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

by Grandin, Greg

  Avilés finally told Delano he would rule in his favor, but only if he would lower his demand to eight thousand pesos. Delano had rejected compromising earlier, in Concepción, but now he had little choice but to agree. The viceroy called Cerreño into his office, with Delano present, and told the Spaniard that he would throw him in jail if he didn’t pay. Cerreño had yet to receive his share from the sale of the West Africans to Jimeño (it’s unknown if he ever did) but on the strength of the decision he was able to mortgage the Tryal and borrow the money to pay Delano.

  * * *

  Delano received his reward, eight thousand pesos in gold, but it didn’t go far. That was close to the amount he owed various suppliers in Callao for keeping the Perseverance afloat and its men fed. It took more than another year, nearly three since he left Boston, for Delano finally to fill its hold with sealskins. In July 1806, he took the Perseverance to China, but with the market still glutted he had to wait months before he could sell the fur.

  Samuel Delano stayed in the waters off of Chile and Peru for another year, finally leaving in September 1807 with only thirteen thousand skins. On the way to Canton, the Pilgrim ran into a northeast gale as it entered the China Sea, turning on its side until its masts were below the waves. Three men were lost and it seemed that the ship would be as well. But then the wind miraculously swung the bow around and righted the vessel before it could fill with water. The Pilgrim was saved though nearly all of its skins were ruined.

  * * *

  Back in Lima, Jimeño sold most of the fifty-five West African men, women, children, and infants who came into his possession within a year. Many were purchased individually. They found themselves distributed throughout Lima alone, the solidarity and community they had built up over their long journey shattered. Others were lucky enough to be kept in groups of two or three.

  The sociologist Orlando Patterson has written that the essence of slavery was “social death.” In a way, Patterson describes what the doctors in Montevideo concluded about the Joaquín in late 1803, that slavery resulted in cisma, or schism, severing humans from their past, from their history, family, and home, and transforming them into “genealogical isolates.” Nothing illustrates this rupture better than the sales receipts that exist in Lima’s archives concerning the Tryal’s surviving men, women, and children. The documentation is meager. At most, the records provide the age and gender of the person being sold, along with the price and credit terms of the transaction. They omit original names and give no indication as to what happened to the babies, whether they were kept with their mothers or sold to different households.14

  The receipts do provide one bit of information that suggests that the psychic breach wasn’t absolute. In a few cases, they reveal the new Christian names of the West Africans: “Two new blacks,” purchased by one household for 960 pesos, “respond to the names Antonio and Manuel and are thirteen years old.” One young boy brought by a merchant “responds to the name Joaquín.” The phrase “responds to” is meant to be formalistic and bland. But it jars. It sounds almost like an admission on the part of the masters that these new labels would always be aliases and that the slaves’ forfeiture of their recent experiences and past lives would remain incomplete—that the two twelve-year-old girls taken off the Tryal and sold to Doña María Daga and Doña María Rivera for 920 pesos might “respond to the Christian names María and Rosa” but that would never be all they were.

  25

  THE LUCKY ONE

  Though Benito Cerreño had kept the original English name of his ship painted on its hull, he occasionally referred to the Tryal as la Prueba, a Spanish word that also means a test of faith. It was as common for Catholics in Spanish America to draw on religious themes for the names of their vessels as it was for Protestants in New England, though the former were partial to martyred saints (including San Juan Nepomuceno) while the latter preferred the virtues (like perseverance). In any case, Benito Cerreño, having passed through more trials than Job, decided soon after he had returned to Lima from Concepción to rename his ship. It would now sail as la Dichosa—the Lucky One.1

  Cerreño wouldn’t be on it. Vowing never to return to sea, he leased out la Dichosa to another merchant captain and dedicated himself to starting a new life on land. A week after his return to Lima, Cerreño married Francisca Murre, a recent widow whose first husband had left her a considerable-size sugar plantation, Hacienda Humaya, about seventy miles north of the city. At the time, the best measure of the value of farmland was not its size but rather the age and height of its crops. When Benito and Francisca moved in, Humaya had twelve fields planted with eighteen-month-old sugarcane upward of twelve feet tall, almost ready to be harvested. All told, with its sugar, fruit orchids, workshops, manor house, and livestock, the plantation was valued at nearly 200,000 pesos.2

