew in the evening, almost as dense as rain, though not enough to keep the travelers hydrated. After the deaths of the two women and their children, desperation had turned to stupor.1

  The Tryal was broad-beamed, built like many of New Bedford’s oak whaling and trading ships for seaworthiness. The voyagers, though, had eaten their way through much of the food merchandise that had served as ballast, the casks of lard, bushels of wheat, boxes of biscuits, chickens, pigs, and cows that weighted the ship and helped keep it steady. And they had run into a bad storm shortly after Aranda’s murder. Waves tossed the ship like a log and water poured over the coamings into the hatches, more than the West Africans, pumping furiously, could kick back out. Cerreño had no choice but to jettison much of the rest of the ship’s heavy cargo, including a load of timber from southern Chile, overboard.

  Because the ship was lighter and riding higher on the waves, less water breached the Tryal’s gunwales. But its pitch increased. The ship was already worn and leaky when Cerreño had taken possession of it in early 1803, and it had grown worse with over a year of hard use and poor care. Now it was nearly ruined, its sails threadbare and its rigging a tangle. Long braids of kelp draped the vessel’s bow and barnacles encrusted its hull. “A ship grows foul very fast in these seas,” a sailor wrote of the waters in which the Tryal traveled.2

  * * *

  The morning the Tryal rounded Santa María’s southern head, Amasa Delano was lying in his bunk thinking about the line that separated sport from insubordination. The Perseverance had dropped anchor four days earlier to wait for Samuel, who still hadn’t appeared, and soon thereafter Delano cast eight men he had discovered plotting against him off his ship, putting them on the island. He allowed another eight to go to shore to have some fun, “shooting, fishing, getting birds’ eggs, and playing ball.” Though after the troubles in New South Wales, the tense voyage to Chile, and the suspicious actions of his crew off of Juan Fernández (Amasa never found out what really happened that night), he wasn’t sure how many from this group would come back. Santa María wasn’t a big island. It was just about five miles long and half that wide, but there were plenty of places to hide among its pines or in its marshes and coves. Delano would have to wait for his brother Samuel before he could hunt down deserters, since so many of the men left on the Perseverance were close to desertion themselves.

  Dressed and on deck after being told about the appearance of the Tryal, Delano considered what to do. He feared privateers and knew firsthand their trick of feigning distress, then striking. But he also knew that maritime commerce, and the prosperity that came with it, couldn’t exist without courtesy and trust. “One ship may be in want of something that another can spare,” wrote Delano later. Besides, the ship could be an ally and might even help him with his own troubles.

  Delano ordered the ship’s boat to be loaded with fish, water, bread, and pumpkins and hoisted out quickly, since it looked as if the wind was pushing the Tryal toward the ledge. He had recently learned from a Captain Barney, master of
the Nantucket whaler Mars, of yet another plot by some of his “convict men” to steal his boat and make for the island. This time, though, unlike at Juan Fernández, he had men he could trust with him, including his first midshipman, Nathaniel Luther, and his brother William. He left William in charge of the ship and climbed into the boat with Luther.

  Santa María sits fifty miles off a wide coastal gulf into which flows the Bio Bio River down from the Andes, the natural border separating Chile’s tamed north from its wild south. Over the centuries Spain had tried to turn Santa María into a defensive garrison, an outpost against pirates, contrabandists, freebooters, unauthorized whalers and sealers, and rival empires.3 But the island was still mostly uninhabited in 1805. In the opening scenes of Benito Cereno Melville paints the place gray on gray: “Everything was mute and calm; everything gray.… The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors.… Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” But as Delano made his way toward the Tryal the sun was breaking through the early mist, revealing a blue sky that would last the day long.4

  * * *

  The West Africans could have tried to stay ahead of their dwindling food and water by reducing the number of people on board their ship. Yet they needed the remaining crew alive if they were going to make it to Senegal. And as far as surviving documents suggest, they didn’t turn on one another. Rather, in the weeks prior to the encounter with the Perseverance, the rebels sank into stillness. During calm days, the late summer sun waxed warm as the vessel rocked listlessly in the water and its yardarms creaked in their slings. Power slid into impotence. After the frenzied uprising and the rush of executions, followed by the heavy work needed to empty the cargo hold during the storm, there was nothing to do. Until the sight of the Perseverance rousted the rebels out of their resignation.