The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  The Middle Passage of the Africans was vexed and deadly from the beginning. After Kru canoemen had loaded the five to six hundred slaves, a British anti-slave-trade warship was spotted, which necessitated a frantic unloading and the hiding of the captives in a large, hot, airless cave, where several died. That vessel of unknown name, empty but equipped as a slaver, was captured by the British, taken to Freetown, and condemned. A short time later, when the coast was again clear, another vessel appeared and everyone was reloaded. Once aboard, the hardware of bondage was attached, said Grabeau: “They were fastened together in couples by the wrists and legs, and kept in that situation day and night.” Women and children were not shackled; the latter had the free run of the ship except in bad weather when the hatches were battened down with everyone stowed beneath. It was common for the captain and crew to enlist the help of a few Africans to help control the others. The largest males were often made “head men” to oversee groups of ten to twenty. Once the voyage began, the captain spotted another British patrol vessel off the coast, hid the ship in a nearby inlet, and delayed the passage.88

  The daily routine of the slave ship under sail was standard: two meals a day, taken on the main deck, with singing and dancing afterward, organized by the captain to preserve health and protect investment. Grabeau recalled that “they had rice enough to eat, but had very little to drink. If they left any of the rice that was given to them uneaten, either from sickness or any other cause, they were whipped. It was a common thing for them to be forced to eat so much as to vomit.” Kale confirmed the dismal picture: “When we eat rice white man no give us to drink.” Worse, he whipped “all who no eat fast.” Kinna added that he “was sick & was forced to eat.” He also recalled that “on their way to Cuba, they had scarcely any water & were sometimes brought upon deck to take the fresh air & chained down in the full blaze of a tropical sun, this was so intolerable that they often begged to go below again.” That they wished to return to a lower deck where they would face seasickness, disease, overcrowding, and the pungent “smell of bondage” among the prisoners—the stench for which slave ships were infamous—is remarkable. In Brazil, slavers were sometimes burned after the voyage because it was impossible to eradicate the odor. Perhaps this was the fate of the Teçora.89

  On the wide Atlantic, Cinqué exercised what may have been his first act of leadership: he “tried various ways to animate & keep up the depressed spirits of his countrymen.” He exhorted his comrades to get rid of the “sad faces” and to make the best of the situation. “Is not ours a bold warlike nation?” he demanded to know. He reminded all that they were freeborn and that “who knows but we may be freemen yet!” He had plans of rebellion already in mind.90

  It is powerfully suggestive that the Mende way of describing death was “crossing the waters,” that is, crossing from the human to the spirit world. Whether the slave ship crossing the “great waters” was experienced as a kind of living death, one can only wonder. But actual, not merely metaphorical, death aboard the Teçora was certainly real and pervasive. All of the Amistad witnesses commented on the number who died. Bau explained in court that there were a “good many in the vessel, and many died.” Burna noted the many who “died on the passage from Africa to Havana—signifying by gestures that they were thrown into the sea,” as indeed happened each morning, when dead bodies were brought up from the lower deck. Some may still have been alive when thrown overboard by the illegal slavers as they sought to lighten ship when being chased by British vessels: the captain cynically wagered that their pursuer would stop to rescue those thrown overboard rather than continue the chase.91

  Several of the Amistad captives resorted to a kind of guerilla theater to represent their experience of the Middle Passage. In order to make real the horrors of life below deck for those in a federal courtroom in January 1840, Cinqué sat on the floor, acting out how they had been manacled and shackled, their heads stooped low because there was so little headroom. On another occasion, in jail, he “got down on the floor, to show us [visitors] how they were stowed on board, then moved about on his knees, and as he rose put his hand of the top of his head, to indicate how low the deck was.” Grabeau and Kinna did likewise: they “lay down upon the floor, to show the painful position in which they were obliged to sleep” aboard the slaver.92

  Throughout these demonstrations, Cinqué emphasized the common experience of the Middle Passage. Speaking of the forty-nine men aboard the Amistad, he recalled, “We all came to Havana in same vessel.” They were, in short, shipmates, or “ship-friends” as the relationship was sometimes called in Freetown in the 1830s: theirs were “the bonds of fellowship, bound in days of misery.” The Mende word was ndehun, which means brotherhood. Fellow inductees of the Poro called each other “mates.” It was noted of Burna that he “manifests much feeling when reference is made to his companions who have died,” those people of many nations aboard both the Teçora and the Amistad. The social bonding—what anthropologists call “fictive kinship”—began in Lomboko, continued aboard the Teçora and in the barracoons of Havana, and reached a kind of apotheosis in action aboard the Amistad. It would continue in the New Haven jail and emerge finally as ethnogenesis, the formation of a new group called “the Mendi People.”

