Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  It was late in October 1832 that the Baltimore clipper Ariel, well out from the coast of Morocco, was hailed by the French corvette Bordeaux. The captain of the ship being overtaken did not, of course, know what it meant to be hailed by a warship and was at a loss as to how he must respond. He judged the best thing to do was to keep plowing ahead and avoid a collision.

  In the end the corvette did four things in rapid succession: it fired a shot across the bow of the Ariel; it fired another shot; it then closed and shouted instruction in both French and English; and finally it launched two rowboats containing twenty sailors heavily armed, and when they boarded the strange ship they shouted back in French, “It’s manned by blacks! They speak no civilized language!”

  When officers came aboard, it took them only a few minutes to realize that they were on a ship which had suffered mutiny; belowdecks they uncovered the seventeen prisoners, and a tale of horror began to unfold.

  “We were sailing peacefully westward.”

  “Where to?”

  “Cuba.”

  “A hold full of slaves?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Acquired where?”

  “Arab slavers had marched them into Luanda.”

  “I think you sent shore parties into Africa to capture them.”

  “Oh no, sir! On my honor. The Portuguese sold them to us. You know, the bishop on the red chair who blesses them before we take them aboard.”

  “How many?”

  “Five hundred and seventeen.”

  “Good God! We find only four hundred and thirty-one.”

  “You know niggers. They do die fearfully.” The spokesman saw that when this was interpreted, it created an unfavorable impression, so he quickly added, “And don’t forget, many were killed in the mutiny.”

  Yes, a major ship had been taken on the high seas, and all its officers slain. This was a matter of the gravest import; its ramifications could be evaluated only by a court of law. So the captain of the Bordeaux placed a cadre of men aboard the Ariel to trail along until both ships could reach a French port, but only two days’ progress had been made when the British cruiser Bristol hove into sight, identified the Ariel as a slave ship the British had been trying for many years to arrest, and demanded of the French that she be turned over to them.

  An international incident threatened, but the two captains who had faced each other in distant wars realized that this was an impasse which must be handled by compromise, and a sensible one was worked out over port and pudding in the Bristol: the French had captured the ship and it was clearly their prize, and if the court dealing with mutiny awarded it to them, the sleek clipper would become part of the French war fleet. The mutinous slaves, who had murdered not less than nineteen American seamen, including four officers, would be turned over to the British, who had a traditional interest in suppressing the slave trade and who could be trusted to handle this complicated case intelligently. The seventeen American survivors would, of course, be set free by the French, but they would be retained by the English as witnesses in the trial of the rebellious slaves, and later as defendants themselves against the charge of slaving.

  The Ariel did enter the French navy, where her high degree of speed and austerity of design captivated all who served in her. The infamous ’tween-deck was removed, and the main deck was raised slightly to accommodate eight carronades. She sailed the Atlantic for years, often on station to interdict the slave trade, and in due course made a return journey to the very town in which she had been built.

  The slaves were returned to their chains and transported by the Bristol to Plymouth, where on June 13, 1833, an extraordinary court delivered an extraordinary verdict.

  It is established that the clipper Ariel of American registry had been engaging in the slave trade for many years, at considerable profit to her owners and crew. Otherwise, in this incident the ship was well handled and in the best traditions of the sea. No evidence was presented to us proving either undue cruelty or sustained severity. The crew, from Captain Matthew Turlock down to the messboy, was responsible.

  On or about August 1, 1832, the Ariel arrived off Luanda, Portuguese Africa, for the obvious purpose of collecting a shipment of slaves from the barracoons in that city. These slaves, an incredible five hundred and seventeen in number, had been collected among the villages strung along the Xanga River, one of the minor tributaries of the Sankuru, itself a tributary of the Congo. They were the property of the Arab slaver Abu Hassan, whose activities have been reported earlier in the British courts.

  The Ariel loaded its forbidden cargo despite efforts by His Majesty’s cruiser Bristol to prevent such slaving, and then made its escape under the Bristol’s guns and in full knowledge of its illegal behavior. On September 22 the slaves imprisoned in the hold mutinied and took the ship. More than a month later, on October 24, it was captured by the French corvette Bordeaux, a remarkable fact being that its sails were properly set and it was being handled in shipshape manner. This court declares said clipper Ariel forfeit and congratulates the Bordeaux for having taken possession.

  Now as to the individuals involved. We find the seventeen surviving American sailors guilty-by-participation in the crime of slaving. Had the voyage proved successful, they admit they stood to share the money gained by the sale of their slaves in Cuba. Each and severally are sentenced to two years in jail.

  The slaves present a more difficult problem. There will be many in this nation and elsewhere who will feel that their attempt to escape from bondage was commendable, but the solemn fact is that in doing so they engaged in an act of mutiny on the high seas, they stole a ship which had been duly registered, and they murdered four officers and fifteen men. Can the seafaring nations of the world condone behavior which strikes at the very heart of naval tradition? This court thinks not.