  The assessment included its slaves, since the cane would have been worthless without the hands to cut it. The estate’s 236 slaves were assessed at 91,782 pesos, almost half the property’s total value. Most of them—129 men and 107 women—had been in America longer than their new master, having been born and raised in Peru and baptized in the Catholic faith. Some were descended from the first Africans present when the estate was founded in 1693. Others might even have had ancestors in Peru earlier than that.

  It must have been tempting for Cerreño, as he assumed his gentry life, a life his family back in Andalusia had lost, to believe that he had put all that had happened to him on the Tryal behind him. Days removed from the bustle and politics of Lima, Hacienda Humaya sprawled up the mist-shrouded sides of the rolling Huaura Valley. It was an ancient Jesuit estate, connected to the coast by an old, rutted road. When Cerreño took it over, its double-nave chapel still had its original organ, stone-carved baptismal font, and wooden pulpit.

  There were no Babos. No Atufals and Moris. No Leobes, Quiamobos, Alasans, Malpendas, or Matunquis. No mass of indistinguishable African women singing death dirges. There were just Humaya’s settled sharecropper slaves who lived in small thatched houses along the road connecting the manor house to the plantation’s graveyard. Among them was the sixty-three-year-old Juan Capistrano, who ran the grinding mill (he was assessed at three hundred pesos), Domingo de la Nieves (worth one peso for each of his eighty years), and Augustina de la Rosa, a ninety-year-old invalid (ten pesos).

  But in 1820, the world once again broke in on Cerreño.

  * * *

  In Spanish America during its wars for independence—which lasted for over a decade, from about 1810 to well into the 1820s—thousands of black slaves in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and the Andes quit their fields, workshops, and houses to join insurrectionary armies. In some places, they made up as much as 30 percent of revolutionary forces.

  Chile was in the vanguard of independence and emancipation, establishing under the leadership of none other than Juan Martínez de Rozas a self-governing council that in 1811 passed a number of measures limiting slavery. Among them was a “law of free womb,” which decreed all children born of slave parents to be free, and a ban on the future importation of new slaves into Chilean territory. When Peru’s viceroy sent in royal troops to pacify Chile, the Revolutionary Army of the Andes—led by General José de San Martín and made up largely of manumitted slaves from Buenos Aires and Mendoza—crossed into the country from Argentina to defeat them. Many of these slaves-turned-revolutionaries had in effect retraced Babo’s and Mori’s journey, but under vastly different circumstances: having first arrived in Montevideo as property, they trekked across the pampas as free people, joining San Martín’s insurgent forces in Mendoza and then climbing over the Andes to liberate Chile, an important step in achieving the independence of all of Spanish South America.3

  Numbering in the thousands, these emancipated rebel soldiers, now joined by Chile’s free and freed blacks, continued to follow the route of the Tryal rebels. They set sail from Valparaiso bound for Lima in August 1820, part of San Martín’s expeditionary fleet that vo
wed to bring down the “tyrants who believed they could enslave with impunity the sons of liberty.” The flotilla first landed south of Lima. Up and down the crisscrossing valleys that connect the Pacific to the Andes, slaves fled their haciendas to join San Martín, bringing with them food, livestock, and horses pilfered from their plantations. Others simply used the chaos caused by the invasion to escape, joining neither the patriotas nor the realistas.4

  On November 9, 1820, San Martín sailed north of Lima, to the Bay of Huacho, at the bottom of the Huaura Valley. Shortly thereafter, his troops marched up the valley with the power to liberate any slave who joined their ranks. On December 27—exactly sixteen years to the day of the Tryal revolt—a rebel detachment arrived outside the gates of Humaya. Cerreño, having survived one insurrection, didn’t wait around to be caught up in another. He was gone when the soldiers entered the next day, having fled to Lima and abandoned the hacienda to his slaves.5

