75. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10 May 1860, reel 6, RSI; McCalla Journal, 17 July 1860.
76. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10 May 1860, reel 6, RSI. Conditions on the island by mid-July were parched; see Key of the Gulf, 14 July 1860.
77. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 13 May 1860, reel 6, RSI.
78. The nine-room shelter was reported to have a total of 9,460 square feet. Taking daily mortality into account, a peak population of about 1,329 recaptives in the depot would have occurred when the Bogota shipmates landed on 2 June. Even if 180 people had been in the 2,675-square-foot hospital building, as reported by a Key West newspaper on 19 May (reprinted in the New York Times, below), the main depot rooms, though described as “spacious and well ventilated,” would have been quite crowded at about 8.2 square feet per person (roughly 1 foot 4 inches by 6 feet per person). See “Africans at Key West. Affecting Scenes among the Negroes,” NYT, 2 June 1860.
79. “Full Particulars of the Capture of the Slaver Wildfire,” Herald, 14 May 1860; Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10 May 1860, reel 6, RSI. The USS Wyandotte sent a marine guard on shore to Key West with six weeks of rations. See Log of United States Steamer Wyandott [sic], 17 May 1860, LNS, and “African Depot,” Courier, 29 May 1860.
80. Log of United States Steamer Wyandott [sic], 17 May 1860, LNS; Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10 May 1860, reel 6, RSI. Fort Taylor’s civil engineer James Clapp also lent Moreno advice and materials for the construction of the temporary camp. Moreno’s letters indicate his unfulfilled expectation that Key West would become a receiving point for more recaptive Africans and would require a permanent set of buildings for that purpose.
81. Scarlet, “The Africans at Key West. The Barracoons Empty—the Rumored Attempt at a Rescue,” NYT, 8 August 1860, 3; Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860; Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 25 July 1860, reel 6, RSI. For rumors that Key West graves stood empty to mask recaptives sold in New Orleans, see Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 77–78. For rumors of intended raiding of recaptured Africans as they embarked for Liberia from Fort Sumter, see “The Steam Ship Niagara,” Courier, 8 September 1858.
82. Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860. The planters lodged with the U.S. agent William Young at the Russell House in Key West. Young recorded his conversation with Morrison in detail in his daily journal. In 1860, R[ichard] T. Morrison was a planter in Christ Church Parish, Charleston County. The 1850 Slave Schedule shows he owned twenty-three enslaved men and women. Since Morrison also had a son named R. T., Young may have spoken with either the son or the father. See U.S. Federal Slave schedule, R. T. Morrison in Christ Church Parish, Charleston County, September 1850, and U.S. Federal Census, St. James Santee, Charleston, South Carolina, 1860, Ancestry Library database. British spy correspondence from Havana also indicates rumors of the kidnapping and sale of more than 200 Key West recaptives to Havana. Thank you to John Harris for generously sharing this information with me (Sanchez to British Consul, 24 July 1860, FO84/1111, Foreign Office: Slave Trade Department, National Archives, London). After combing through the U.S. government records on Key West and consulting with other researchers in Key West, I have found no supporting evidence for a mass abduction from the Key West Depot. Pursuing the rumor into Cuban archives lies beyond the scope of this book, and I leave this unresolved trail for future researchers. An abduction of this scale would have been very difficult to conceal, given all of the U.S. government departments tracking the Key West recaptives. However, if the British intelligence report of kidnapping was true, even in smaller numbers, it would further demonstrate the persisting insecurity and commodification of slave trade recaptives.
83. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 12–34, quotes on 12.
84. Scarlet, “The Africans at Key West. The Barracoons Empty,” NYT, 8 August 1860; “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344–46; “Africans at Key West. Affecting Scenes among the Negroes,” NYT, 2 June 1860.
85. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 2, 6, 10 May 1860, reel 6, RSI. Crew and captain on illegal slavers frequently claimed to be passengers to avoid indictment.
