Whereas most shipmate bonds had been formed in exile, a rare recovery of lost kin prompted celebration among West Central African recaptives and drew the attention of the American press. According to one widely circulated account, a “middle aged” woman, who had arrived with her three children in the Wildfire, discovered among the William’s shipmates four young women “whom she claimed as her daughters.”95 Both slave ships had loaded captives in March 1860 from the same barracoons near the mouth of the Congo River, making possible a remarkable reunion of seven women and girls torn from one another in previous captive journeys.96 The newspaper account’s assumption of sentimentalized nuclear family bonds obscured the subtleties of the women’s reclaimed kinship; these women could have been joined as mother and daughters or by local residence, extended lineage, or ritual family.97 Yet fellow shipmates clearly understood the magnitude of the moment. A journalist wrote that “shouts rose from three hundred voices” as the woman embraced her reclaimed daughters. The older woman who anchored her social identity strongly in her role as a mother and elder kinswoman recovered a familiar social mooring. Young and vulnerable female recaptives regained a reassuring adult presence and tangible evidence of their former lives. The strength of their connection became further evident in the fact that the four younger women left their William shipmates to travel with their maternal elder on the Wildfire recaptives’ Liberian passage.98 Even so, the exceptional nature of their reunion highlights the enormity of recaptives’ social alienation and the imperative of building shipmate networks.
For most recaptives, the collective basis of identity in family and lineage had been irrevocably ruptured. Shared experiences of illness and death instead served as the foundation from which recaptives built their social worlds in the wake of illegal slave ships.99 Numerous recaptives arrived in Key West weak and emaciated, wracked by dysentery, blinded by ophthalmia, and suffering from skin and respiratory infections.100 Due perhaps to the condition in which captives embarked at Ouidah, Bogota shipmates had experienced relatively fewer deaths and less sickness in the middle passage than their young West Central African counterparts. Young Congo shipmates of the William, however, arrived in such a state of extremity that many required transportation in horse-drawn carts from the government wharf to the camp’s buildings.101 At the depot, the effects of weeks at sea in crowded, filthy quarters with little water and food proved difficult to reverse.102 Daniel Whitehurst, a Virginia native and army physician with prior experience in Liberia, headed a team of three doctors hired by Moreno.103 Concerned most to defend his record in supervising the depot, Moreno told his superiors in Washington that after recaptives had embarked for Liberia, he took great satisfaction in knowing that he had been relieved of his “responsible charge without loss except from natural causes.”104
Congregating large numbers of people already suffering from a slave ship voyage, however, produced devastating results in recaptive camps throughout the Atlantic. In one extreme example, the recaptive hospital in Sierra Leone between 1838 and 1850 showed an average annual mortality of 50 percent.105 Key West recaptives experienced a lower overall rate of mortality (18.9 percent), but the deaths were compressed into a period of only eighty days and affected every shipmate group.106 During the entire period of occupation, only four days passed without the report of one or more deaths. On 28 May, the only recorded birth in the camps took place; one fragile life joined the camp as seven slid away. From that day until 7 July, in a period during which almost 200 people passed away, several days took a toll of six, seven, or eight lives each. The losses peaked on 20 June, when U.S. marshal Moreno recorded the deaths of one Bogota male, eight William males, one William female, one Wildfire male, and one Wildfire female. None of the recaptives had much control over how the deceased were buried. In Florida’s summer heat, dead bodies quickly decomposed and thus had to be promptly removed for burial. Daniel Davis, a Key West master carpenter, oversaw the laborers who interred bodies in shallow graves on a southern shore removed from both the camp and the main Key West cemetery.107 Tally sheets drawn up by Moreno listed 294 deaths and bore the signatures of the hospital steward and three attending physicians and a signed statement by the master carpenter. Perfunctory burial procedures addressed concerns for public health and official documentation.
Consequently, as with all enslaved Africans in motion across the Atlantic, the inability to properly bury and honor the dead deepened the social crisis faced by Key West recaptives. To borrow historian Vincent Brown’s phrasing, the Key West camp represented one of many “gasping new societies” in which hundreds of recaptive shipmates attempted to make their loss comprehensible through meaningful acknowledgment of death in an alien environment.108 Over many years, enslaved and recaptive Africans in the Americas gradually adapted familiar burial rites to their New World circumstances, but recaptives in Key West did not have this kind of time.109 In their immediate crisis, they were unable to enact collective rituals, which in both West and West Central Africa soothed the transition of a living relative into the realm of ancestors. An honorable burial helped family members ensure the positive intervention of an ancestor in the lives of his or her kin.110 In the transient Key West and Fort Sumter government camps, however, physical depletion, impending removal, and few resources precluded the necessary rites. A closer sampling of burial practices from nineteenth-century West Central and West Africa clearly illustrates the threat to the critical relations between the living and the dead posed by the bleak conditions of U.S. recaptive camps.
