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

by Grandin, Greg

  THE NEPTUNE

  The Neptune was built by the British East India Company in Bombay, India (hence the teak), to sail as a merchantman under the name Laurel. But the French seized and renamed it Le Neptune. The British recaptured the ship and auctioned it to John Bolton, who kept its name and outfitted it as a slaver (Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool Register of Merchant Ships, 1793–1802, microfilm reel 23, 70/1799). Had Mordeille not intercepted the ship and its cargo, it might have returned to London with a hold full of dark Caribbean mahogany, used to carve the handsome doors of Bolton’s Storrs Hall.

  LORD NELSON AND THE WRONGS OF AFRICA

  Sixteen of the nineteen members of the civic committee established to erect Liverpool’s Nelson monument were slavers. The city’s mayor, who convened the committee, was John Bridge Aspinall, a prominent slave merchant who, with others in his family, ran over 180 voyages that had carried nearly sixty thousand Africans to the Americas. The committee, though, was chaired by an abolitionist, William Roscoe, a member of Parliament and the author of a number of poems and pamphlets denouncing the slave trade, including The Wrongs of Africa and An Enquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo (1792). Some historians of Liverpool have speculated that Roscoe, in helping to select the monument’s design, meant its four enchained prisoners to be a veiled criticism of slavery. Roscoe was also an acquaintance of Herman Melville’s father, a fact mentioned by Melville later in his stream-of-consciousness Redburn passage: “And my thoughts reverted to my father’s friend, the good and great Roscoe, the intrepid enemy of the trade; who in every way exerted his fine talents toward its suppression; writing a poem (“the Wrongs of Africa”), several pamphlets; and in his place in Parliament, he delivered a speech against it, which, as coming from a member for Liverpool, was supposed to have turned many votes, and had no small share in the triumph of sound policy and humanity that ensued.”

  For Aspinall, see Trans-Atlantic Slave Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces). For the composition of the monument’s subscription committee, see Thomas Baines, History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool, vol. 1, London: Longman, 1852, p. 524. For Roscoe, see Penelope Curtis, Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside, Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1989, pp. 21–26. For Melville’s father’s association with Roscoe, see Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of the Poet, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007, p. 46, and Parker, Melville: A Biography, vol. 1, p. 9.

  THE TRYAL AND ITS REBELS

  Eric Robert Taylor writes in his very useful survey of hundreds of slave ship rebellions, If We Must Die in This Way (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), that the Tryal rebellion is “particularly compelling” because of “the incredible amount of surviving information about it.” This is a startling statement, for by far the most frustrating aspect of doing research for this book was the limited available information concerning the history of the West Africans involved, how they got to America, where they came from, and what they suffered along the way. The scarcity of documentary records underscores the large degree to which New World slavery was an anonymous genocide. There are many memoirs of emancipated slaves, and specific events such as the Amistad rebellion and the 1835 Bahia uprising in Brazil produced significant documentary evidence. But the quantity of information pales in comparison with the scale of slavery. See Taylor, p. 139. For the Amistad, see Marcus Rediker’s magisterial new history, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, New York: Viking, 2012. For examples of memoirs, see Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, 1789; James Williams, A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, ed. Diana Paton, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001; and Terry Alford’s history of the life of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, A Prince among Slaves, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Of the at least 12,500,000 people taken out of Africa and brought to America, historians have identified only about 100,000 original African names, a figure that gives a sense of the magnitude of the historical silence. Most of these names are listed in the African Origins Project (http://www.african-origins.org/african-data/), which is based on the records of roughly 92,000 enslaved Africans liberated primarily by the British Royal Navy after 1808. While extremely useful, the project is limited. The names are of Africans freed from intercepted slaving vessels after British abolition of the slave trade and might overrepresent ships that embarked slaves in West Africa, from ports running from Senegambia to Biafra. One of the goals of the project is to share the names with African-speaking people so as to identify origin and ethnic group. Respondents have associated the name Mori, or variations, with the Kuranko, who live in what today is Sierra Leone and Guinea, are closely related to the Mandinka, and speak a dialect of Mende. Just under 50 percent of the Kuranko today are Muslim. Most of the other thirteen Tryal rebels’ names are also associated with embarkations at or around Bonny. It is more likely, though, that the named slave-rebels were embarked somewhere in Senegambia. Correspondence with the Senegalese scholar Boubacar Barry was also very useful in identifying the possible ethnicity and origins of the names. See Alex Borucki, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo, “Using Pre-Orthographic African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862” (forthcoming).