86. Ibid., 28 May 1860.
87. Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860.
88. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 345.
89. Vermilyea also reports the same arrangement of captive children on the exposed deck of the Montauk. See Slaver, the War, and around the World, 7–8.
90. Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860.
91. McCalla Journal, 17 July 1860. One paper even reported that Moreno had procured “a band of music for their amusement” (“Later from Havana—Important from Key West and Mexico—Capture of the Slaver Wildfire,” Courier, 14 May 1860).
92. Fabre, “Slave Ship Dance.”
93. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 62, 68.
94. McCalla Journal, 17 July 1860.
95. “Africans at Key West. Affecting Scenes Among the Negroes,” NYT, 2 June 1860, 8; “Still Another Slaver Captured,” Florida Peninsular, 2 June 1860. In Freetown, with its more permanent liberated African yard and numerous arrivals of captured slavers, reunions were even more likely. See Peterson, Province of Freedom, 186–87.
96. On possibilities of relatives being sold together onto slave ships after initial capture as prisoners of war, see Rediker, Slave Ship, 304. For a rare eighteenth-century account of sisters reunited in the hold of a slave ship after being sold to the same European slaver, see Lovejoy, “Children of Slavery,” 210.
97. Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 251–72. On the need for better language to represent non-nuclear African family forms, see Sweet, “Teaching the Modern African Diaspora,” 109. On U.S. antebellum inability to recognize the plurality of various African family forms, see Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 228–38.
98. In a letter submitted to the U.S. press after his Liberian voyage, William Young referred to two of the younger women as “nieces” rather than daughters of the older woman. See “The Returning Africans. Letter from the Ship Castilian, of the Colonization Society’s Expedition,” NYT, 17 October 1860.
99. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 29–59.
100. Letters from T. M. Craven to Isaac Toucey, H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 619; Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860; “The Slave Bark William,” Courier, 23 May 1860; Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10, 24 May 1860, reel 6, RSI; Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI. For an excellent discussion of recaptive debility and disease in the aftermath of the middle passage, see Pearson, Distant Freedom, 154–200.
101. “Capture of the Slave Vessels and Their Cargoes,” Frank Leslie’s, 23 June 1860, 65–66; Lindsly, “Dreadful Sufferings Caused by the Slave Trade,” 108–10.
102. Rosanne Adderley identifies health care as one of the major administrative challenges for British officials charged with the reception of liberated Africans in the Bahamas and Trinidad; see “New Negroes from Africa,” 31–32, 52.
103. Whitehurst and Skrine are reported as the two physicians in “Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344. Hamilton Weedon, the Key West port physician, may have joined the effort after more recaptives arrived. Whitehurst had served in the 1830s as ACS employee and later government agent overseeing resettlement of recaptive Africans in Liberia. He married Henrietta Weedon Williams Whitehurst and was thus Weedon’s brother-in-law. See Weedon and Whitehurst Papers Finding Aids, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/w/Weedon_and_Whitehurst_Family.xhtml (accessed 17 January 2016), and 1860 Federal Census, Key West, Monroe, Florida, roll M653 108, p. 387, image 387, Family History Library Film 803108, Ancestry Library database.
104. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 10 June, 25 July (emphasis in original) 1860, reel 6, RSI.
105. Pearson, Distant Freedom, 198.
106. Figures in this and the next paragraph are based on analysis of the death statements, ar
ranged by date and gender, submitted by Fernando Moreno to Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson on 26 July 1860, reel 6, RSI: “No. 1. Statement of the Number of Births and Deaths Which Occurred at Key West, among the African Negroes Recaptured on Board of the Bark Wildfire”; “No. 2. Statement Showing the Number of Deaths Which Occurred at Key West, among the African Negroes Recaptured on Board of the Bark William”; and “No. 3. Statement Showing the Number of Deaths Which Occurred at Key West, among the African Negroes Recaptured on Board of the Bark Name Unknown [Bogota].” See also tables 2, 3, and 4 in this book for aggregate figures.
