Witnesses say it was Babo and Mori who came up with the plan. Had they tried to flee, the Perseverance probably wouldn’t have pursued. The West Africans, though, didn’t know that. They could have immediately fought. Benito Cerreño later testified that, upon coming on Delano’s ship, the rebels picked up their knives and broad axes and made ready. Instead, Babo and Mori thought of the idea of deceiving the boarding party, of acting as if they were still slaves. Mori warned Cerreño that he would be listening to his every word and watching his every move. If Cerreño gave “any indication about what had happened on the ship,” as the Spanish report on the incident later said, “they would kill him on the spot, along with all the rest of the crew and passengers.”
Babo, Mori, and possibly others on board the Tryal were lettered men, probably educated in qur’anic schools. They knew how to read the sky, at least enough to keep the calendar, and how to write in their own language. Legal contracts like the kind they had made Cerreño sign in exchange for his life were well established in Islam by 1805, as they were in Christianity. Mori knew enough Spanish to communicate with Cerreño. And Babo was held in high respect by the other West Africans, suggesting that he could have been a marabout (a cleric) or a faqīh (a scholar) in his former life.5
Slavery existed throughout West Africa. Babo, Mori, and some of the others might have been slave owners themselves. Or they might have been slaves, since neither status nor education would have necessarily protected them against being captured and sold to Europeans in one of the many conflicts that roiled parts of West Africa at the time. Beyond whatever firsthand familiarity Babo might have had with slavery, if he was a religious man or an elder scholar, he would also have been well versed in the theology of slavery. Many of the great Sufi manuscripts today found in Timbuktu and elsewhere throughout Mali, for instance, grapple with slavery as a moral, legal, and intellectual problem.* As did Christians, Muslim philosophers and clerics worked to reconcile their humanism—the idea that all could be saved, that, as a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist said, “the basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom”—with the practice of slavery.
As it did in Christianity, this contradiction raised a number of questions that Islamic scholars struggled to answer: Who could legitimately be enslaved? Who has the right to enslave? What limitations should be placed on the power of masters? What obligations did slaves have to their owners? Muslim theologians, like Christian ones, elaborated strong ethical codes regulating servitude, urging slaves to obey their masters and masters to be righteous and merciful, to treat slaves as family.**
Also much like Christians, Islamic philosophers understood freedom and slavery broadly, as psychological and spiritual conditions. Desire, or worldly envy and pride, was slavery; the freeing of oneself of desire, giving up ambition, was freedom. Sufis in particular used slavery as an analogy for nurturing an intimate relation with Allah, of submitting one’s will and being to God. Who aint a slave? The person who serves God like a slave. “Let it be known,” wrote the tenth-century Sufi theologian, Abd al-Karim ibn Hawazin al-Qushayri, “that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery.”6
In a way, giving themselves over is what Babo, Mori, and the others did. As they watched Delano cutting across the bay, they started to abandon the outward manifestations of the freedom they had won with their rebellion, a freedom that in any case was already slipping away with each day they spent in the Pacific. Drawing on their own experience with the master-slave relation, with its mannerisms that signaled duty, submission, and affection, they readied themselves to play their part, to inhabit their characters. They would try to “perfect slavery.”
* * *
It took Delano and his men about twenty minutes to reach the Tryal, which was slowly drifting out of the bay, away from the ledge and away from the Perseverance. After he had boarded, and after he had quickly surveyed the state of the ship and finished distributing the food and water he had brought with him, Delano spent most of the rest of the day in the company of Cerreño and Mori. He had sent his midshipman, Luther, along with the rest of his away team, to obtain more supplies, so he was alone. Delano knew it would take a long time for them to return. They first had to go to a fresh spring inland on the island to fill the Tryal’s water casks and then back to the Perseverance for canvas and more food. Delano also told them to wait for the return of the Perseverance’s larger and better-built yawl, which was out on a fishing run, and to use that to bring the full casks and food back to the Tryal.
