Facing the prospect of a horrific death at the hands of the white flesh-eaters, they would risk a different kind of death to escape their captors’ bloody clutches. At four a.m. the ship was in almost total darkness. Everyone was asleep except the sailor at the helm. Cinqué, Faquorna, Moru, and Kimbo climbed up from the hold through the hatchway and onto the main deck. It is not clear whether they had to break open the grating or whether it had been left unlocked by mistake. They snuck quietly toward Celestino—not Captain Ferrer—as the first and primary object of their wrath. He was sleeping in the ship’s longboat, which lay in the waist, on the larboard side, near the cabin. Along the way Cinqué picked up a belaying pin, or handspike, used to turn the ship’s windlass, and his mates did likewise, quietly gathering weapons from the main deck. They surrounded Celestino and clubbed him repeatedly with hard, crushing blows. Fuli later recalled, “The cook was killed first—was killed by Jingua [Cinqué] with a stick, while lying in the boat.” Burna agreed: “He saw Cinguez strike the cook with a club, probably a handspike.” During the beating, Celestino did not cry out, did not groan, did not make any sound at all, according to Antonio. The only sounds to be heard in the damp night air above the rolling of the sea and the creaking of the ship were the thuds of wood on flesh and bone.27
Now began “the whooh,” as Burna called the chaos of open rebellion that engulfed the small main deck. The commotion woke up the captain, who was sleeping on a mattress not far away, as well as the rest of the crew and the two passengers, Ruiz and Montes, who were in the cabin. Ferrer called out, “Attack them, for they have killed the cook.” Amid the “confusion and uproar,” as Ruiz remembered it, they scrambled frantically in the dark for arms, grabbing whatever was close at hand; there was no time to load pistols or muskets. Captain Ferrer seized a dagger and a club and fought furiously to defend his vessel from capture. The two sailors, Manuel and Jacinto, who were supposed to be the armed guard to prevent what was now happening before their very eyes, threw themselves into the battle, one with a club, the other with no weapon at all. Montes armed himself with a knife and a pump handle, screaming all the while at the Africans to stop, to be still. The unarmed sailor yelled to Montes to get the dead cook’s knife and give it to him. Ruiz grabbed an oar as he scrambled from his passenger’s quarters, shouting “No! No!” as he came on deck. Ruiz then “stood before the caboose and halloed to the slaves to be quiet and to go down into the hold.” They ignored the command of the (now former) master; indeed, more Africans escaped their chains and joined the fray, wielding fearsome machetes that had been found by the little girls, who had had free range of the vessel. Seeing that the situation was far beyond exhortation, Ruiz called to Montes to kill some of the rebels in order to frighten the rest and to restore order. He believed, wrongly, that the Africans were all “great cowards.”28
At first the crew and passengers were able to drive the rebels from amidships beyond the foremast, and at this point Captain Ferrer, who desperately hoped that this was a rebellion of the belly, commanded Antonio to fetch some sea biscuit and throw it among the rebels in the hope of distracting them. He knew they were hungry—hunger had been a complaint since the voyage began. Antonio did as his master commanded, but the insurgents, he explained, “would not touch it.” Antonio himself opted for neutrality: he climbed up the mainstays, where he would watch the struggle unfold, safely from above.29
Several of the Africans were reluctant to attack the captain until Cinqué exhorted them to do so. A small group formed a “phalanx” to surround him, machetes in hand. As the battle raged, Captain Ferrer killed a man named Duevi and mortally wounded a second, unnamed rebel, which infuriated the other Africans and made them fight harder. He also wounded others, as Kale recalled: “Then captain kill one man with knife and cut Mendi people plenty.” Two of the rebels attacked Montes with an oar, which he grabbed and used to hold them off. Montes wrestled with the men until one of the sailors cried out that he should let it go or they would kill him. At this point, a blow to his arm caused Montes to drop his knife. He groped desperately around the deck in an effort to find it. Ruiz continued to scream at the rebels to stop fighting and go below, but they ignored him, soon disarming him of his own makeshift weapon.30
