After reading the opinion of the five surgeons, who collectively represented the state of medical knowledge in the United States, Protestant Great Britain, and Catholic Spain, one comes away with the sense that slavery must have played an important but largely unacknowledged role in disenchanting medicine, in taking concepts like melancholy out of the hands of priests, poets, and philosophers and giving them to doctors. The intellectual historian Thomas Laqueur notes that, starting in the 1700s, a new kind of forensic writing, at once clinical and humane, began to reveal “in extraordinarily detailed fashion” the “pains and deaths of ordinary people in such a way as to make apparent the causal chains that might connect the actions of its readers with the suffering of its subjects.” There was an unprecedented outpouring of “fact, of minute observations, about people who had before been beneath notice.” Laqueur includes the “realistic novel, the autopsy, the clinical report, and the social inquiry,” to which could be added the observations of slave ship doctors.10
Two decades after the incident involving the Joaquín, the Spanish medical profession no longer considered melancolía to be caused by an incubus or a sign of moral weakness. It rather was understood as a type of delirium, related to dementia and mania. Spanish doctors also began to use the word to refer to seasickness, describing, though they didn’t directly mention slavery, the condition in terms very similar to the way critics of the Middle Passage did, as caused by rancid food, too close contact, extreme weather, and above all the “isolation” and the “uniform and monotonous life” one experiences at sea, which can induce violent nervous disorders and intestinal disease. It was as if with each time a doctor threw back a slave hatch to reveal the human-made horrors below, it became just a bit more difficult to blame mental illness on demons and personal failings.11
The doctors, however, didn’t extend the logic of their own reasoning to condemn the slave trade. They instead focused on the hardships of the Middle Passage as a technical concern. “It is in the interests of commerce and humanity,” said the Connecticut-born, Edinburgh-educated member of the inquiry, John Redhead, “to get slaves off their ships as soon as possible.”12
* * *
The West Africans brought to the “village of blacks” must have thought they had landed in some combination of hell and heaven. All around, there were clusters of sick, fevered, and suppurating Africans, either recovering or dying from their Middle Passage. Yet after three months in the ship’s hold, they were at least on land, in an open-air compound located on the bank of a freshwater stream where they could bathe.
In the United States, as well as in the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch Caribbean and some areas of Portuguese Brazil, the torments of the ocean voyage continued on land, as Africans left behind one totalitarian system, the slave ship, and entered another, the plantation. In the Río de la Plata region, however, there was a dizzying disjuncture between the terror regime of the Atlantic, as revealed in the inquiry into the Joaquín’s crossing, and life on shore.
Africans shipped out of Montevideo or Buenos Aires to work in mines or plantations would be in for more suffering. But those who stayed in the two cities found themselves in a plebeian world of considerable liberty. Many worked as assistants to tradesmen and artisans who were not their owners; the main obligation to the person who claimed them as property was a weekly or monthly percentage of their cash wages. As their trade skills increased, so did their degree of freedom. Many negotiated their own terms of employment and housing arrangements and some slaves became independent artisans themselves. There were no large concentrations of plantation slaves in the Río de la Plata region. Bakers, brickmakers, ranchers, wheat growers, and beef salters were the biggest slave owners. The majority of enslaved peoples belonged to households with only one slave or two. Thousands of the city’s slaves went about their lives with little or no oversight, dancing, drumming, drinking, gambling, and generally ignoring regulations trying to get them to do otherwise.*
The Neptune’s Africans caught a glimpse of this world at the compound. It really was, in a way, a village, a permanent refugee camp for people from all over the African continent, from Senegal, Guinea, the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique. Families, mostly making a living in low-skilled trades, had settled in, raising ragtag lean-to homes around cooking fires. During the day, the the newly arrived slaves would have seen black laundresses leaving the compound’s gates early in the morning and coming back late at night, working hard but being left alone to live on the margins of freedom, singing: “Acuchú chachá acuchú chachá … al cubo del sur, vamo a lavá … vamo todo a lavá.” 13
* * *
In all the many hundreds of pages of official documents having to do with the case of the Neptune, there is not one description of the West Africans, not a scrap of information about them other than that they were embarked on Bonny Island, that when they were taken by Mordeille’s crew they were dressed in coarse blue cotton smocks, and that the adult men wore beads around their necks and waists and had a thin, shaved line running through their scalps, from forehead to nape.
