They made it back to the beach just before night fell, “completely worn down with fatigue.” Delano sat on a boulder in the middle of the river’s mouth as feelings of humiliation washed over him:
When I was seated in perfect silence, on a rock in the river near its sources, and could hear the echo of the waters through the awful stillness of the desert, mingled with the occasional but unintelligible expressions of anxiety by the poor Malabar boy; and when I remembered that I was at an almost immeasurable distance from my native country, in the service of a foreign power, the victim of an imposition which appeared to me under various aspects, and now in a savage spot where the natives might be every moment upon me, I confess I was not very far from that fixed mood of melancholy, mortification, and terror, which required but little more to overcome me.
It must have been some image: a seated, silent towheaded Amasa Delano, head in hands, and a dark Kerala slave boy prostrate at his feet, convulsed and crying with fright, two isolated figures on a barren rock island in a river mouth in the middle of the Pacific, the waste of an empty white beach all around them and the green of a tropical forest behind. Delano was so lost in the “perfect silence” and “awful stillness” of his own misery that he was barely aware of the indecipherable wails of the young Indian.
Later, once the episode was behind him, Amasa said that the intense distress he felt sitting on his beach promontory helped him be more empathetic to the pain of others. As a “child of misfortune,” he was extremely sensitive to the “sufferings and wants of men, whose spirits fail, when they are at a distance from home, and appear to themselves to be cast out from the sympathies of the human family.” Though he was talking about the hard life of sailors, Delano’s description of vulnerability and loss could be describing the condition of slavery: “Many are the instances, in which generous and feeling minds have been ruined, and only relieved by death, when they were subject to the command of others, and during a period of depression were inhumanly treated without the means of redress.” He said in retrospect that the episode helped him understand the loneliness that is a part of “human nature” and made him a better leader of men.
Yet here on a South Sea beach, he ignored his Malabar slave boy, who undoubtedly was feeling the same “melancholy, mortification, and terror” he was. Even if he had wanted to pay attention, the boy “could not speak English.” “And I,” Amasa said, “could not speak anything else.”
Not too long after this event, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit, which contains what the historian David Brion Davis describes as the “most profound analysis of slavery ever written.” Davis is referring to a short chapter that starts with the master believing he is a sovereign consciousness, independent of and superior to his slavish bondsman, even as he grows materially and psychically dependent on his slave. Soon, the solipsism of the master gives way to an intense awareness of the slave’s being, so much so that he can’t imagine the world without him. He comes to realize his utter dependence on the slave, not just on his labor but on the slave’s recognition of his very existence. In turn, the slave becomes aware of this dependence and realizes his equality. One philosopher has called Hegel’s description an “existential impasse.” But it isn’t really an impasse, since there is an exit: the whole point of Hegel’s parable is to identify how human consciousness evolves, how it moves toward a higher level of freedom. It is out of the struggle between the master and the slave that a new world consciousness emerges. As Hegel wrote elsewhere, it wasn’t “so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.”15
It is Amasa on his rock who is at an impasse, so trapped within himself that he can’t even enter into the dialectic of dependence and interdependence, he can’t even begin the process of seeing himself in another. In this particular case, he is insensate to the cries of his own, at least for a day, slave lying at his feet. But throughout his memoir he seems blind to the larger social world around him. Being from New England, he thinks he is “free,” not only in a political sense, as compared with the legal enslavements of Africans and others, but in every other sense. Free from the past, from the passions that soaked human history in so much blood. Free from vices; reason is his master. And of course free from slavery itself, from relations of bondage and exploitation. After every one of his many other moments of crisis or of disappointment, including this one, he affirms his faith in the idea of self-mastery and self-creation. And his faith is repeatedly proven to be misplaced.
Amasa’s feelings began to regain their elasticity after his British mates arrived in the ship’s boat. “Brother Jonathans” were known for their cheerfulness, and so the players of the joke pressed him to “join in the common laugh.” Delano obliged. But when he jumped into the boat to go back to his ship, he felt a sharp sting. A “large centipede eight or nine inches long” had crawled out of a pile of firewood and given Delano “a most venomous bite” on his throat. The infected area “swelled very much, and caused an extremely painful night.”
“Thus ended my dreams and my excursion in search of the golden ore.”
* * *
Morals wouldn’t let Amasa run a slave ship or trade with slave islands. Insufficient access to capital, along with other deficits, ruled out whaling. There was, though, one maritime profession that well suited Delano’s resources, talents, and temper: sealing.