  Conquering warriors had been assimilating people from other cultures for centuries. As Arthur Abraham has noted, to this day Mende people “with no degree of consanguinity” routinely call each other father, mother, brother, and sister. Indeed, this seems to have been a regional phenomenon in Sierra Leone. Surgeon Robert Clarke noted that the multiethnic Liberated Africans in Freetown commonly used the terms “mammy,” “daddee,” “broder,” and “sissa” as forms of address. The “additive” nature of Mende and other West African cultures served the Amistad Africans well when they were far from home. Life itself depended on ndehun.93

  The Barracoons of Havana

  In the middle of June 1839, after an eight-week voyage from Pedro Blanco’s factory, the Teçora encountered another British antislave frigate as it neared Havana. Foone and Kimbo testified that they were landed “by night.” Slavery was legal in Cuba, but the slave trade was not, for Spain had signed a treaty outlawing the trade, and the British meant to enforce it. Security was tight during disembarkation and afterward: Cinqué and Bau recalled that they were “ironed hand and foot.” In addition, “every two were chained together at the waist and by the neck.” The vessel was one of many slave ships arriving in the dynamic slave society of Cuba at the time: British Superintendent of Liberated Africans Richard Robert Madden claimed in November 1839 that some eighty vessels, bearing twenty-five thousand enslaved Africans, had already arrived in Havana during the year. It was customary for the slavers to allow a couple of weeks for their human cargo to recover their health before final sale.94

  After five days the captives were moved to a new set of barracoons, named La Misericordia, located “nearly in front of the governor’s country house, situated outside the walls of Havana, on the Paseo Militar, or public promenade.” They took their place alongside sheep, oxen, and cattle for sale. According to Madden, who made it a point to find and visit these barracoons in order to learn more about the experience of the Amistad Africans while they were in Cuba, the keeper was the same Riera who had worked for Pedro Blanco/Pedro Martinez in Gallinas. When told of the revolt and the escape to freedom, Riera said to Madden, “Que lástima” (“What a pity”). He referred to “the loss of so many valuable Bozals, or newly imported Africans.” He regretted “that so much property should be lost to the owners.”95

  Cinqué and Grabeau recalled the time at La Misericordia and the moment of their purchase by José Ruiz. Cinqué saw Ruiz (nicknamed “Pepe”) for the first time at the place he recollected as the “prison house.” His future “owner” was conferring with the “man that brought us from Lomboko,” the captain of the Teçora. Cinqué specifically remembered the humiliating medical examination: “Pepe feel of me—said ‘Fine’ ‘fine.’” Grabeau
went into more detail: Ruiz picked a number of them from the larger mass of the enslaved in the barracoon and “made them stand in a row.” He then went up and down the row and “felt each of them in every part of the body; made them open their mouths to see if their teeth were sound.” Abolitionist George Day, who took down Grabeau’s account, added that Ruiz “carried the examination to a degree of minuteness of which only a slave dealer would be guilty.”96

  After Ruiz had selected the “prime slaves” he wanted, he prepared to remove them to another barracoon. This occasioned great turmoil, as the deep, painfully acquired social and emotional bonds of shipmates were now being torn apart. As “they were separated from their companions who had come with them from Africa,” many wept, Grabeau recalled, especially women and children. Cinqué joined in, shedding tears of his own, but Grabeau did not, “because he is a man,” he explained. Kimbo noted that at that moment “he thought of his home in Africa, and of friends left there whom he should never see again.”97

