The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

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  Mordeille had a fallback plan, which he had already worked out with local confederates, in case his request for permission to sell all the Neptune’s slaves wasn’t approved. The scheme, as one of del Pino’s subordinates would put it, was part of the standard “repertoire of lies and tricks” the privateer and his allies “used to pursue their sordid personal interests.”

  The plot was simple. Mordeille would legally sell the seventy slaves to Andrés Nicolás Orgera, a Lima-based merchant who was at the moment in Montevideo. They would be boarded on the Santa Eulalia, a frigate then in transit from Cádiz, Spain, bound for Lima. Port taxes would be paid and customs forms filled out. Then the Eulalia and the Neptune would depart Montevideo within a day of each other, rendezvous at a beach on one of Río de la Plata’s islands, and secretly transfer all the rest of the Africans save for forty young men.

  The Neptune would get a makeover. Its privateer crew would be switched for Portuguese merchant sailors, its sails barque rigged in the Spanish style to make it look less British. Its hull and figurehead—its lion without a crown—would be painted black. Renamed the Aguila, the Eagle, it would sail to a small cove town forty miles east of Buenos Aires. There the Liverpool slaver would be sold, along with its remaining forty Africans, to a new owner, Don Benito Olazábal, one of Buenos Aires’s leading merchants.

  Mordeille would have to wait a month or so until the Santa Eulalia arrived from Cádiz before the plan could be put into motion. In the meantime, he occupied himself with supervising repairs on his vessels. The Hope had been about fifteen years in service, the last three the hard life of a privateer. The hull creaked badly and leaked constantly, and the ship’s pumps needed to be worked without rest to keep it afloat. The Neptune too was showing signs of wear from its many trips from Liverpool to West Africa to the Caribbean and back again.

  One of the advantages of Montevideo’s sheltered bay, with its marked high and low tides, was that his two vessels could be careened there. That is, they could be towed close to the shore and left to fall gently into the bay’s soft mud bottom as the water went out with the tide and then tilted to one side. Short of having access to a dry dock, this was the best way Modeille’s men could scrape the barnacles off the Hope and Neptune, hull, recaulk their seams, and paint their hull boards with a mixture of tallow, tar, and sulfur to protect the wood against worms. The operation required some skill to carry out, but Mordeille could count on Montevideo’s experienced corps of carpenters and shipwrights. They first would remove the sails, yards, and riggings from the masts of the two ships and brace the heels of their decks and inner hulls with props. Then they would ready supports to catch the masts as the ships were let down, using heavy rope threaded through portholes as pulleys.

  Before any of this work could begin, the vessels had to be emptied. Anything that couldn’t be lashed down had to be removed, including their cannons, cargo, and captives. The British prisoners were transported to a nearby French brig, where they were kept for a time before being released. The slaves were sent in lighters, about forty at a time, to shore.

  4

  BODY AND SOUL

  The West Africans were taken to a place called el caserío de los negros—“the Negro village”—where slaves waiting to be sold or transferred to Buenos Aires were housed. It was on the western flank of the bay, just behind the beach and upwind from well-kept Montevideo, with its roof gardens. It was squalid, consisting of a large compound made of thick adobe walls and not much else, though when city officials had dedicated it a few decades earlier they did so to the “pious mind of the sovereign, who does nothing but shower his subjects with tender love.” An open pit was used as a latrine and rat-infested garbage was piled high. Under the old monopoly or licensing system, Spanish officials could occasionally compel the companies who ran the slave trade to clean up their pens.* But with slavery now liberalized, it was difficult to hold any one slaver responsible for the filth, and it fell to the city to maintain the “village,” and about the only thing it did on a timely basis was to bury corpses, in a patch of land just outside the walls.1

  For Mordeille and the merchants he served, Montevideo was a central hub in an expanding Atlantic economy. For untold numbers of African slaves, however, it was their terminus. Over the course of the next few weeks, while they waited in the caserío to see what the next step of their ordeal would be, fourteen more of the West Africans put on the Neptune at Bonny would die, adding to the fifty-one who didn’t survive the Atlantic crossing. Death was everywhere around them.

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  Just a few days after the Neptune showed up, a Portuguese brig named Belisario dropped anchor. Of the 257 Africans boarded in Mozambique, ninety-one had died and most of those still alive were dying. Then came La Luisa, another Portuguese ship from Mozambique. Nearly a third of its original consignment of three hundred Africans had perished during the crossing. By this point, more and more slaves were arriving from the other side of Africa, from its eastern coast on the Indian Ocean. It took almost four months to make the trip, around the Cape of Good Hope and then running against the South Atlantic’s westerlies, an agonizingly long and often lethal voyage.2

  Along the way, Africans died from contagious diseases or from the miseries of crossing the ocean in a claustrophobically small space. Some went blind. Others lost their minds. Even when the circus followed the best practices of the early nineteenth century, the holds were never cleaned fast enough to counter the accumulating strata of excrement, vomit, blood, and pus. With poor ventilation, baking under the equatorial sun, cargo bays festered and putrefied. Slave ships could be smelled from miles away. “The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies, and by being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes, which generally carries off great numbers of them,” observed a British slave ship surgeon in the 1780s. When bad weather forced the portholes and hatches to be closed for a long period of time, the floors of the holds would become so covered with “blood and mucus” that they “resembled a slaughter-house.” “It is not,” said the surgeon, “in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”3