INTERLUDE
Black Will Always Have Something Melancholy in It
Largely ignored throughout the nineteenth century, Benito Cereno was hailed as a masterpiece at the beginning of the twentieth. It was, wrote one critic, a “flaming instance of the author’s pure genius.” But what did it mean? Moby-Dick’s symbolism was so fluid and open-ended it could be debated endlessly. Benito Cereno, in contrast, seemed unrelentingly to be about one thing, the most divisive subject in American history: slavery.1
Except that for a long time scholars said it wasn’t about slavery. Benito Cereno “equals the best of Conrad,” wrote Carl Van Doren in 1928. And like those who read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for its “Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision” but ignored its true story of homicidal Belgian imperialism in the Congo, scholars didn’t think Benito Cereno was about the slave trade and the racism it bred. Some said it was an allegory of the clash between European decadence (Cereno) and American innocence (Delano). But more often, critics read it as a parable of the cosmic struggle between absolute virtue and absolute evil.2
Article after academic article fixated on Babo’s blackness (recall that in Melville’s novella, it is Babo, not Mori, who plays the role of deceptive servant). “Blackness and darkness are Melville’s predominant symbols of evil, and Babo is blackness, not simply a Negro.” He is “pure deviltry … a creature of undiluted evil.” The West African who in the story presides over the murder of his enslaver and much of the ship’s crew is a “manifestation of pure evil.” He is the “origin of evil,” a “monster,” and “the metaphorical extension” of “the basic evil in human nature.” Babo isn’t a symbol of evil or a human being who does evil: “Babo is evil.”
Most early-twentieth-century scholars couldn’t see any rational reason for his violence. Babo’s is a “motiveless malignity.” He hates for the “happiness of hatred” and is evil “for the sake of evil.” He is “everything untamed and demoniac—the principle of unknown terror.” He is “the shark beneath the waters.” Some, such as Harvard’s F. O. Matthiessen, cautiously suggested that the slaves’ actions were justified by their captivity, since “evil” had “originally been done to them.” But most white scholars continued to insist that the “morality of slavery is not an issue in this story.” “Babo, after all, as perhaps his name suggests,” wrote Yale University’s Stanley Williams in 1947, “is just an animal, a mutinous baboon.”3
African American critics saw things differently. As early as 1937, Sterling Brown, a professor of literature at Howard, himself the son of a slave who traine
d a generation of writers, poets, activists, and actors, including Toni Morrison, Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Nkrumah, Ossie Davis, and Amiri Baraka, wrote that he wasn’t troubled by the portrayal of the West Africans as “bloodthirsty and cruel.” They weren’t villains, Brown wrote, much less incantatory exclamations of cosmic evil. They were human men and they “revolt as mankind has always revolted.” In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the black power protests of the 1960s, African American writers and activists started to celebrate Babo as an “underground hero” and to read Benito Cereno as subversive, seeming to take the side of the whites while skewering their idiocy.4
Then there’s Amasa Delano’s whiteness. The image of the Duxbury captain that accompanies his memoir is striking. His cropped hair is colorless and his face is white, as intensely so as the starched, ruffled white cravat that grabs his round neck a bit too tightly. The retreating flanks of Delano’s scalp are curved and his arched eyebrows seem to continue their circumnavigation around fleshy cheeks. There’s a hint of a sailor’s squint, yet his eyes lack depth. They are fishlike. In fact, the combined effect of the whiteness and the roundness calls to mind a sea creature, a whale or maybe an otter. D. H. Lawrence described Herman Melville as “half a water animal”: “There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over.” Delano, too, according to an acquaintance, was “almost amphibious.”5
Delano sat for the portrait when he was about fifty years old. It is a full-frontal bust image done in stipple engraving, where the contours of his face are created by thousands of black dots pressed on a white page. All its shading and texture come from contrasting black to white. The denser the dots, the brighter Delano’s cetacean whiteness. Melville was fascinated by this kind of black and white interplay, the way that blackness defines whiteness. He used the imagery of a dark backgrounded portrait or a lighted sphere “shrouded in blackness” as a symbol of sublime terror—the feeling a person gets when contemplating his or her smallness in relation to the “ghostly mystery of infinitude.”6
He didn’t, though, assign a simple color code to morality, where black meant bad and white meant good. That he didn’t is clear in one of Moby-Dick’s most famous chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which has the book’s narrator, Ishmael, offering an extended meditation on what it is about the color white, despite its association with things “sweet, and honorable, and sublime,” that strikes “panic to the soul.”7
To write the chapter, Melville read, among other things, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which argues that there is something inherent in blackness that causes a shared repulsion in “all mankind.” Darkness doesn’t just conceal potential dangers, Burke writes, but causes a “very perceivable pain”: as light dims, pupils dilate, irises recede, and nerves strain, convulse, and spasm. To prove his point that darkness is “terrible in its own nature,” Burke gives the example of a young, presumably white, boy born blind who, after having his vision restored at the age of thirteen or fourteen, “accidentally” sees “a negro woman” and is “struck with great horror.” People can become accustomed to “black objects,” and once they do, the “terror abates.” But “black will always have something melancholy in it.”8
Melville says the same about the color white. The thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains calls forth “soft, dewy, distant dreaminess.” Yet just a “bare mention” of New Hampshire’s White Mountains causes a “gigantic ghostliness” to pass “over the soul.” The Yellow Sea merely “lulls us,” while the White Sea casts “spectralness over the fancy.” Melville doesn’t say that he believes the origin of this fear is to be found in slavery, yet he does have Ishmael mention in passing that the association of whiteness with goodness allows the “white man” to gain “mastership over every dusky tribe.”