Cerreño had greeted him warmly when he first came on board, and the two captains began conversing in a mix of broken Spanish and basic English. Cerreño rallied himself to his part, telling Delano that his ship was out of Buenos Aires bound for Lima, Peru, but had run into a bad storm rounding Cape Horn, where he had lost a number of men overboard. He had made it into the Pacific only to fall becalmed. In the windless, tideless sea, the fevers had hit, he said, killing all his officers and most of the rest of his crew.
Cerreño seems to have tried to drop hints that things on board were not as they appeared, introducing Mori to Delano, for instance, as “captain of the slaves.” A more suspicious mind perhaps would have picked up the irony, that it was Cerreño who was enslaved and Mori his master. But Delano didn’t. Exhausted and wasted, Cerreño had trouble keeping the performance going. He grew distant. Delano kept asking him questions, which Cerreño tried to answer. But his responses became shorter and shorter. His change in demeanor had a noticeable effect on Delano, who began to think that his initial worries were justified, that Cerreño planned to kill him and, in alliance with the slaves, take his ship.
Those fears, though, began to fade, leaving Delano to feel a different kind of vulnerability. He started to think that he was being insulted, that Cerreño’s “neglect” was intentional. As he grew more agitated, Delano began to pay more attention to the black man at Cerreño’s side. But he couldn’t stay focused. His mind turned from one thing to the next, from Cerreño, to Mori, to the nursing, dirge-singing women, to the rest of the slaves, and then back to Cerreño.
The Tryal rebels didn’t quite “perfect slavery.” They were impatient. They seemed to have wanted to see what they could get away with and still have a white man think them slaves. At one point, a young African, with Delano standing nearby, pulled out a knife and slashed the head of a Spanish cabin boy, cutting him to the bone. Blood poured out and the startled Delano looked to Cerreño, who brushed off the attack as “merely sport.” “Rather serious sport,” said Delano. Delano noticed other, similar incidents that made him think that the slaves enjoyed what he called “extraordinary liberty.”
* * *
Shortly after Luther returned with the supplies, around three o’clock in the afternoon, Delano felt a change in wind and looked up to notice that the Tryal had drifted nearly out of the bay and now was about three leagues away from the Perseverance. Delano asked Cerreño why he hadn’t dropped anchor. Receiving no satisfactory answer, he took charge, ordering the ship be brought as close to his vessel as possible. When that was done, he had the anchor put out and made ready to leave. He had had enough.
Throughout the day, Delano had tried to talk to Cerreño about compensation. He was glad to offer his assistance but, as was the case with the Integrity at Bass Strait, he expected to be paid for his effort. Yet each time he asked if they could meet alone, away from Mori, he was rebuffed, told by Cerreño that whatever he wanted to say he could say in front of the slave. The idea of talking about money in front of Mori must have unsettled him, for Delano kept putting the conversation off. Just before he was ready to leave, he asked one last time if he and Cerreño could go below to talk. He was again refused. Delano then invited the Spaniard to take tea or coffee on his vessel. Cerreño said no. “His answer was short,” remembered Delano. He decided to retaliate. “In return, I became less sociable, and said little to him.”
But just as Delano was going over the side of the Tryal, about to clim
b down into his boat, Cerreño came toward him. Delano’s hand had been holding on to the top rail and Cerreño placed his over it, pressing down and squeezing tight. A surge of relief flowed through Delano. He immediately returned the warmth. That Cerreño seemed reluctant to let go of his hand, that it even had to be pulled it free. The release from his worry that the Spaniard held him in low regard was so powerful that, over a decade later in his memoir, he recounted his experience on board the Tryal as if it were his relationship to Cerreño that was driving the action, as if he didn’t know, though of course he did by then, that the West Africans were the ones who were choreographing that relationship.