  Montevideo’s harbor doctors tried to identify the most serious illnesses: scurvy, consumption, dropsy, malaria, measles, yellow fever, typhoid, ophthalmia, flux (or unending dysentery, which easily spread in the packed-tight holds), something called el mal de Luanda (Angola sickness, a vitamin C deficiency that Spaniards distinguished from scurvy), ringworm, and gonorrhea and syphilis, also known as mal de Gálico, Galician sickness. Smallpox was especially deadly. Before a working vaccine was fabricated in the early 1800s, Africans who arrived in Río de la Plata suffering from the disease were unloaded for less than half of their expected price had they been healthy. But those who had recovered from smallpox were sold at a premium, since it was assumed they had built up immunity.4

  Slave ships were more than floating tombs. They were floating laboratories, offering doctors and scientists opportunities to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Often learning of cases from a ship’s surgeon, medical professionals used high slave ship mortality to identify a bewildering number of symptoms and classify them into diseases, to hypothesize about causes and isolate variables, and to advance medical knowledge.*

  Among the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean, as well, a corps of doctors, some of them committed to relieving the sufferings of their charges, others looking to make the slave system more efficient, did important early work on epidemiology. They identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility (more slaves were dying than being born), experimented with how much water they needed to give slaves in order for them to survive on a diet of salted fish and jerk, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. And when slaves couldn’t be kept alive, their autopsied bodies provided useful information. Medical knowledge then filtered out of th
e slave industry to benefit the broader international community; slavers made no proprietary claims on the techniques or data that derived from treating slaves.5

  For instance, an epidemic of blindness that broke out on the French slaver Rôdeur, which sailed from Bonny Island in 1819 with about seventy-two slaves, helped eye doctors identify important information concerning ophthalmia, or trachoma. The disease appeared not long out to sea, first in the hold among the slaves and then on deck, blinding all the voyagers save one member of the crew. According to a passenger’s account, sightless sailors worked under the direction of the one seeing man “like machines,” tied to the captain with a thick rope. “We were blind—stone blind, drifting like a wreck upon the ocean.” Some sailors went mad and tried to drink themselves to death. Others cursed through the day and night. Still others retired to their hammocks, immobilized. Each “lived in a little dark world of his own, peopled by shadows and phantasms. We did not see the ship, nor the heavens, nor the sea, nor the faces of our comrades.” But they could hear the cries of the slaves in the hold.6

  This went on for ten days, through storms and calms, until the voyagers heard the sound of another ship. A Spanish slaver, the San León, had drifted alongside the Rôdeur. But the entire crew and all the slaves of that ship had been blinded by disease as well: when the sailors of each vessel realized this “horrible coincidence,” they fell into silence, “like that of death.” Eventually the León drifted away and was never heard from again.

  The Rôdeur’s one seeing mate managed to pilot the ship to Guadeloupe. By now, a few of the crew members, including the captain, had begun to regain some of their vision. But thirty-nine Africans hadn’t, so before entering the harbor the captain decided to drown them, tying weights to their legs and throwing them overboard. The ship was insured and their loss would be covered. (The practice of insuring slaves and slave ships, which had become common by this point, extended a new kind of economic rationality into the trade, helping slavers decide that a dead slave might be worth more than living labor.) The case of the Rôdeur caught the attention of Sébastien Guillié, director and chief of medicine at Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth. He wrote up his findings and published them in Bibliothèque ophtalmologique, which was then cited in other medical journals.*

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  What killed the Africans on the Joaquín, which arrived in Montevideo a few months after the Neptune, was the subject of a long debate. Of the 301 East Africans who boarded the Portuguese frigate in Mozambique on November 19, 1803, only thirty survived the nearly half-year journey to Montevideo. The deaths started shortly after setting sail, one a day until the ship reached the Cape of Good Hope forty-six days later. The mortality rate steadily increased as the slaver rounded into the Atlantic and continued on to Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Brazil. After a layover, the Joaquín made for Río de la Plata.7

  Montevideo’s surgeon, Juan Cayetano Molina, along with the harbormaster, boarded the Joaquín the afternoon it arrived in port. When they opened its hatch, they were horrified by what they saw below: thirty bone-thin East Africans in a foul, bare room, otherwise empty save for hundreds of unused shackles. Told that the most recent death had occurred just that morning and that a few Africans had died the day before, Molina and the harbormaster panicked and ordered the ship’s captain to weigh anchor and leave immediately. The captain at first refused. The barometer was dropping and a storm was coming. He yielded, though, when the harbormaster threatened to seize the ship and throw him in jail if he didn’t comply. After food and water were brought on board, the Joaquín sailed back out into the gulf with its exhausted crew and emaciated slaves.