He never really explains where the power of whiteness comes from. Maybe it is a matter of contrast. The polar bear’s whiteness, for instance, drapes its “irresponsible ferociousness” with a “fleece of celestial innocence and love,” uniting “opposite emotions in our minds.” “Were it not for the whiteness,” Melville writes, “you would not have that intensified terror.” Or it could be that since white isn’t “so much a color as the visible absence of color,” it reminds man that other, more pleasing hues are “subtile deceits” covering up the “charnel-house within.”
PART III
THE NEW EXTREME
There is boundless theft …
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement; each thing’s a thief;
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Have unchecked theft.
—A PASSAGE MARKED BY HERMAN MELVILLE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TIMON OF ATHENS
9
THE SKIN TRADE
On April 19, 1804, in Buenos Aires, Juan Nonell, a twenty-year-old Catalan recently arrived in the Americas, sold sixty-four Africans to Alejandro de Aranda, a merchant from the inland Argentine province of Mendoza. Among the slaves were a man named Babo and his son Mori.
The sale could have taken place in any of the many fetid human pens that dotted the city. Earlier, most slave transactions occurred in a few centralized locations, including in El Retiro, a large open-air compound built by the British when they had the slave trade monopoly with Spain, or in an auction house along the waterfront. But with the advent of free trade, the auction house was converted into the city’s customs building, while Retiro gave way to smaller corrals that had sprouted throughout the city center and near the wharves. Officials constantly complained of merchants who made no effort to keep up these enclosures or provide care for people “full of lice, skin diseases, and scurvy, and exuding from their body a foul and pestilential odor.” Those Africans who didn’t attract a buyer were simply “liberated,” turned out into the streets with no clothes, no Spanish, and no way of surviving. Nearly all died quickly following such midnight emancipations. Slavers wouldn’t even bury the bodies; instead, they’d have the corpses “dragged through the street” and “thrown in city ravines.”1
Aranda paid Nonell 13,000 pesos for the sixty-four Africans, a third in silver and a promissory note for the balance, which he committed to pay within a year after he had returned from Lima. Nonell had acquired the slaves in the lot from various sources. Some were the captives pulled off the Neptune and Santa Eulalia by royal officials, purchased by Nonell at public auction. The Catalan did most of his business with U.S. slave ships that worked the western bulge of Africa, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. In the months prior to the sale, Nonell had imported 188 Africans into Buenos Aires, including seventy-one that came in on the Louisiana and another ninety on the Susan, both U.S. brigs that embarked their cargo at the Gambia River. Of the fifteen Tryal rebel names that we do have, Samba is typical among the Fulani, as is Leobe, though it is also found among the Wolof. Atufal might have been the slavers’ compression of a first and last name—Fall is a common surname in Senegal. Alasan was a popular West African Muslim name. They all referred to West African peoples who could have been seized anywhere in Senegambia.2
The slaves purchased by Aranda probably hadn’t been branded. In 1784, Spain had dropped the requirement that a royal mark be seared into slaves’ skin as a receipt to prove that they had been imported legally and that the branding tax, el derecho de marco, had been paid (though some U.S., French, and British ships continued using the brand as a way of distinguishing their lots). They weren’t named in the promissory note he received from Aranda. When Spaniards referred to slaves as merchandise or cargo they generally used the word piezas (pieces or
units). When Africans were huddled together in pens they were usually referred to simply as la negrada (the black mass) or la esclavitud—which roughly translates as a combination of servitude and slavery but was often applied collectively to the people subject to that condition, reducing them to that condition, as “in the esclavitud was fed” or “the esclavitud was disembarked.” In Nonell’s case, the import documentation just referred to the humans he was buying and selling as negros and negros bozales—that is, “raw” blacks, straight from Africa.3
It’s not that Spain didn’t encourage record keeping and paperwork. On the contrary, the Spanish empire floated on ink. To a far greater degree than any of their imperial rivals, Spaniards were obsessed with legalisms. Spain sent not just warriors, priests, and would-be aristocrats across the Atlantic but a legion of scriveners and notaries to create one of the most comprehensive bureaucratic edifices in world history. Content mattered. Spanish theologians debated for centuries the moral and religious justifications of conquest and slavery. They revived Roman law. They reread Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. And they reinterpreted Scripture.
Forms, elaborate forms, mattered as well. Royal decrees, commercial transactions, tax and tariff records, legal inquiries and testimonies were copied again and again and deposited in archives throughout Spain’s dominion. The copying might be rushed, done in illegible handwriting. Or it could be ornate, adorned with elaborate flourishes left over from when Arabs ruled the Iberian Peninsula, and filled with phrases so oft repeated they had become meaningless. Sales receipts frequently said a given slave was “subject to servitude” or “taken in a just war and not in peace.” It was legalese from an earlier time, when Catholic theologians were consciously arguing that the enslavement of Africans was legitimate since they were prisoners of a war deemed to be just. By the late eighteenth century the expression was used by rote, applied not only to slaves captured in the field but to those who had been in America for generations.4
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