“I had committed a mistake,” Delano wrote of his attributing Cerreño’s “coldness to neglect; and as soon as the discovery was made, I was happy to rectify it, by prompt renewal of friendly intercourse. He continued to hold my hand fast till I stepped off the gunwale down the side, when he let it go, and stood making me compliments.”7
* * *
For his part, Mori’s acting had been almost flawless, as Spanish officials would later say. But Mori, too, succumbed to pride. As Amasa Delano was climbing down the ladder, the West African slipped out of character, stepped up to Cerreño, and quietly asked him how many men the American had on the Perseverance. Thirty, the Spaniard answered, but many of them were on the island. “Good,” Mori nodded, then whispering: “We will only need three blacks to take it, and before night falls you will have two ships to sail.”
The boast shocked Cerreño out of his torpor. He looked at his black captain, stepped on the gunwale, and threw himself overboard.
22
RETRIBUTION
Delano’s men, with Delano sitting in the rear of his boat, had just pushed off far enough from the Tryal’s hull to lower their oars, when Benito Cerreño fell into the boat. As soon as he landed, he yelled up to his men: “Into the water all who can swim, the rest up the rigging.” He was speaking fast and frantically, and Delano, with his simple Spanish, couldn’t understand him. For a moment, Delano thought he himself was being attacked, that his earlier fears were correct after all. But after a Portuguese hand helped translate, Delano finally realized what was happening.
Events then moved fast. After pulling three of the Tryal’s four sailors out of the water, Delano’s crew began to row toward the Perseverance. When they reached earshot, Delano, still in the stern of his boat with one arm pressed on the tiller and the other wrapped around a collapsed Cerreño, ordered his men on deck to run the cannons out their portholes. But the West Africans had cut the Tryal’s anchor cable, letting the tide swing the bow and point the ship out of the bay. The Perseverance was left in a bad position, with only its aft gun facing the fleeing vessel. It fired six shots, missing each time save for one cut of the foremast rigging.
* * *
The Tryal was moving, but the Perseverance, with two dropped anchors, couldn’t immediately follow. Cutting his cables would have allowed Delano to set sail quickly. But that would have resulted in a financial loss either to the Perseverance’s investors or to its insurers. In Moby-Dick, when the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck, tells Ahab his obsession isn’t economically rational and will hurt the profits of the ship’s owners, Ahab responds by cursing rationality: “Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners? Owners, Owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.”1
Delano, in contrast, not only almost lets the Tryal get away in order to save the two anchors but years later, telling the story in his memoir, interrupts the chase to provide readers with a long lecture on the responsibilities and duties of sea captains as defined by insurance law. To cut his ship’s cables, he says, “would be to break our policy of insurance by a deviation, against which I would here caution the masters of all vessels.” Whenever possible, it was best not to do anything to harm the interest of the underwriters, shareholders in the ship, and financers of the voyage. “All bad consequences,” he continues, “may be avoided by one who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.” Delano would take risks when it came to storms, seals, and other perils of sailing. But regarding the institutions that had evolved to govern commerce—like insurance and law—he remained faithful and duty bound. He preferred to risk letting the Tryal slip away than deviate from a correct course.*
Delano decided to send his boats after the Tryal. At this point, he had about twenty-three men on his ship. He picked twenty of them for the assault, including his clubfooted brother, William, gunner Charles Spence, and midshipman Nathaniel Luther. He put Rufus Low, the officer who presided over the run of floggings, in command.
Before giving the final order to capture the rebel ship, Delano took Cerreño by the arm and stepped him away from his men. He was finally going to have that word alone. Later, the two would dispute what was said and how it was said, but Delano shortly returned to his men and told them to gather around. When they did, he now began to sound less like a clerk at his counting table and more like a captain possessed.
On the far side of the island, the sun was setting as calmly as it rose, throwing dusky light on the bay. Looking out at the moving Tryal with his spyglass from the stern of the Perseverance, Amasa could see its remaining sailors climbing high aloft its topgallant masts. Delano pointed to them and reminded his men of the “suffering conditions of the poor Spaniards” at the hand of the slaves. If the men failed to retake the vessel, “death must be their fate.” Benito Cerreño, who was on deck listening, “considered the ship and what was in her as lost,” Delano said. That meant it was a prize for the taking, which he calculated was worth tens of thousands of pesos. “If we should take her, it should be all our own.”