107. Malcom and Conyers, “Evidence for the African Cemetery at Higgs Beach,” 1, 8; Swanson, “African Cemetery,” 24–28.
108. Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1241.
109. Handler, “Prone Burial from a Plantation Slave Cemetery”; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 63–74; Reis, Death Is a Festival; Jamieson, “Material Culture and Social Death”; Frohne, African Burial Ground in New York City.
110. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 60–61, 139–41, 152. Smallwood discusses Akan funerary rites that would not have been practiced by recaptives at Key West. However, her discussion concerning death outside a meaningful social and cultural context provides important insights into recaptives’ social crisis.
111. Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 137–40.
112. Malcom and Conyers, “Evidence for the African Cemetery at Higgs Beach.”
113. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 72, 45, 55–56, 64–73. MacGaffey describes bodies buried “with their heads toward the rising sun” (45) so that when the deceased arose as ghosts in the land of the dead, they could continue a counterclockwise journey.
114. Ibid., 54. For a description of another ritual (lufwalakazi, from lufwa [death]) observed by a bereaved wife or husband with his or her relatives to “remove the curse of widowhood,” see Bentley, Appendix to the Dictionary and Grammar, 862.
115. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 181–82, 186–87; Candido, African Slaving Port, 128.
116. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 137–39. My discussion of Key West death reports is heavily influenced by Stephanie Smallwood’s approach to slave ship mortality records, which examines the daily social impact of mortality in light of the “temporal and spatial realities” of captive Africans (137).
117. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860. The only birth at Key West occurred on 28 May, after this infant died.
118. Malcom, “Cemeteries at South Beach,” figs. 4 and 5. The African Cemetery at Higgs Beach in Key West is now an official site on the National Register of Historic Places and has been commemorated with a public memorial.
119. The 19 May 1860 Key of the Gulf article was reprinted by several papers, including “The African Depot,” Courier, 29 May 1860; “Africans at Key West. Affecting Scenes among the Negroes,” NYT, 2 June 1860; and “Still Another Slaver Captured,” Florida Peninsular, 2 June 1860. See Browne, Key West, 17.
120. Similar evidence for combined European and African burial practices appears in several infant coffin burials in the Rupert’s Valley cemetery, St. Helena. See Pearson, Jeffs, Witkin, and MacQuarrie, Infernal Traffic, 108, 159–60.
121. Secretary of the Interior Thompson, for example, calculated his reimbursable expenses for housing the recaptives at Key West at 37 cents per person per day. More importantly, the U.S. government had contracted to pay the American Colonization Society a fixed amount of money per person for one year of support in Liberia. See Thompson to McLain, 13 August 1860, reel 1, RSI. Thompson made his remarks in the context of the ACS’s failure to meet contractual obligations to remove recaptured Africans from Key West by a certain date. See also Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” 433.
122. Examples of the naval capture genre of engraving include “Capture of a Brazilian Slaver by ‘H.M.S. Rattler’ off Lagos,” Illustrated London News, 29 December 1849, 440; “H. M. Gun-boat ‘Teaser,’ Capturing the Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 19 September 1857, 284; and Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 286.
123. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344 (emphasis added).
124. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “Race and Visual Culture before the Twentieth Century” (unpublished manuscript shared by Camp with author in July 2012), forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of the History of Race, ed. Matthew Pratt Guterl.
125. Coghe, “Problem of Freedom,” 485; Anderson et al., “Using African Names,” 167; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 95; Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 54.
126. Register of the Águila, FO84/128 version, Liberated Africans Project, http://www.liberatedafricans.org/hstc/ships/18_aguila/08_aguila_fo84_la_rigister.pdf (accessed 24 February 2016).
127. Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 44, 51; Nwokeji and Eltis, “Roots of the African Diaspora,” 371–73.