One thing is known for sure: they would have done anything not to get back on the Neptune, or any other slave ship. It appears they were afflicted with the same disease the slaves on the Joaquín were said to have been suffering from—from nostalgia, defined by one Spanish dictionary as “a violent desire compelling those taken out of their country to return home.”14
5
A CONSPIRACY OF LIFTING AND THROWING
By the end of February, with the careening of his ships completed and the Santa Eulalia in from Cádiz, Mordeille, anxious to get back out to sea, made arrangements to reboard the Neptune’s slaves. Fourteen had died at the compound and nine were too sick to be moved, which left about 320 to be loaded. They were divided into two groups. The seventy del Pino gave Mordeille permission to sell were put on the Eulalia and the rest, over 250, returned to the Neptune.
The Neptune was the first to revolt. Coming on board in the morning, naked except for makeshift loincloths and the beads the men still wore around their waists and necks, the West Africans grew increasingly frantic as the day went on. At dusk, on the deck of the anchored ship, one of them seized a sailor and threw him overboard, crying out, “I would rather kill all the whites than return to sea.” With that, what Mordeille would later describe as “the conspiracy of lifting and throwing” had begun.
The ship erupted. At first, Mordeille’s crew tried to hold its ground, fighting the captives hand to hand. After the slaves pushed a few more into the water, the mariners retreated to the ship’s boats and rowed away. A nearby Spanish man-of-war, the Medea, sent a detachment of marines to retake the ship from the unarmed Africans. Firing musket shots over the heads of the rebels, the troops boarded the vessel. When it became clear that their revolt had failed, a number of the rebels began to throw themselves over the gunwales into the bay.
As already mentioned, of all the Africans taken during the four-century-long slave trade, those from West Africa, especially those boarded at ports in the Gulf of Guinea and the Niger Delta region, and especially Bonny, where the Neptune sailed from, were known for their high rates of suicide. Descendants of slaves who worked the rice plantations of Georgia’s coastal islands handed down a legend that captive Igbos would fling themselves into the Atlantic rather than submit to slavery, not committing suicide but “flying” or “walking” on the water—or dancing on the waves—home. “Negros did not” kill themselves, remembered Estebán Montejo, a former Cuban slave.* “They escaped by flying. They flew through the sky and returned to their own lands.”1
None of the Neptune’s West Africans managed to get away. They were all pulled out of the water alive. Skirmishes like this were so common on slave ships that they were hardly ever reported, much less were inquiries made into the motives of the rebels. Mordeille did send a note to Viceroy del Pino reporting the event, writing that the Africans had risen up after spending time on shore among “their kind.” Seeing
how the others “dressed and ate,” he said, they were “determined not to return to sea.” It took “indescribable effort” for his men to force them into the hold.
* * *
Once order was restored and provisions were stocked, including five barrels of black paint, the Neptune set sail on March 21. The ship’s papers said it was going to Guiana but it dropped anchor a day later at one of the estuary’s island beaches, where, as planned, it rendezvoused with the Santa Eulalia. That night, with the help of paid-off royal coast guards, their crews transferred all except forty of the Neptune’s Africans to the Eulalia. While Mordeille’s carpenters and painters began work to make the Neptune look like something other than a Liverpool slaver, the Santa Eulalia hauled anchor and started out, bound for Lima.2
The Eulalia made it as far as the mouth of the Río de la Plata, with the open sea ahead, when a number of slaves got “loose.” They didn’t take the whole ship, just the part in front of the barricado, the midsection containment wall built for these kinds of occasions, about eight feet high and projecting two feet out from either side of the vessel, punched through with holes for blunderbusses. The stern and quarterdeck remained in Spanish hands. The rebels ordered the Eulalia’s captain, Tomás Lopatequi, to sail to Africa, but Lopatequi, still in control of much of the mechanics of the ship, including the wheel, capstan, and mizzenmast, instead made for Punta del Este, the northern head of the gulf, where the water is deep to the coastline. Nearing land by the end of the day, Lopatequi ordered a launch dropped and sent a messenger to get help from a nearby garrison.