  Combing through notary records in Mendoza, Santiago, and Buenos Aires provided information on the sale and transport of 64 Africans by Juan Nonell in April 1804 to the Mendoza merchant Alejandro de Aranda, including the fact that some of them most likely arrived on the Neptune. Others in the lot arrived on different ships. Alex Borucki reports that there were regular connections between Senegambia and the Río de la Plata in those years, mostly through U.S. slavers. The Tryal rebels all likely came from West Africa but they may not all have been Muslim. Spanish documents alternatively describe them as guineos, etíopes, or “from the coast of Senegal,’ a distinction that could mean something or nothing to their owner and overseers. Spanish slavers tended to use Senegal to describe the region between the Senegal River and the Gambia River. They might also use Guinea to mean that area. More often, though, they meant it to refer to the land south of the Gambia River, running into the part of West Africa that hangs over the Atlantic, including Bonny Island in the vast Niger River delta, where many of the Liverpool prizes captured by Mordeille embarked their captives. Guinea and etiopía could also just mean all of Africa. Many, perhaps most, slave transactions were illegal and therefore not documented. And since 1804 was the height of “free trade in blacks” in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, what record keeping there was was often rushed, reflecting the frenzy of the moment. There was information on the Neptune in Liverpool and London, but not a manifest or any other paperwork to give information on the four hundred or so Africans the ship embarked at Bonny.

  The most important documents, in addition to Delano’s memoir, for reconstructing events on the Tryal are (for abbreviations, see “Archives Consulted,” the next section): AGI (Seville), Lima, 731, N.27 (“Carta n° 445 del virrey Marqués de Avilés a Miguel Cayetano Soler, Ministro de Hacienda. Comunica el alzamiento de los negros esclavos de Senegal, conducidos a Lima desde Montevideo y Valparaíso en los navíos ‘San Juan Nepomuceno’ y ‘Trial,’ respectivamente,” April 23, 1805); AHN (Madrid), legajo 5543, expediente 5 (“El Capitán Amasu de Eleno presta auxilio en la isla Santa María, a la tripulación de la fragata español Trial, en la que habían sublevado los negros”); BN (Santiago), Sala Medina, MSS, vol. 331, ff. 170–89 (“Informe de Luís de Alva al Presidente Luís Muñoz de Guzmán, Concepción”); ANC (Santiago), Real Audiencia de Santiago, vol. 608, ff. 90–93 (“Libro copiador de sentencias 1802 a 1814”); ANC (Santiago), Tribunal del Consulado, vol. 12, ff. 179–89 (“Informe rebelión de negros en la fragata Trial)”; ANC (Santiago), “Amacio Delano Capitán de la F
ragata Perseverancia con el dueño de la Trial sobre el compensativo,” ff. 199–213. Details are also found in uncataloged bundles of documents related to customs taxes and other paperwork concerning shipping found in Contaduría Mayor, in Santiago’s ANC, as well as cited documents describing Delano’s subsequent legal conflict with Cerreño found in Chile and Lima. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Historia de Valparaíso, vol. 2, Valparaiso: Imprenta Albión de Cox i Taylor, 1869, is also useful, as are Javiera Carmona, “De Senegal a Talcahuano: Los esclavos de un alzamiento en la costa pacífica (1804),” in Huellas de África en América. Perspectivas para Chile, ed. Celia L. Cussen, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2009, pp. 137–58, and Jorge Pinto, “Una rebelión de negros en las costas del Pacífico Sur: El caso de la fragata Trial en 1804,” Revista Histórica 10 (1986): 139–55. For Nonell’s sale to Aranda, also see the notary entries for Inocencio Agrelo, April 10, 1805, December 24th, 1806, January 1811, and April 16th, 1839 (marginal notations in the original entry).