Each group of recaptives experienced the alienation of death through Atlantic dislocation in culturally specific ways. Although the following burial rites are neither static nor definitive for the regions discussed, their material, social, and intellectual complexity highlights the impoverishment of burial practice for marooned recaptives. In the nineteenth-century Yoruba homelands of many Bogota shipmates, families buried their dead in tombs dug under their houses. Several other rituals, distinguished by the gender, age, and wealth of the deceased, followed in the three months after the burial. Relatives marked these consecrated months of mourning by abstaining from bathing, shaving, and hairdressing. During ceremonies of farewell, an elaborately masked Egũgun—the embodiment of the deceased ancestor by an initiate—accepted gifts from grieving family members and blessed the mourners. The Egũgun representing a mature woman with children, for example, received a calabash symbolizing the hearth on which she would cook in the afterlife. In each of these ceremonies, the Egũgun was attended by assistants and elders who helped facilitate the family’s giving of gifts and blessings.111 Clearly, however, even a superficial consideration of proper Yoruba rites exposes the diminishment of burial at Key West: the missing crowd of grieving relatives, the absence of ritual specialists, and the lack of crucial material gifts. Above all, the twenty-eight Bogota shipmates who died awaiting Liberian transport would forever remain interred far from the homes of their kin.
Hundreds of West Central African recaptives also found little consolation in the shallow sandy graves dug for their deceased on Key West’s southern shore.112 Kongo cosmology, which outlined the realm of the dead in mirrored opposition to the living, revealed the manner in which recaptives expected the newly dead to influence the lives of the living. In their homelands, Kongo mourners interred the dead near other deceased kin in cemeteries located a distance from their inhabited towns. “Corporate cults of the dead” required the living to know where their kin were buried and to attend to their graves ritually in hopes that their ancestors would act constructively on behalf of the living.113 In the case of young infants who died, however, parents and relatives intentionally buried the infants poorly in order to discourage the soul of an infant from returning in the form of future dead children.114
In the Luso-African coastal environment known to Francisco, Constantia, and their Luanda-affiliated shipmates, both free and enslaved Angolans created ritual space to soothe the deceased soul and ensure spiritual protection
. Angolan religious authorities known as gangas (from nganga) led free and enslaved residents of colonial Luanda in ceremonies aimed to keep the spirits of the dead from afflicting the living. Gangas also officiated at entambes, eight-day wakes held at the home of the deceased that allowed relatives to mourn and usher the souls of their dead (zumbi) to “eternal rest.”115 Any recaptives who had spent significant time in Luanda’s Catholic missions would also have seen Christian funerals as well. Proper burial locations, specific rituals, and spiritual frameworks differed from Yoruba funerary rites, but West Central African recaptives also sought the necessary continuity of relationship between the living and their dead kin and the correct observance of burial practices.
Despite the impossibility of an acceptable burial, when given the chance, surviving shipmates drew on past experience to mourn in ways that would meaningfully recognize lives lost.116 Newspapers noted, in particular, the burial for a six-week-old infant of a young mother from the Wildfire. The pair had, in fact, been portrayed to the nation in a Harper’s illustration, “The Only Baby among the Africans” (discussed below), but the child did not survive long in the depot.117 In mid-May, the mother and seventeen of her fellow shipmates gathered at the southern shore soon to be designated by Key West residents as the “African cemetery.”118 The mourning party interred the baby in a “handsome coffin,” quite possibly built by master carpenter Davis. According to the Key of the Gulf, the woman’s companions echoed her “plaintive song” with “low chauntings [sic] and loud wails of grief.” The mourners’ distress may also have been deepened by fears of how the infant’s spirit would fare so far from ancestral terrain. Once the coffin was placed in the ground, each mourner “threw in its handful of earth, and amid the deepest sorrow they returned in silence back.”119 The ceremony, filtered through the words of an American journalist, nevertheless conveys the collective creativity recaptives harnessed to bury their dead. The call and response of the mourners mirrored forms of West Central African collective expression. At the same time, the Christian custom of dirt-throwing, which acknowledged the “dust to dust” nature of human mortality, could easily have been adopted from Luso-African regions of the Angolan coast. Improvised attempts to reclaim the dead from an alienated burial served as one of the early collective rituals devised by Key West shipmates.120
Examining recaptivity through the life and death of the body illuminates the human cost of slave trade suppression and underscores the crucial nature of daily relations among African shipmates in Key West. From the perspective of government authorities, the African Depot created a never-ending problem of basic human needs for food, shelter, medicine, and burial. For recaptives, social belonging and affiliation also constituted a basic survival need, for only in connection to the world of shipmates could the alienation of their displacement be meaningfully contained. Loss of family, unknown landscapes, physical pain, and spiritual disorder became partially intelligible, if not bearable, through common understandings of misfortune, illness, and death. And the need of recaptives to find belonging, protection, and community with shipmates became all the more urgent in light of most U.S. officials’ inability to see beyond their basic life or death status.121 Further amplifying the duality of recaptive experiences, popular press coverage took a sensationalistic approach to the presence of African shipmates under federal protection.