  Because of his leading role in the mutiny, the slave known as Rutak shall be hanged. The slave known as Coboto shall be hanged. The slave known as Betana shall be hanged ... [and so on, through a list of nineteen slaves.]

  The slave known as Cudjo, who appears to have played a major role in the mutiny, also played a major role in saving the ship. He and all others shall be transported to Havana, and delivered to their rightful owners.

  This harsh decision raised, as might have been expected, an outcry in both England and France, but the objections came from only a limited number of critics. In the former country the year 1832 was one of vigorous political reform, always opposed by the grand Duke of Wellington, and also one in which the anti-slavery movement gained the momentum which would within the year prohibit the ownership of slaves throughout the British Empire. The citizenry was so preoccupied with doing good for blacks in general that it had no energy left to protect the rights of specific blacks.

  In France, the nation was bending every effort to digest the peculiar behavior of their new king, Louis Phillipe; nominated by the radicals because he was a revolutionary, he quickly became the darling of the conservatives because he had always been at heart a reactionary. Alternately confused and elated, the citizens of France could not care what happened to a gang of slaves, especially since their aborted action enabled France to gain a fine warship.

  On June 15, 1833, Cudjo and four hundred and eleven other blacks were marched out of Plymouth jail and loaded onto a British ship bound for Cuba, where in a large shed at dockside they were put up for sale.

  Word had circulated, of course, that these were the mutineers who had murdered the crew of the Ariel, so an ugly fascination attended their sale, and more buyers than usual pressed in upon the auctioneer, but they had come to gawk, not bid. Plantation owners were loath to bring onto their land slaves known to cause trouble, and speculators feared that none could be smuggled into America, where an uprising of slaves led by the preacher Nat Turner had ended in the slaughter of fifty-five Virginians. American slaveholders were terrified.

  At the sale, Brazilian traders bought the lot except for six of the strongest young men
. After the most careful inspection, these were picked off by a thin American who wore a white linen suit buttoned almost to the chin. He sucked constantly upon a silver toothpick and spoke softly in the manner of a gentleman: “Name’s T. T. Arbigost, Savannah, Georgia, and I pay cash.” When the auctioneer asked, after the sale, why he had purchased the six men who promised to be most difficult, Arbigost said, “I have ways of training them. What I figure is, I can smuggle them into Georgia, then slip them into the market, one at a time ... different parts of the country ... nobody need ever know they were mutineers.” He paid over his money, marched his six slaves, including Cudjo, to his sloop, dragged them belowdecks and ordered his carpenter to secure them. This man was a powerful fellow from the interior of Georgia who hoped one day to run his own plantation and had specific theories about handling blacks. With the aid of four stout sailors he spread-eagled Cudjo on the lowest deck of the ship, where the headroom was only eighteen inches. He ordered his men to strap down each ankle, extending the legs as far as possible. He did the same with Cudjo’s wrists. Then, about his neck he fastened a heavy iron collar from which led two small chains. These he bolted to the deck. And when the powerful slave was thus secured, the carpenter began to kick him, cursing the while and daring him to try mutiny aboard this ship. And he continued doing this until Cudjo fainted. With a farewell series of kicks, the carpenter growled to the remaining five, whom he pinioned in similar fashion, “Now let’s see you mutiny.”

  It was in this posture that Cudjo, twenty-five years old, slipped into America.

  THE SLAVE-BREAKER

  MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in conformance with its national customs.

  The most practical was that in Brazil. Since Portuguese women were discouraged by their Catholic faith from emigrating to a savage new country, Portuguese men found their wives in the slave population, and a curious, strong and viable society developed. Slaves were slaves and were treated as such until they produced beautiful daughters; then suddenly they became the parents of the bride. At fourteen the master’s son was given his own slave, the prettiest black woman of eighteen on the plantation, and it became her pleasurable task to introduce the lad into an essential meaning of slavery.

  The most reasonable system was the English. Since many of the best young men had to find their destiny in a life overseas, it became traditional for many of the best young women to follow them; although marriage with slaves was unthinkable, reasonably decent treatment was obligatory, and it was not surprising that England became the first great power to outlaw slavery at home and discipline it abroad.

  The French were perhaps the best administrators of their slave system; it was a cross between the total assimilation of Brazil and the rigid exclusionism of England, and resulted in a kind of amiable non-rigid society in Guadaloupe and Martinique, where a family of some distinction might have a cousin married to a former slave. In fact, there were persistent rumors that Joséphine de Beauhamais, the exquisite Martinique girl who married Napoleon to become empress of France, had slave blood in her distant background. The lot of the French slave was by no means pleasant, and there were insurrections in these islands too, but they were handled with compromise and concession.

  The most stolid, unrelieved system was that of the Dutch. They treated their slaves no worse than others, but they did so with such relentless pressure and lack of grace that slave rebellions in their colonies became frequent. To be a slave on a Dutch island was to live without hope; day after relentless day the sugar mills revolved, grinding the blacks into sullen submission until they could bear no more. Then the fiery insurrection, the savage reprisals, and the continued grinding of the mill.