Anchored from the stern and swinging with the tide, the Eulalia bobbed quietly, as the Africans in the fore and Spaniards in the aft sized each other up through the night and over the barricade. Saber-carrying, black-hatted cavalry soldiers, led by Second Lieutenant Josef Casal, arrived the next morning. Unsure how to proceed, Casal put half of his forty men on the Eulalia’s stern and kept the rest in his boat.
Nothing much happened for another half day. At some point, the women, who had been locked in a separate hold, had broken free. Now the forward deck, about a twenty-by-forty-foot space, was packed with 290 or so insurgents, most of them naked. The rebels seemed to realize that there was no such thing as a standoff in this kind of situation. The advantage of time and waiting went to their captors. Having taken over half the ship, freed the women, and issued a demand to be returned to Africa, there was nothing else they could do that would have an effective result. They therefore threatened to destroy the ship’s cargo.
The Eulalia carried a rich hold, filled with pipes of wine, candles, iron, nails, paper, maté, leather shoes, and mercury, used to extract silver from ore, and Captain Lopatequi demanded that Lieutenant Casal do something to not lose it. Mounted on the quarterdeck were two twenty-four-pound carronades. A magazine of case shot—tin cylinders filled with six- to eight-ounce iron balls—was stored in the stern as well. When case shot is fired, the force of the discharge rips the flimsy tin apart, propelling the balls forward independently in a cone-shaped cluster, inflicting maximum pain on humans, especially on targets gathered closely together, as the insurgents were in the fore of the ship, while limiting damage to infrastructure.
Only the “rigor of fire,” Casal wrote his superiors later, would force la negrada—“the black mass”—to submit. Two blasts ended the revolt. Casal had his men pull a hundred of the “most robust and terrible” African men off the ship, twenty of whom were identified as leaders and marched in chains to the garrison. The rest were returned to the ship. After a halfhearted, inconclusive investigation as to why the ship had so many Africans on board, local officials allowed the Santa Eulalia to proceed to Lima.
It was a long, frightful sail south and through the Strait of Magellan. The Eulalia was not a big ship. Over 250 humans were kept in storage rooms designed to carry no more than a hundred slaves. The West Africans, laid in on their sides, the front of one body pushed against the back of another, listened in the dark as the ship’s beams groaned with each lurch through the rough straits. With rancid food, poor ventilation, little water, and no medical attention, they began to die. Fifteen were gone by the time the ship reached the Pacific, another ten before calling on Arica in northern Chile, six before Pisco in Peru, and twenty-three more by the time the ship dropped anchor at Lima.
The Eulalia ended its journey in June 1804, its surviving cargo having spent most of nine months in the hold of a ship on the high seas.
* * *
Meanwhile, Mordeille’s scheme proceeded as planned: he handed over the disguised Neptune, now called the Aguila, to a group of Portuguese mariners under the command of Simão de Rocha, a cabin boy he had promoted to the rank of captain. Rocha sailed the counterfeit vessel to Ensenada de Barragán, a small port village on the Buenos Aires side of the Río de la Plata, and delivered it, along with its forty remaining captive Africans, to its new owner, a Buenos Aires merchant.
But port officials figured out the swindle. Acting on orders from Viceroy del Pino, who had been alerted to the uprising on the overloaded Santa Eulalia, they seized the ship, imprisoned Rocha, and embargoed the slaves. They had recognized the Neptune by its blackened figurehead: its lion without a crown.