  For a while, Lima acted as if what was would always be. Rozas was right about the city’s merchants. They were servile. Even as Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, Bogotá, and Santiago, along with provincial towns like Concepción and Mendoza, were throwing in with independence, “fortress Lima,” with its surfeit of priests and lords, wealthy merchants tied to the great trading houses of Seville and Cádiz, and well-armed viceregal army, stayed true to Spain. The inhabitants of the city and its surrounding estates, wrote one observer, “went on in their usual style of splendid luxury, in thoughtless ease and security, till the enemy came and knocked at the ‘silver gates of the city of kings.’”6

  The knock came in July 1821. San Martín and his army entered Lima and its residents finally realized they were living in new times. “The consternation was excessive,” wrote the same witness, “the men were pacing about in fearful doubt what was to be done; the women were flying in all directions to the convents; and the narrow streets were literally choked up with wagons and mules, and mounted horsemen.” Cerreño was likely among those trying to escape the city “on foot, in carts, on horseback,… men, women, and children with horses and mules, and numbers of slaves laden with baggage and other valuables … all was outcry and confusion.” Soon, though, the streets were empty, as fear spread that the “slave population of the city meant to take advantage of the absence of troops, to rise in a body and massacre the whites.”7

  The lords and ladies of Lima had little to fear. San Martín, after taking Lima, did issue a number of decrees limiting the slave trade and slavery. But, still facing a strong royal army outside of the city, he hoped to win over rural landlords to his cause. He walked a fine line, emancipating slaves who joined his ranks but making clear that runaways still belonged to their owners. Fighting dragged on for years more. It wasn’t until December 1824, at the Battle of Ayacucho, that royalist forces were finally driven out.

  By that point, the early radical promise of Spanish American independence, which saw the revolutionary armies marching across hacienda lands, freeing slaves by the thousands, had been contained. The legal process of abolition that started in Chile in 1811 would continue. But it did so gradually and conservatively, through measures, laws, and decrees designed to maintain the power of the region’s landed elite. Still, by 1855—ten years before the U.S. Civil War ended at Appomattox—the buying, selling, and holding of human beings as chattel was over in all of the American republics that had broken from Spain.

  * * *

  As to Benito Cerreño, he was thrown in jail for a few days on charges of aiding royalist forces shortly after he fled San Martín’s troops.8 But he was soon released and, when life returned to normal, allowed to reclaim Humaya and its people, resuming an aristocratic life now accommodated to republican rule. In 1829, he suffered a hemiplegic seizure that left him paralyzed. He died in 1830. His widow, Francisca, lived until 1853. Abolition was still a year away in Peru, yet on her death she freed all of Humaya’s “large number of slaves” except one, who was left to her daughter.9

  Cerreño had years earlier lost the vessel previously known as the Tryal to his creditors. La Dichosa, the Lucky One, was spotted thereafter by Mayhew Folger, the Quaker captain of the Topaz, famous for having rescued the survivors of Bligh’s Bounty from Pitcairn Island. Upon returning to Nantucket in 1810, he told his friend Thomas Coffin that Coffin’s old ship was rotting away in the port of Valparaiso, “stripped, weatherbeaten, and settled in the water.”10

  26

  UNDISTRIBUTED

  Schools of porpoises and flocks of seabirds trailed the Perseverance as it approached the Cape of Good Hope in May 1807, heading back to New England from China with a hull half filled with porcelain and tea not worth close to enough to cover what Delano owed his men or to pay back his creditors. The vessel was worn down. According to its log, “all hands” were needed to keep it afloat. “The ship was very leaky,” and its men were “obliged to pump her every half an hour.” The weather turned “gloomy” after it entered the South Atlantic, with flying clouds, baffling winds, and heavy swells from the west. The Fourth of July dawned “dark and squally.” There was no liquor left on board, but the crew celebrated by dining on lobscouse, a meat stew. On Friday, July 24, “the highland of Cape Cod” came into sight. A few days later the Perseverance was in Boston, having ended a voyage of nearly four years, circling the globe twice and sailing over fifty thousand miles.1