  Almost as soon as the ship left Montevideo’s snug harbor, a fierce wind came out of the pampas, creating a strong tidal bore that rolled through the estuary. A pampero is a sight to see: as the pressure falls, grasshoppers, moths, and other insects fly off the land, driven forward by gusts of air. Thick black-cotton clouds advance like a wall from the west, mixing water with blown dirt to rain mud. At times, the wind can be so strong as to push an enormous amount of gulf water into the Atlantic, exposing large patches of the riverbed. The storm turned the Joaquín, nearly capsizing it. First its furled sails blew out of their gaskets and then all three masts snapped, leaving the ship “half-destroyed.” With what was left of its jib and foresail, the ship limped back into Montevideo, beaching on a sandbar close to shore.

  There now began a lengthy, drawn-out legal battle of charges and countercharges. The merchant who imported the slaves, Martín de Alzaga, accused Molina of incompetence. Alzaga is a familiar type in Argentine history, a staunch antisubversive who defined subversion as any understanding of libertad beyond his right to buy and sell Africans (it was Alzaga who, during the investigation into Buenos Aires’s rumored French Revolution–inspired rebellion, had personally presided over the torture sessions of suspects, black and white, who exhibited “dangerous egalitarian leanings”). The slaver wanted to disembark the survivors and sell them, to recoup some of his loss. City officials, going on Molina’s diagnosis that they were carrying a transmittable disease, refused his request.8

  Alzaga sued the doctor for malice. The Africans perished not from an infectious disease, the slaver insisted, but rather from lack of water and from the extreme variations of temperature they suffered on their long voyage, which, he said, had a debilitating effect on the “miserable uprooted beings.” There was proof that Montevideo wasn’t in danger: none of the Portuguese crew members had died on the crossing.

  Royal officials convened a commission of inquiry, which became a curious exercise in the limits of inductive reasoning, the kind of reasoning that held that matters of law, science, and medicine were to be decided through observation. The commission took testimony from the Joaquín’s crew, since they witnessed the sickness spread over the course of the voyage. And it called on the expertise of five surgeons—two British doctors, a Spaniard, a Swiss Italian, and one from the United States. They all had firsthand experience ministering to ailing slaves, either because they had previously sailed on a slave ship or because they had spent time in Mozambique. Everybody, the doctors, the sailors, and the ship’s officers, gave their opinion about what had killed the East Africans. No one, though, thought to ask the surviving East Africans themselves, who were being confined to the hold of the Joaquín for the duration of the investigation.

  The doctors agreed that the slaves had died not from an infection but rather from dehydration and chronic diarrhea, aggravated by the physical and psychological hardships of slavery. Those surgeons who had been to Mozambique confirmed that long before being boarded on the ship, the captives would have felt extreme anguish, forced to survive on roots and bugs and arriving at the coast emaciated and with their stomachs distended. Then, once on the ocean, crowded in a dark hold with no ventilation, they’d have had nothing to do other than listen to the cries of their companions and the clanking of their chains. Many would have gone mad trying to make sense of their situation, trying to ponder the “imponderable.” They had developed a “total indifference to life,” the Swiss Italian doctor, Carlos Joseph Guezzi, testified. No one illness was to blame for their condition. Rather, they had wasted away emotionally. An “abandonment of the self,” in Guezzi’s opinion, had led to their demise.

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  The commission decided that the East Africans had died from an intestinal illness aggravated by nostalgia, melancolía, and cisma—nostalgia, melancholia, and brooding, or mourning. Montevideo had nothing to fear. Alzaga could disembark the survivors and sell them.

  It was a strange ruling, holding in favor of an individual trader while condemning, implicitly at least, the trade itself. In doing so, the decision revealed the way that medical professionals were beginning to use in a more clinical fashion terms that in the past had been associated with religion, morality, and emotions. Cisma literally meant schism. In Spanish theological texts, the word referred not just to the political division of Ch
ristianity between Catholicism and Protestantism but to the spiritual split of fallen man: Adam’s rebellion against God resulted in a cisma “between body and soul, between flesh and spirit.” As to melancolía, two decades prior to the arrival of the Joaquín in Montevideo, the Royal Spanish Academy was still associating the term with nighttime demon possession, with dreams that “compress and squeeze the heart.” In Great Britain, melancholics could be geniuses, sublime souls capable of producing beautiful poetry; more often, though, moral and religious philosophers of the time tended to think of extreme sadness as a vice, as a dissipating self-indulgence manifesting itself in a fondness for “love-tales,” “melodramatic escapades,” and other “popular nonsense” that leads to a softening of the brain.9

  The doctors investigating the Joaquín, however, used these concepts in a decidedly secular, matter-of-fact manner and, more importantly, in ways that unmistakably affirmed the humanity of the slaves. To diagnose enslaved Africans as suffering from nostalgia and melancholia was to acknowledge that they had selves that could be lost, inner lives that could suffer schism, or alienation, and pasts that could be mourned over. The Spanish doctor, Josef Capdevila, was the most empathetic, emphasizing the “sadness” that overcame captives when they realized they were being forced to leave behind their “family, their homeland, their freedom—all the familiar objects that sooth the senses and make people happy.”