Representing Key West Recaptives in Illustrated Weeklies
The rise of illustrated weeklies made possible the mass distribution of recaptive images that reinforced narratives of rescue and African exoticism purveyed in slaver and naval accounts. An earlier tradition of illustrated warships capturing illegal slavers rarely depicted the human victims of the illegal trade. Images of recaptive Africans, however, began to appear in the pages of Anglo-American illustrated newspapers in the 1850s.122 These engravings and the text that accompanied them conveyed multilayered messages that mixed humanitarianism and civilizing discourses with ethnographic voyeurism. Take, for instance, the Harper’s Weekly correspondent touring the deck of the Wildfire who sympathetically noted “decided evidences of suffering” among diseased and malnourished recaptives. “But notwithstanding their sufferings,” he continued “we could not be otherwise than interested and amused at their strange looks, motions, and actions.”123 A large engraving of naked shipmates on the Wildfire’s upper deck placed directly above these words invited readers to examine the remarkable sight for themselves. Together, image and words performed a deft pivot from sympathy to spectatorship, effectively curtailing a discussion of recaptive social crisis and future legal status. Instead, illustrated news images of recaptives at Key West conveyed two potentially compatible messages to American readers. First, they situated recaptives as beneficiaries of U.S. benevolence, while avoiding the issue of complicity in the illegal slave trade. A second powerful message, implicit in the first, depicted the arrival of recaptives in Key West primarily as a rare opportunity for ethnographic observation. In both cases, the illegal slave trade and its suppression influenced the visual culture of nineteenth-century Anglo-American race formation.124 Even exceptional imagery of female recaptives ultimately demonstrated the novelty value of slave trade refugees on American soil.
The portrayal of recaptives in mid-nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers differed in purpose from other attempts to represent recaptive bodies in administrative records. Ironically, liberated African registers elsewhere in the Atlantic World noted some of the same somatic features, such as teeth, skin markings, and hairstyles, used by the weeklies to convey recaptives’ racial inferiority. The scarification marks, brands, heights, and weights recorded in mixed-commission registries served the state by securing individual identity and regulating the line between enslaved and liberated blacks.125 For example, “Ruperto,” of the Congo Luango nación and liberated from the slave ship Águila, appears in the 1832 Havana Liberated African registers as a seven-year-old boy, forty-one inches in height, with the African name “Fana.” Officials designated Ruperto’s twelve-year-old shipmate “Bembe” (also called “Josefa”) as belonging to the nación Congo Musundí and measuring fifty inches tall.126 Liberated African registers in Rio de Janeiro and Freetown noted similar information along with facial scars and bodily tattoos.127 By the 1860s, British officials documenting captives of the Indian Ocean trade took photographs on board captured slavers.128 The United States, with its much lower number of slave ship seizures and its unilateral approach to slave trade suppression, kept no such records identifying individuals for legal purposes.129 Rather, visual images of Key West’s African Depot fed public appetites for tales of national strength at sea while placing recaptives firmly beyond the pale of “civilization.”
The ability of illustrated weeklies to turn a particular moment in U.S. slave trade suppression into a generic encounter with “native Africans” derived in part from the geographical distance between most Harper’s readers and the Key West depot.130 To be sure, recaptives attracted local attention as well. One correspondent in Key West during the first week of the excitement claimed that, as “the only attraction on the Key,” the camp drew large numbers of local visitors daily.131 Yet unlike remote readers of national weeklies, the residents of Key West, numbering almost 3,000, encountered the temporary encampment as more than a spectacle.132 For carpenters, gravediggers, and locals tapped for guard duty, the sudden appearance of hundreds of recaptives provided unanticipated employment opportunities. Some of Key West’s women enacted principles of female benevolence by collecting women’s clothing to supplement the shirts and pants Moreno provided for African men and boys.133 Still others worried that diseases carried from the “filthy holds of the slavers” would incubate in the crowded camp and spread from recaptive bodies to their own.134 Furthermore, although the number of recaptured Africans at the depot marked a unique event in the island’s history, the familiarity of residents with accused slavers and shipwrecked migrants most likely tempered the novelty of the event.135 A few old-timers may ev
en have remembered the shipwrecked Africans from the slave ship Guerrero who stayed on the island in 1822 while awaiting a court decision on their next move.136 Though varied, the reactions of Key West residents remained rooted in local conditions of health, community, and economy. In contrast, Harper’s images used the alchemy of antebellum markets to turn the misery of the slave trade into spectacular images for national print culture.
Recaptured Africans Page 13