Suddenly the tide of battle turned—red. An insurgent wielding one of the machetes slashed one of the sailors, who cried out “Murder!” He and his crewmate saw not only defeat but certain death in the ever-larger mob, now armed with machetes, so they threw a canoe overboard—they would not have had time to lower the longboat, which was in any case heavy with the battered corpse of Celestino. They jumped into the water, leaving the remaining five to battle ten times their number. Of one of the sailors, Kinna recalled: “He swim—swim long time—may be swim more—we not know.” The two sailors, cut and bleeding, eventually crawled into the canoe and began paddling for land. They had about eighteen miles to cover and it was by no means certain they would make it.31
Someone now gave Montes “a powerful blow on the head with a cane knife, and he fell senseless on the deck.” Stunned, with another deep wound on his arm and “faint from the loss of blood,” he roused himself, staggered from the battle scene, and fell headlong down the hatchway. Once below, he remained conscious enough to crawl into a space between two barrels and hide beneath a canvas sail. It was a frail hope against death.32
On the main deck, Cinqué and the other leaders of the rebellion now surrounded Captain Ferrer in a fury of flashing blades. Faquorna apparently struck the first two blows; Cinqué struck the last one. Antonio testified, “Sinqua killed Capt with cane knife—see it with my eyes.”33 When the time for the death blow came, one of the brave combatants, Kimbo, proved to be squeamish: “When the Captain of the schooner was killed, he could not see it done, but looked another way.” Slashed several times on his face and body, the captain collapsed on the deck, bloody, crumpled, and lifeless. The warriors danced, yelled, and beheaded the captain in their customary rituals of war called kootoo.34
The rebels now went in search of Montes, whose ragged, heavy breathing gave away his hiding place below deck. An enraged Cinqué found him and swung at him twice with his cane knife, narrowly missing. Montes begged for his life, to no avail as Cinqué prepared to swing again, until Burna stayed his arm. Cinqué and Burna then carried Montes up to the main deck, where he saw Ruiz, “seated upon the hen coop with both hands tied.” He, too, was pleading for his life. The rebels laced the two Spaniards together, “making at the same time horrible gestures” and threatening to kill them. Someone dragged young Antonio down from the stays and tied him to the two other prisoners. After a little while, Ruiz recalled, the insurgents “made signs that they would not hurt me.” The new masters of the vessel then locked their prisoners below as they went through the captain’s cabin and also familiarized themselves with the cargo.35
With two dead, two overboard, and three disarmed, bound, and begging for their lives, an eerie silence came over the bloodstained deck. The rebellion was over. The Mende way of war had carried the day. Mende warriors always used knives—the cutlass at home, the very similar cane knife aboard the Amistad. They used typical Mende military tactics: encouraged by a moonless night they launched a surprise guerilla attack, using war shouts and swinging their blades wildly in a successful effort to make their enemies abandon position. The goal of warfare was not death, but rather capture of people and place, and both were quickly achieved aboard the vessel. The social world of the Amistad had been turned upside down. The captain and cook had been killed, the sailors had been forced to jump overboard, and the slaveholders were now prisoners. Those who had once been slaves had won their freedom in a desperate armed gamble.