  HAITI AND FREEDOM

  That the Haitian Revolution was a source of hope to enslaved men and women and fear to their enslavers is well known. Less recognized is that it had a direct effect on the course of history. In 1803, Haitians definitively routed Napoleon’s invading army, which had orders to retake the island as a French colony. Napoleon had envisioned a restored sugar-producing Saint-Dominique slave island as the anchor of a new French America running up the Mississippi Valley, connecting French Canada to the Caribbean, quarantining the young United States to the east and opening up the west to French settlers. But Haitians forced Napoleon to give up the dream. He sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson and turned his attentions to destroying Europe’s ancien régime, which, despite his expedient alliances with Madrid’s Bourbons, could mean only one thing: deposing those royal houses built on American slavery. After beating the Prussians at the Battle of Jena and checking the Russians at Eylau, Napoleon invaded Portugal and then turned on Spain, deposing the Bourbons and placing his brother Joseph on the throne (thus ending Amasa Delano’s expectation that he’d get anything more than a medal for his help retaking the Tryal). The combination of a financially draining war against Great Britain followed by France’s six-year occupation of Spain and Portugal marked the beginning of the end of Spanish rule in the Americas, paving the way for men like Bolívar and San Martín to launch their wars for independence. There would be many starts and stops, many advances and setbacks, but the continent-wide drive that began with Haiti first to wrest more freedom and then for total freedom was unstoppable. Even as one train of events moved forward in Europe and Spanish America, another accelerated in North America: Haiti’s defeat of Napoleon allowed Thomas Jefferson to make his Louisiana Purchase, which set in motion the simultaneous processes of westward expansion and the extension of slavery, leading first to the Mexican-American War and then to the Civil War.

  Not too long ago, Haiti barely registered in histories of the Age of Revolution, which focused nearly exclusively on the American, French, and Spanish American Revolutions. Now, due to the work of the following scholars, it is understood to be not just a central event of that age, but, since insurgents insisted on applying the ideal of freedom to really existing slavery, the central event: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ada Ferrer, Laurent Dubois, Jeremy Popkin, David Patrick Geggus, Sibylle Fischer, Sue Peabody, Julius Scott, Matthew Clavin, and Robin Blackburn.

  PABLO NERUDA, JOHN HUSTON, PAUL NEWMAN, AND I SPY

  In the late 1960s, Pablo Neruda told an interviewer that he couldn’t get a handle on the story he wanted to write about the Tryal uprising. Where Melville had focused on the deception, Neruda wanted to write about the slaves themselves, calling his screenplay Babo, the Rebel. But he found himself “fighting with shadows,” perhaps meaning the shadow cast by Melville. A fragment of the screenplay that he did finish imagines Melville as the last survivor, like Ishmael, arguing with Neruda over who can best narrate the story:

  NERUDA: Tell the story.

  MELVILLE: Let others tell it.

  NERUDA: You are the only witness from that time, your voice is the only one that remains.

  John Huston, who had earlier brought Moby-Dick to the screen, wanted Benito Cereno to be his last movie and hoped to convince Paul Newman to play Amasa Delano. “Paul dear,” he wrote on April 8, 1987, “I hope to make one picture more, this one,… and to have you, my favorite actor on Earth, playing it.… I would so like our association to end on a note of triumph.” Two months later, the New York Times reported that Robert Duvall and Raul Julia had been cast to play Delano and Cereno. Huston died on August 28, 1987, before work on the project could begin.

  In the mid-1960s, the poet Robert Lowell produced a stage version of Benito Cereno, starring the actor Roscoe Lee Browne as Babo, or Babu, as Lowell wrote him. The play was broadcast on public TV in 1965, just a few weeks after NBC, having overcome most of the opposition of its southern affiliated stations, premiered the “first weekly network television show to present a Negro as co-star in an integrated cast,” which was I Spy, with Bill Cosby. See “‘I Spy’ with Negro Is Widely Booked,” New York Times, September 19, 1965.