  Ruiz, on the other hand, recalled a routine business transaction when he testified about the purchase. He told a correspondent of the New York Morning Herald that “he first met these negroes in the fields close to Havana.” He took his time in deciding who to buy: “He saw them and examined them for two or three days before he made his purchases.” He was not concerned about their ethnicity or nationality. He did not bother to “inquire whether they were Congo negroes, or Mandangoes, or where they came from.” He simply saw that “they were stout bodied men and he bought them.” Ruiz purchased the forty-nine men “on account of his uncle, Don Saturnino Carrias, a merchant of Puerto Príncipe, not for any property of his [own] but for sale at that place.” Pedro Montes bought the four children separately, in a different place, “the house of a tobacconist in Machandas street, in Havana,” from petty traders named Xiques and Azpilaca. Ruiz and Montes stressed that the buying and selling of slaves was a normal part of life in Havana in 1839.98

  It is impossible to appreciate the full experience of the Amistad Africans while they were held in the barracoons of Cuba’s major city, but evidence suggests that it was a profound one, in which old bonds were broken and new ones formed amid dreadful uncertainty. The Africans would have been incarcerated along with large numbers of others who came from a much broader expanse of West Africa, from not only the Gallinas Coast, but also, moving from west to east, from Senegambia; the Gold Coast; Lagos and Onim in the Bight of Benin; Bonny in the Bight of Biafra; Princes and São Tomé in the Guinea Islands; Cabinda, Loango, and the Congo River in West Central Africa; even Mozambique in southeast Africa. They also would have interacted with some enslaved Africans already present, acculturated, and working in Havana. What kinds of discussions took place in the barracoons of Havana about urgent matters of common interest, and through what means of communication? Where are we? What kind of place is Havana? Where are we going? What will happen to us after we get there? Is there a place to which we might escape?99

  Something happened in Havana to create terror among the Amistad Africans. Clues may be found in commentary by Madden, who lived in Havana and was roundly despised there for his abolitionist principles. He said repeatedly after the rebellion that

  these unfortunate persons, if they are returned to Cuba, will every man of them be put to death. This was understood as a matter of course by every body at Havana; and the feeling of every one there is that they deserve such a fate. Their act in boldly rising against their oppressors and striking a blow for freedom is looked upon as a deed of peculiar atrocity, and as demanding signal punishment.

  The Spanish ambassador to the United States, Angel Calderón de la Barca, had stated in his first letter about the case, dated September 6, 1839, that the “internal tranquility” of Cuba depended on proper punishment “to prevent the commission of similar offenses” on the island. The Amistad rebels themselves shared the view that they would be executed if they were returned to Havana. The most likely speculation is that sometime during their stay in Havana, while they awaited sale and transport to another part of the island, they witnessed the execution of rebellious slaves, perhaps their very own shipmates from the Teçora, at “El Horcón” (place of the gallows), near the harbor. The Amistad Africans would tremble at the very mention of the city’s name ever after.100

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rebellion

  Night had fallen, and Havana’s streetlamps cast a golden glow on the prisoners, now dressed as sailors, as they trudged toward the waterfront. None of them had a clear idea about where they were going nor why they were clothed in mariners’ slops. Their captors herded them along, speaking quietly, even furtively, to them in the Spanish language not a single one of them could understand. After ten days in the city’s infamous barracoons, they were, on this Friday evening, June 28, 1839, entering a new phase in their transatlantic ordeal.1

  The white men guiding their way were nervous. The prisoners did not know why. Later they would learn that their captors feared the British vessel Romney, a large fourth-rate man-of-war (1,227 tons) anchored in the harbor and to be avoided at all costs, lest its soldiers and sailors seize the enslaved and liberate them, which a recent treaty between Britain and Spain had allowed them to do. The Afro-Cuban sailor Antonio recalled, “There were Spanish and Yankee men of war in the port, and English too. There were many vessels there in pursuit of slavers.” This is why they were boarded in disguise and under cover of darkness.2

  When they arrived at the dock they could barely make out their intended vessel, which was anchored several hundred yards off shore, “about a musket shot” away. José Ruiz helped to load his recently purchased adult male prisoners into lighters to carry them to a vessel with a rather cruel name: La Amistad, Spanish for “Friendship.” Sailors rowed one boatload of disoriented captives after another out to the schooner, driving them up a rope ladder and over the rail to the main deck. Fifteen minutes after the last group of men came aboard, the sailors brought aboard three little girls and a boy, who arrived with their master, fifty-eight year-old Don Pedro Montes.