  The Spanish were an anomaly. In Mexico and Peru their primary slaves were Indians, whom they baptized and annihilated. Blacks fared comparatively well in some of the Spanish possessions, where they often served as teachers, minor administrators and family friends. In the Spanish islands their life in the sugar fields was horrible and brief. Many who had known servitude in islands like Cuba thanked their forgotten gods when fate moved them to the United States.

  By all standards, and in the opinion of all, the one island which represented human slavery at its absolute nadir was Haiti. Here, under a remote French administration, accountable to no one, a band of cruel exploiters accepted those fractious slaves whom no one else could handle, worked them sixteen hours a day like animals, fed them little, beat them constantly, and buried them after four or five years. For a slave to be assigned to Haiti was a sentence of lingering death.

  American slavery covered such a vast area that no generalizations could be easily made. In the northern tobacco states with temperate climates, like Virginia, it duplicated the best aspects of the English pattern; in the more remote lower states, like Mississippi and Louisiana with their steaming sugar and indigo fields, the worst features of the Dutch and Haitian systems flourished. And the cotton states, like Georgia and Alabama, offered some of the best, some of the worst.

  Maryland was in a category by itself. Indeed, it encompassed two categories: the western shore, whose plantations were much modified by anti-slavery pressures from Pennsylvania; and the Eastern Shore, which remained insulated from outside pressures and resembled a fiefdom of the Carolinas. In 1833 the apex of Eastern Shore slavery occurred on the vast Steed holdings.

  There were four major plantations: the great one on Devon Island, with its satellite operations north of the Choptank, and the three fine establishments at the Refuge, with their outlying fields reaching to the Miles River. Together they covered a vast extent of land, well over thirty thousand acres, which were worked by six hundred and ninety-three slaves. And these slaves, who soon would total more than eight hundred, were kept under control by eighteen white men.

  No one could ever see all the Steed slaves. Some worked in fields so remote they rarely encountered a white overseer. Others tended the various stores. The fortunate ones, insofar as food and clothing were concerned, worked in the four mansions. Others specialized in trades requiring the most sophisticated skills; they stayed in hidden shops all their lives. But most worked the plantation crops: wheat, corn, vegetables, a little tobacco. They hoed and weeded and harvested, and they did this till they died.

  They lived, for the most part, in collections of rude, dirt-floored wooden cabins whose boards did not fit and through which the winds of winter swept. They were allowed some wood to burn, but not much. They were given some food to eat, but never much. They were medicined when they fell ill, but only by the overseer or his wife. And they were given clothes, one reasonably good outfit for special occasions, one fitting of work clothes for all other days of the year. They had no church, no hospital and, above all, no school.

  The first slaves had reached Devon Island in 1670; it was now one hundred and sixty-three years later and almost nothing had changed. If those first blacks could come back and walk up from the wharf some Tuesday night, by Wednesday morning they would find themselves fitting easily into the system. Actually, no slaves direct from Africa had reached Devon in more than eighty years; new arrivals had been born in America, often on plantations noted for their success in breeding blacks.

  At Devon their lives were governed by overseers; on remote plantations a Steed slave might spend three years clearing new fields and breaking them in without ever having actually seen a member of the Steed family. Overseers were usually German or Scot; they had a pragmatic approach to life, and the Lutheran religion of the former and the Calvinism of the latter prepared them to believe that sinners should be punished. Thus they were always ready to chastise the tardy slave and keep the
field hands working; also, they tended to be honest.

  On the island itself in the year 1833 the overseer was a Mr. Beasley, a Scotsman with an impeccable reputation for strictness and fairness. He knew each of his slaves by name and tried to assign them tasks for which they were preeminently suited. In his early days on a Virginia plantation he had often whipped slaves, because the master there demanded it; but after he fell under the influence of the Steeds, he never struck a slave again. He did, however, demand instant compliance, and if a slave proved refractory, Mr. Beasley recommended sale to some other plantation. He also liked to see his slaves attending the prayer meetings he conducted—“The word of God is soothing to a troubled spirit.”

  Some of the distant plantations had known overseers of quite a different stripe; some were true horrors, lashing and beating and knocking down; but when verified reports of their savage behavior reached Mr. Beasley, he dismissed them on the spot, so that the Steeds were justified in boasting, as they did repeatedly, “Our slaves are the best treated in Maryland. They’re not beaten and they’re not abused.”

  The pitiful fact about slavery as it existed on the Steed plantation was its banality. On white and black alike the heavy encumbrances of custom pulled everyone down to a mournful level in which the most extraordinary situations were accepted as inevitable. An unbroken chain of black men and women was purchased for the plantation or bred there, and they existed through the centuries without family names, or recorded histories, or education, or variation, or hope. The male field hands formed an interminable succession of Toms, Jims, Joes; at the big house classical names were preferred, for these gave a kind of distinction to social life: Pompey, Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, Brutus. Women in remote fields often bore names that were rarely spoken by their white overseers: Pansy, Petty, Prissy, Pammy, Puss. Generation after generation they were judged to be alike: treated alike ... dressed alike ... ignored alike ... and buried alike.