128. The most well known of these are the photographs of East African recaptives on a dhow seized by the HMS Daphne on 1 November 1868, FO84/1310, National Archives, London.
129. The exception is the Castilian roll of names discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. However, this list contained no other descriptions beyond gender, age, and newly assigned English-language names.
130. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344.
131. “Full Particulars of the Capture of the Slaver Wildfire,” Herald, 14 May 1860.
132. The 1860 census listed Key West’s population at 2,832, of which 15 percent (435) were enslaved. See Langley and Langley, Key West, 19.
133. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344–45.
134. “The Captured Africans—the Necessity of Doing Something,” Herald, 4 June 1860.
135. Stebbins, City of Intrigue; Langley and Langley, Key West, 12–17.
136. Swanson, Slave Ship Guerrero, 33–45.
137. Some U.S. publications also experimented with illustrated news soon after 1842 but struggled to find the market and the technology that would make their endeavors profitable. In 1855, however, an English-born engraver and former employee at the Illustrated London News, Henry Carter (under the pseudonym Frank Leslie), hatched Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, which revolutionized U.S. newspaper illustration. The Harper Brothers publishing house joined the competition in 1857 by marketing the new Harper’s Weekly to a more genteel, middle-class readership whose sensibilities were not completely attuned to Frank Leslie’s hard-hitting urban exposés. See Brown, Beyond the Lines, 4, 12–14, 25–31, 41; Zboray, “Antebellum Reading,” 76; Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s”; Lehuu, Carnival on the Page; and Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 61–65.
138. “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 19 September 1857, 283–84. See also “Capture of a Slaver” from “A young officer of HMS Antelope,” Illustrated London News, 17 October 1857, 393; “Chase and Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 1 May 1858, 435–36; and “The Slaver ‘Sunny South,’ Alias ‘Emanuela,’” Illustrated London News, 8 December 1860, 546, 530. Editors’ references to the submitted photographs or sketches served to authenticate the newspapers’ engravings. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Printed Page, 63–71, discusses the Illustrated London News “artist as reporter (Special Artist),” the local commissioned artist, and the in-house artist who drew images based on newspaper reporting; however, Sinnema does not discuss the sketches and photographs submitted to the press by interested observers.
139. “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 20 June 1857, 595–96; Voyages, ID #4229, Zeldina, beginning in New York and embarking 500 African captives at Cabinda.
140. “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 20 June 1857, 595.
141. Bender, Antislavery Debate; Eltis, Economic Growth; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 231–49.
142. “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 20 June 18
57, 595.
143. See Anderson et al., “Using African Names,” 181.
144. Adderley confirms the self-congratulatory tenor of Colonial Office officials charged with overseeing liberated Africans in the British West Indies; see “New Negroes from Africa,” 43, 48. For comparison, see the analysis of mainstream French antislavery framing of lithographs depicting Brazilian slavery, in Slenes, “African Abrahams.”
145. Zboray, “Antebellum Reading,” 77. Although Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s took Unionist positions after the outbreak of civil war, during the 1860 summer months, they still sought to maintain sectional neutrality. See Brown, Beyond the Lines, 46–47; Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s,” 88, 92; and Mason, “Keeping Up Appearances,” 809–32.
146. Harper’s opened its story on Key West similarly with an account of naval capture. Both papers used familiar devices to establish authenticity by noting the origins of the images: “From a Daguerreotype,” in the case of Harper’s, and, in Frank Leslie’s, from the camera of Newburgh, New York, photographist David Lawrence. See “Capture of the Slave Vessels and Their Cargoes,” Frank Leslie’s, 23 June 1860, 65–66. David T. Lawrence is listed under “Daguerreotypists, Ambrotypists and Photographists” in the 1859 New York State Business Directory, 383, and as a maker of “Lockets and Miniatures” in the IRS Tax Assessment Lists for New York, District 11, November 1864, Ancestry Library database.
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