Mordeille—Citizen Manco—had already cruised out of the Río de la Plata on the Hope. He would return again and again over the next three years, delivering at least eight more prize ships and nearly a thousand more enslaved Africans to Montevidean and Buenos Aires merchants.3
When the British Royal Navy tried to capture Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Mordeille and his men helped defend the two cities. He put his knowledge of the estuary, earned over the years avoiding Spanish officials, to good use, hitting British ships and then running, drawing them into shallow water to ground on sandbars and shoals.
British troops took but couldn’t hold Buenos Aires and Montevideo. But Mordeille died driving them out, on February 3, 1807, killed by a bayonet on the Montevideo beach where, over the years, he had unloaded thousands upon thousands of Africans, including the ones who came in on the Neptune.4
* * *
Those sixty of the Neptune’s slaves who didn’t continue on to Lima on the Santa Eulalia—the forty embargoed from the disguised Neptune and the twenty “robust and terrible” rebels taken off the Eulalia—were sent on to Buenos Aires, where they would be auctioned in the city’s slave market. They had arrived as booty, twice-stolen goods. Now, thanks to the alchemy of “free trade in blacks,” they were about to complete their transition from pirate’s prize and contraband to salable merchandise.
INTERLUDE
I Never Could Look at Death without a Shudder
Herman Melville believed in abolition. “Sin it is, no less,” he wrote of slavery, “it puts out the sun at noon.” Yet he tended to treat bondage as a metaphysical problem and freedom as an idea best suited to some inner realm of personal sovereignty. It was a common position for his time. Individuals, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, published a year before Benito Cereno, needed to achieve “self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination.” All human beings, Melville believed, oscillate somewhere between the two extreme poles of liberty and slavery that defined much of the political rhetoric of antebellum America. His stories contained characters who were slaves yet made to seem free, and freemen, like Ishmael and Ahab, who were slaves, mostly to their own tangled thoughts and uncontrollable passions. All the tomes of “human jurisprudence,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, could be reduced in essence to the whaler’s rule distinguishing “Fast-Fish” (harpooned or hooked on a line, and thus in the possession of a given party) from “Loose-Fish” (unclaimed and therefore fair game). “What plays the mischief with this masterly code,” Melville said, “is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.”1
And once expounded, it turns out that there is no such thing as a completely Fast or a completely Loose Fish. “What are the Rights of Man and li
berties of the world but Loose-fish?… And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” “All men live enveloped in whale-lines,” he said elsewhere in Moby-Dick, “All are born with halters round their necks.” “Who aint a slave?” Ishmael asks. “Tell me that.” There’s joy in the question, as well as in the implied answer—no one—an acceptance of the fact that humans, by sheer stint of being human, are bound to one another.2
There was one moment in Melville’s writing career, though, when he admitted that the chattel slavery of dark-skinned people from Africa, or descendants of Africans, was different. It’s in a scene from one of his earlier novels, Redburn, partly based on his visit to Liverpool in 1839, when he came upon a statue of Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson had led the British to their greatest naval victory, over the combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in October 1805, but he died in the battle, cut down by a French bullet. Most of the memorials that went up afterward throughout Great Britain to honor Nelson’s sacrifice were simple tributes, like the column in London, which supports the regally posed admiral in full dress uniform.
But Liverpool’s monument, located in Exchange Flags Square, in the shadow of city hall, was darkly symbolic, more befitting, thought one observer, a “barbarous” nation ruled by savages or Catholics rather than by true Christians: a naked Nelson falls back in uneasy repose in Victory’s arms, his left foot trampling down a dead man, as Death, in the form of a cowled skeleton, its ribs separated by dark recesses, grasps at his heart. Around the pedestal sit four pitiful figures chained to the stone.3
They were supposed to be French and Spanish prisoners of war. But they made Herman Melville think of slaves:
At uniform intervals round the base of the pedestal, four naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, are seated in various attitudes of humiliation and despair. One has his leg recklessly thrown over his knee, and his head bowed over, as if he had given up all hope of ever feeling better. Another has his head buried in despondency, and no doubt looks mournfully out of his eyes, but as his face was averted at the time, I could not catch the expression. These woe-begone figures of captives are emblematic of Nelson’s principal victories; but I never could look at their swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place.
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