A New Order
Cinqué the warrior apparently remained in something of a rage for a time after the rebellion had formally ended. Antonio testified that Cinqúe threatened to kill him, Ruiz, and Montes. He even threatened to kill Burna for defending Ruiz and Montes, partly, it seems, because he feared Bu
rna was conspiring with them to return the vessel to Havana. Ruiz noted that Antonio had a special skill that kept him alive: “They would have killed him, but he acted as interpreter between us, as he understood both languages.” It also helped that Antonio had become good friends with one of the teenage captives, the “stout built youth” Ndamma, who protected him. Montes was forced “to fall on his knees and kiss the feet of the ring leader before he would spare his life.”36
Burna gave his own account of the clash with Cinqué: “I say where whitey man? where old man? (meaning Montez) where sailor man? Cinguez say he will kill ’em; Cinguez want me tie old man; I say no—you cut off my head first—Cinguez give me money in cloth; I no take it; I tell him he no hurt young massa, (Ruiz) he say no, he kill old man; I say no, I take him off.” Burna won this heated debate, as Ruiz and Montes lived to tell the tale of the uprising. The warriors did not annihilate all of their enemies.37
The following morning, the rebels were in a state of jubilation. Montes recalled, “They were all glad, the next day, at what had happened.” Neither he nor Ruiz, however, were sure what had actually transpired amid the chaos. They saw that the captain, cook, and two sailors were missing and they supposed all had been killed. Antonio, who had seen everything, told them that the first two had been killed, but the others had escaped in a canoe.38
The rebels, led by Cinqué, Grabeau, and Burna, locked Ruiz and Montes in irons, many unused sets of which they suddenly had at their disposal. When the slaveholders complained of their chains, Cinqué howled in righteous fury: “You say irons good enough for nigger slave; and if they good enough for slave, they are good enough for Spaniards, too.” Ruiz and Montes were likewise allowed little to drink, likely the same half teacupful of water twice a day that not long ago had been the portion of the Africans. Again they complained of their treatment and again Cinqué pointed out the contradictions: “You say water enough for nigger slave; so water enough for Spaniards.” The object lesson continued for two days, in order to give Ruiz and Montes “a taste of their own cruelty toward the slaves,” said Kinna. Thereafter the chains were removed and they were given food and water in the same proportions as everyone else. They were threatened many times, but never again beaten or harmed, as Ruiz and Montes themselves admitted.39
The morning after the rebellion Cinqué and Faquorna threw the headless body of Captain Ferrer overboard and washed the deck of his blood. The rebels released Ruiz and Montes from their irons, stripping the latter of his clothes, which were badly stained by the blood from his wounds. They then “took from him the key of his trunk and brought him clean clothes, which they made him put on.” A new phase of life aboard the Amistad had begun.40
Toward a Free Country
The final, and in many ways the biggest, questions about the revolt aboard the Amistad remained: Could the rebels sail the ship? Could they set and manage the sails, operate the windlass, raise and lower the anchor, handle the longboat, and steer the ship? Could they navigate the treacherous shoals of the Caribbean and survive violent tropical storms at sea? Could they, in the end, get themselves to a place where their desperate rebellion would result in true emancipation? Could they work their way to freedom?
Cuban authorities, as soon as they learned of the revolt from the sailors who jumped overboard and made it to shore, assumed that the answer to all these questions was no. They dispatched a ship of war, the Cubano, to search for the Amistad, thinking that the Africans would run the vessel aground on the north coast of Cuba and go ashore as maroons. They would not, or could not, remain at sea. Yet this is precisely what the Amistad rebels decided to do, outthinking the government of the slaveholders and wagering that they could provide affirmative answers to the big questions facing them. For a disparate group of people who had grown up in non-seafaring societies and had had nothing to do with deep-sea sailing vessels until they were engulfed in the twin catastrophe of enslavement and Atlantic shipment, it was a bold and daring decision.41
Even though the Amistad rebels had established their leadership roles before and during the uprising, the collective continued to meet and act together as the situation unfolded. As Ruiz noted, a few days after the rebellion, the group met and officially chose Cinqué as their leader, as the Poro Society might. He had earned the position in the customary Mende way, through action. Other positions also were established: Sessi, who apparently possessed some seafaring knowledge (probably acquired aboard the Teçora), would steer and “make sail.” Foone would be delegated as the group’s cook.42
As the new masters of the Amistad, the rebels gave their most important order to Montes, who had once been a sea captain and therefore knew navigation, to take them home—to sail back across the “great waters” to Sierra Leone. Using Antonio as interpreter, they made it clear that they wanted to reverse the Middle Passage. Montes protested that he did not know the way, but the rebels refused to accept this as an answer. Cinqué told Montes that he should “steer toward the rising of the sun.” It had been behind them as they came westward on the Teçora and would now be ahead of them on the return voyage. The sun would guide the way.43
Montes had no choice but to do as he was told, for the demand was made with cane knives hovering above his head. “Every moment my life was threatened,” Montes recalled. Yet he bravely and cleverly developed a plan to thwart his new masters and to save his and Ruiz’s lives. During the daylight hours he would sail, as instructed, toward the rising sun. He would do so slowly, with sails loose, beating in the wind, to limit headway. But at night he would tack back to the west and north, to stay in coastal waters, where he was more likely to encounter other vessels. The man who had done all he could to evade the British antislavery patrols in Cuban waters now hoped against hope that one of them might find him. Naval officers who once would have confiscated his property might now save his life.44
The Africans did not trust Montes, and rightly so. Fear and stress roiled the vessel. The first time Montes reversed course, they sensed something was wrong and worried that he was secretly taking the Amistad back to Havana. They held a “consultation”—another Poro meeting—and decided to kill both him and Ruiz. It would be better to go it alone than risk the treachery of the white men. When the time came for the killing, Montes fell upon his knees and begged again for his life, pleading for his children and family. The influential Burna probably supported him. A majority of the rebels relented again, and let Montes live.