  BABO, AFRICAN AMERICAN SCHOLARS AND WRITERS, AND BARACK OBAMA

  Neruda might have had difficulty figuring him out, but African American writers recognized Babo. Ralph Ellison used an epigraph from the story for his novel Invisible Man, in which the narrator’s grandfather reveals on his deathbed that he wasn’t an obliging Tom but a stealth Babo, his last advice to his son being to “overcome” whites “with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” Sterling Stuckey links Babo to Brer Rabbit, the trickster prominent in African American folktales. Writers from outside the United States, from the decolonizing third world, also saw their struggles in Babo’s actions. “Melville’s interest [in Benito Cereno] is in a vast section of the modern world,” wrote the Trinidadian C. L. R. James in 1953, “the backwards peoples, and today, from the continents of Asia and Africa, their doings fill the front pages of our newspapers.” Babo, James thought, was the “most heroic character in Melville’s fiction,… a man of unbending will, a natural leader, an organizer of large schemes but a master of detail.” “What does ‘Babo’ mean?” asked the Nigerian scholar Charles E. Nnolim in 1974. “The word ‘babo’ in the Hausa language … means ‘NO’—an expression of strong disagreement.… How did Melville know that ‘Babo’ … is ‘NO’?”

  More recently, Barack Obama has cited Benito Cereno as having influenced him as a young man, perhaps preparing him for the hallucinations of his more feverish critics, who charge him with hijacking the ship of state and fantasize about having his head on a pike.

  See Stuckey, Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Charles E. Nnolim, Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: A Study in Meaning of Name Symbolism, New York: New Voices, 1974; Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977; and James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, p. 112.

  APES AND ANGELS

  Herman Melville read the naturalists and geologists of his day and would consider the implications of what eventually came to be known as Darwinism throughout his whole writing life. He started his literary career joking, a decade before the publication of On the Origin of the Species, that man’s “ancestors were kangaroos, not monkeys,” that marsupials were the “first edition of mankind, since revised and corrected.” Thirty years later, he ended his eighteen-thousand-line poem, Clarel, with the question: “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year, / Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?… Yea, ape and angel, strife and old debate, / The harps of heaven and the dreary gongs of hell; / Science the feud can only aggravate— / No umpire she betwixt the chimes and knell: / The running battle of the star and clod / Shall run forever—if there be no God.”

 
Melville purchased a copy of Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the World, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. in 1847. For Melville’s reading of Darwin, see Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, New York: Dover, 1966, p. 265; Merton M. Sealts, Melville’s Reading, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988, p. 171; and Mary K. Bercaw, Melville’s Sources, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1987, pp. 2, 74. For the influence of Lyell and Darwin on Melville, see James Robert Corey, “Herman Melville and the Theory of Evolution,” PhD dissertation, Washington State University, 1968. See also Eric Wilson, “Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being,” Studies in American Fiction 28 (2000): 131–50. And see the edition of Moby-Dick edited by Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle, and Hershel Parker, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 829, for another passage that closely follows Darwin’s Journal of Researches.

  THE REVOLT OF THE SAN JUAN NEPOMUCENO

  Aside from a brief mention in an article published in a Peruvian history journal, I’ve found no other scholarly reference to this remarkable uprising. News of the fate of the San Juan was carried back to America by three of its passengers, who were taken to Salem, Massachusetts, on the brig Sukey, captained by John Edwards, which had been in Senegal trading for hides, gum, peanuts, and palm oil. The first report was published in the Salem Impartial Register on July 30, 1801, reprinted in newspapers throughout New England, and translated and published in Buenos Aires in the Telégrafo Mercantil on December 16, 1801. For the Sukey, see History of Essex County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men, vol. 1, ed. Duane Hamilton Hurd, Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1888, p. 92.