  As they went aboard, the Africans would have noted how everything about the Amistad was smaller than the Teçora, on which they had made the Middle Passage. The vessel was modest in size—the schooner possessed a seventy-ton carrying capacity compared to one hundred fifty to two hundred tons for the brig. So too were their own numbers smaller: now only fifty-three compared to the five hundred to six hundred men, women, and children who had boarded the original slaver. The Amistad’s crew was tiny, too. Captain Ramón Ferrer commanded only four others, including the sailor and cook Celestino, a twenty-six-year-old mulatto from Puerto Rico, and the teenage Afro-Cuban sailor/cabin boy Antonio, both of whom Ferrer called his slaves. Two sailors, Manuel Padilla of Catalonia, Spain, and Jacinto Verdaque of Santo Domingo, would work the sails, steer the vessel, and keep an armed guard over the prisoners.

  The well-educated young gentleman Ruiz and the older, less genteel Montes were not part of the crew, but they were unmistakably men of power in the larger scheme of things. Having bought the forty-nine adult male captives directly from the captain of the Teçora, Ruiz planned to take them to a burgeoning region called Puerto Príncipe and sell them to local sugar planters. Montes had purchased the children: Margru, Kagne, Teme, and Kale. Ruiz and Montes seemed so powerful, the captives could not easily tell who was actually in charge of the vessel.3

  La Amistad

  The Amistad was a long, low schooner, a popular type of two-masted craft the captives may have seen on the Gallinas Coast or indeed most anywhere around the Atlantic in the early nineteenth century. “La Amistad” was written on its square stern. The bottom was painted green, above which was a white streak. The upper works were black. The vessel was sixty-four feet long, nineteen feet nine inches wide, with a golden eagle on its prow and gilt stars on both sides. Built in Cuba of high-quality “West Indian hard wood”—the deck and hull bottom were made of red Spanish cedar, the sides of mahogany—this “sharp
clipper” also had copper sheathing, with iron fastenings, to protect the hull against the shipworms and mollusks that routinely destroyed sailing ships in tropical waters. Captain Ferrer had ordered an awning to be built over the deck to protect the crew and human cargo from the blazing sun until the time for sailing came.4

  The Amistad was essentially a coastal trader, but it had made longer voyages to Jamaica, and the coppered hull suggests the possibility of a transatlantic slaving voyage or two, as such protection was expensive and not common among vessels built solely for local and regional commerce. Better known for speed than carrying capacity, the schooner could outrun most British ships policing the slave trade and hence became a preferred vessel after the commerce in bodies had been outlawed in 1807 in Great Britain and 1808 in the United States. As the sailor Antonio testified in U.S. District Court in January 1840, “The Sch. Amistad had carried slaves before—every two months made trip.” The temporary awning was common to slave ships.5

  Because Captain Ferrer had run an advertisement in Noticioso y Lucera seeking passengers and cargo a week before the voyage, the hold of roughly 6,600 cubic feet contained a big, well-sorted cargo. Manufactured goods made up a large part, many of them destined for use on sugar plantations: “6 mill rollers, 8 cogg wheels, 6 piece of iron, one box of iron wedges,” as well as iron castings, and a “mill for grinding sugar cane.” Boxes and bales of fabrics and clothes were also abundant: silks, crepes, calicoes, ginghams, gauze, German and Silesian linens, muslins, and “50 pairs of shirts and pantaloons.” Other items were for everyday use: soap, glass knobs, crockery, toys, needles, iron pots, “48 rolls of wire,” and leather goods of several kinds: saddles, bridles, and holsters. The Amistad was a floating general store of plantation life. As on any vessel involved in nefarious activities, the captain made sure to have an assortment of national flags, “half a dozen” of them, to be used as the occasion demanded. Another especially important part of the cargo was “1 box containing 4 percussion guns.” These weapons, probably produced in Britain, represented a new and recent improvement over previous models in that they allowed quick firing and were not damaged by water and dampness—two features that would have made them very useful on a vessel like the Amistad. The sailors carried muskets to overawe the enslaved.