Ruiz and Montes also wrote a letter and explained to Cinqué that if he would give it to the captain of any vessel they should encounter at sea, the recipient would take them to Sierra Leone. Cinqué took the letter, pretending to agree to the proposal, but afterwards discussed the matter with his brethren and expressed his suspicion. Unfamiliar with written language because they had none in Mende, and unable to read what the Spaniards had written, Cinqué and his comrades decided that it was impossible for them to know what was in the letter. The leader concluded, “There may be death in it.” Indeed there may have been, for Ruiz and Montes were undoubtedly trying to send a message that would result in the recapture of the vessel, their own liberation, and the reenslavement of the Africans. The Africans attached a piece of iron to the letter with a string and sent it “to the bottom of the sea.”45
On another occasion, Cinqué perceived what he thought was deception and demanded that the anchor be dropped so that progress in the wrong direction might be halted. When Montes told him the waters were too deep to anchor at that location, Cinqué, an adept swimmer and diver, “jumped overboard and was under so long they thought he would never rise.” Finally he emerged from the water to say that “there was no bottom to be found.” Montes was right: the ocean was too deep for anchoring. Westward they drifted—not by accident and not for the last time.46
Uncertainty about where they were going was soon compounded by another, more immediate problem, one that would plague them for the entire voyage and severely limit what they could do: they did not have enough w
ater. Because water puncheons and casks had been scarce in Havana when the Amistad set sail, they not only lacked water, they lacked enough containers for water, so they had to stop every few days, under dangerous circumstances, to refill the vessels they had. They caught all the rainwater they could, squeezing the sails for each lifesaving drop. Every time they went ashore for water, on one isolated cay after another across the Bahamas, they did so with dire fear of being discovered and recaptured. Even when they could fill their demijohns, pots, and bottles, “it was soon drunk up” and the search began all over again. They spent more than a month sailing around a relatively small geographic area in the Bahamas in search of water.47
The rebels were plagued by another big problem: they simply did not know where they were. They had no maps, no navigational knowledge, and few visual markers at sea by which to judge the ship’s location or progress. To make matters worse, they did not know where they could get reliable information or who they could trust in the perilous Caribbean world of bondage. They did not realize, for example, that in the very Bahama Islands around which they were now sailing, the British government had freed all slaves less than a year before, on August 1, 1838, and that they might have found refuge there, as other self-emancipated people had done and would continue to do. They went ashore to look for water in one place because Montes told them “there were only negroes in that part and no slaves.” The rebels proceeded cautiously, and upon seeing two white men they jumped back into their boat, rowed back to the schooner, hastily weighed anchor, and sailed back out to sea.48
Encounters with other vessels at sea were fairly common and always terrifying. Small fishing smacks, pilot boats, schooners, brigs, and big ships—all sailed nearby, especially since Montes tried to keep the Amistad in busy sea-lanes. Several vessels approached, whereupon the Africans immediately sent Ruiz and Montes below. The strangers wondered if the schooner was in distress or needed a pilot to navigate the dangerous waters, but they rarely got close enough to ask their questions. When they saw forty-odd men armed with cane knives, they usually backed away in fear. They must have known that something dramatic had happened on the vessel. Ruiz and Montes hoped they would inform local authorities, who might in turn dispatch a warship to investigate, but the prisoners were repeatedly disappointed in this hope. Meanwhile, the Africans regarded every vessel they encountered with suspicion and hostility, a threat to their hard-won freedom. Sometimes they slept with cane knives in their hands.
The Amistad Rebellion Page 9