“God to prosper,” Delano prayed. He told his men that he wished “never to see their faces again” if they failed. All these encouragements, he later said, were “pretty powerful stimulants.” The men boarded their boats, gave themselves three huzzahs, and began to row.
* * *
Delano’s command to capture the Tryal, with its double promise of doing good and making money, helped unite a fractured crew. The Perseverance’s two boats set off, armed with muskets, pistols, sabers, pikes, and the sharp-edged lances the away men used to skin seals. Rowing fast, the pursuers soon came up along the side of the rebel-held ship, opening musket fire. They directed their shots at the helm, where the leaders of the revolt had gathered. A Spanish sailor whom the West Africans had steering the ship took advantage of the shooting to abandon the wheel and climb up the rigging. But Delano’s men mistook him for a rebel and shot him twice. He fell to the deck. A surviving member of Aranda’s entourage, a Basque cousin, Joaquín Arabaolaza, who had taken over the steering, was also shot.
The wind had picked up and the Tryal began to make headway, but its moss-heavy bow and barnacle-befouled hull slowed it down. Delano’s men pulled hard and kept up. They yelled to the Spaniards who had fled up the fore- and mainmasts to cut the sheets holding the sails to the yards, which they did, leaving only the mizzenmast to manage the ship. They kept their firing up for over an hour, wearing the rebels down. There was no one left on board who knew how to steer, and eventually the ship turned round to the wind, allowing the two boats to come up on either side of the bow. Covered by musket fire, their men began to board.
The Perseverance’s sailors clambered up the hull. By this point, the sun had set but the nearly three-quarter moon in a cloudless sky lit the deck. On either side of the ship, in each of the boats, a point man held aloft an oil lamp. The West Africans withdrew to the stern, which Delano later described as the “place of resort for the negros.” Some of the rebels had grabbed empty water casks and bales of yerba maté and erected a makeshift breastwork at amidships, six feet high and running full across its beam. Delano’s men, still covered by musket fire from their boats, forced their way over. One West African stabbed Rufus Low with a pike, wounding him badly in t
he chest. But the barricade was breached. Babo was the first to die. Surrounded by Delano’s men, Joaquín, the ship’s caulker turned rebel, swung an ax wildly in a circle until he was put down, wounded yet alive.
The West Africans defended themselves with “desperate courage,” Delano said, but his men used their superior weapons, particularly their lances, with “extraordinary fury.”
* * *
The battle lasted for four hours. At 10 p.m., Delano got word that the Tryal was taken. He and Cerreño waited until the next morning to board, bringing with them handcuffs, leg irons, and shackles. They weren’t needed.
What they found, Delano said, was “truly horrid.” Babo’s body was among the bales of yerba maté, as were the corpses of six other West Africans: Atufal, Dick, Leobe, Diamelo, Natu, and Quiamobo. The rest were chained tight, hands to feet, through the ring bolts in the deck. They had been tortured. Some had been disemboweled and were writhing in their viscera. Others had had the skin on their backs and thighs shaved off.
This had been done with the Perseverance’s skinning knives, which, Delano wrote, “were always kept exceedingly sharp and as bright as a gentleman’s sword.”
23
CONVICTION
The Tryal was secured and its slaves “double ironed.” But Delano didn’t trust the ship’s surviving crew. Soon after he had boarded, one of Cerreño’s mates had slashed the face of a West African with a straight razor. He was going for the man’s throat when a hand from the Perseverance stopped him. Then, a minute later, a sailor tugged Delano’s sleeve and nodded in the direction of Cerreño, who was about to stab a rebel, possibly Mori, with a dirk he had pulled from his belt. Delano grabbed his arm and Cerreño dropped the knife. The American threatened to have the Spaniards flogged if they didn’t stand down. It was all he could do to stop Cerreño’s men from “cutting to pieces and killing these poor unfortunate beings.”1
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 22