  Delano had expected something to be waiting for him on his return. “Many powerful friends” in Lima had told him, he said, that the king of Spain, Carlos IV, would personally send him an additional reward, beyond the gold he had received from Cerreño. It’s easy to imagine, as he pleaded his case in one office after another, royal bureaucrats telling him such a thing in the hope he’d move on. As it turned out, there was a gift for him in Boston, though it wasn’t what he had hoped. It was a gold medallion embossed with Carlos’s profile, along with a letter from Spain’s envoy to the United States thanking Delano on the king’s behalf for his humane and noble service. Within a few months, Carlos would be dethroned by Napoleon, ending once and for all Delano’s hope of receiving, as he put it, “something essentially to my advantage.”2

  * * *

  Delano could have used it. America had changed while he was away. Debt had taken a more central role in the growing nation’s economy, and Delano was trapped in its grip, dragged through court and, it seems, thrown into debtors’ prison. He had owed significant amounts to various creditors even before the Perseverance’s first sail (including to Ezra Weston back in Duxbury). But now he was being sued by people he had never met, by creditors who had bought his debt from earlier creditors or by individuals claiming to be the executors of deceased sailors. He owed thousands of dollars to various people when most of the prisoners in the Boston Gaol were sailors serving time for demands of less than twenty. One George Riley owed about fifty dollars, and he spent six years in the jail. A blind Bostonian was put in for owing six dollars.3

  Delano continued to run the Perseverance for a while more, bringing dried codfish to the Caribbean, his debt, along with the pressure of having to support his family, forcing him to put aside earlier qualms about trading with slave islands. With the help of the Reverend Horace Holley, his pastor at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church, Delano was able to call on some of the city’s most prominent residents for help. A young lawyer just starting out, Lemuel Shaw, who would go on to be the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as well as Herman Melville’s father-in-law, offered his services pro bono to keep him out of jail. Delano also wrote to Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, later famous for his ruling in favor of the Amistad rebels, asking him to intervene on his behalf with a judge presiding over one case. “Pray befriend an honest man, and oblige,” he begged. Delano defaulted in most of the debt trials. He just didn’t show up in court.4

  Delano sold his ship in late 1810, paying off some of what he owed but not all. He took a job at the Boston Custom House and settled on Summer Street, a short walk from Bosto
n’s India Wharf, the broke head of a household of eight, including sisters, nephews, and nieces. It was around this point that, encouraged by Reverend Holley, he began to write his memoirs. His lawyer, Shaw, drew up a contract between Delano and three men, possibly friends but maybe just more creditors, who advanced the money to have the book printed. Sold by subscription, it was meant to reverse Delano’s string of “misfortunes and embarrassments.” “It is a matter of regret,” Holley wrote in a biographical sketch included in the memoir as an appendix, that a man of Delano’s “generous and disinterested feelings, and who has made such great exertions to secure a handsome living in the world, should be thus unfortunate at this time of his life.”5

  Delano had high hopes for A Narrative of Voyages and Travels. He sent a copy to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in Washington, asking for a favorable comment that might help sell it and telling Adams that he wrote the book to add to the “great stock of knowledge already collected by Capt. Cook and others.”* The memoir is filled with extended descriptions of the natural world (“the serpents of Bouro are most remarkable”) and useful nautical information, such as the direction of currents, the location of underwater rocks, and which way winds normally blow as one enters this or that harbor. “The westerly head” of San Félix Island “is of a different colour from the easterly part.” “Between the red and black parts is the best place to land.” Delano takes long philosophical detours throughout, considering, for example, the underlying universality of world religions and the similarity between the Greek “system of dialectics” and Hinduism. “There is scarcely a notion,” he writes, “advanced by metaphysicans” that can’t be found in “bramincial writings.”6