But as one moves through its pages, A Narrative reads less like an encyclopedia of world knowledge than like a long catalog of botches, fiascos, and debacles testifying to the impossibility of knowledge, or at least the impossibility of doing anything with knowledge once it is collected. Having been catapulted into the world by the great egalitarian thrust of the American Revolution, Delano found it to be one long parade of mortifications, a word that comes up often in his memoir. I’ve described only some of his defeats here. But there were many more. Delano himself described his life, when he was in the Bass Strait thinking he was going to drown, as filled with “hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustice, ingratitude, and disappointment.”
* * *
Delano thought his book would help demythologize the world, the way as a young man he thought going to sea would allow him to judge the truth of all the many “exaggerated accounts” he had read in books and “false statements” peddled by sailors. He valued seeing the world as it really is, seeing it with, as he put it, “two eyes.” Perhaps that’s why he started his memoir with a story about an effort to trick his crew into reason.
Mariners were a strange “class of men,” he wrote. They lived their lives charting the movements of the natural world, the expected comings and goings of stars, planets, tides, and currents. But if sailing was a learnable trade, it was also a “mystery,” as apprentice contracts stipulated. “Sailors, though usually the boldest men alive, are yet frequently the abject slaves of superstitious fear,” complained Delano. On voyages where gale followed gale in unfathomable succession, mariners, continually exposed to nature’s capriciousness, put great stock in the “traditions which are handed down from generation to generation concerning omens, charms, predictions, and the agency of invisible spirits.” Whistling might summon Satan, drowning a cat would bring a storm, seamen could equally hang a kingfisher by the bill to judge the weather as consult a barometer, and just one word from an astrologer could cause a whole crew to quit a ship.
Delano thought such practices mocked the “Deity,” as if God would intervene in nature’s mechanics for the “most trifling purposes,” to make, say, the North Star shine in the south. So after overhearing a few of his men on watch one night debating the existence of ghosts, Delano decided he had to do something. He found an old deck mop and outfitted it with white linen to look like a shrouded, slender-waisted woman and hung it from a block above the ship’s stern. He intended to gently frighten the night watch and then reveal the hoax, in the hope that reality would “cure” the men of “their folly.”7
The joke worked too well. A group of men sitting aft upon the quarterdeck were “struck dumb, fixed immovable with terror, and seemed like so many breathless but gazing petrifactions.” They moved to address the specter, asking her in the “name of the Holy God, who are you, and what do you want?” Fearing he had gone too far, Delano took the apparition down and withdrew to his cabin to sleep, planning to reveal the hoax in the morning. But he was woken in the middle of the night by his chief mate, who told him that the crew had gathered on deck “filled with anxiety and alarm.” Delano tried to calm his men down, but their sufferings were so “extreme” he couldn’t. Afraid to reveal his ploy, he kept quiet. For the rest of the voyage, the affair haunted Delano and caused him a “great deal of anxiety.” It did not, he admitted, “accomplish the good that I designed by it.”
It’s a fitting prelude to Delano’s memoir, foreshadowing deceptions and deceits to come. After such episodes, such as the practical joke played on him by his British mates on Pio Quinto, Delano often lapsed into long passages of brooding and introspection, not unlike Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. But Odysseus was able to use these inner thoughts to his advantage. He plugged his men’s ears so they wouldn’t succumb to the song of the Sirens and he gulled the Cyclops, allowing him and his men to escape. Delano can only trap himself with his own trick, achieving the opposite of what he intended, confirming to his men the existence of ghosts.
The American Revolution for men like Delano was a great clarifying event, helping to disenchant the world. The Duxbury preachers who supported independence told him that one’s fate was not predestined, that man had reason and free will, which gave him the power to make of himself what he would. But for the hapless Delano, faith in reason and free will became its own enchantment, blinding him to the ties that bound men together, that set the limits of who succeeded and who failed, and that decided who was free and who wasn’t.*
The Age of Revolution tossed Amasa from Haiti to Île de France, Bombay to Lima, returning him home to find nothing waiting other than past-due promissory notes, court summonses, and an America he couldn’t get a hold on, a token from a soon-to-be deposed monarch his only medal.8
* * *
At the end of his last sealing voyage on the Pilgrim, after his ship nearly capsized and he had lost all his skins, Samuel Delano recommitted to Christianity. He got caught up in America’s Second Great Awakening, a reaction against the intellectualism that had crept into the Christianity of his youth, a return to religion as a sensual, carnal experience. In a letter to his son in New Orleans, Samuel warned him to watch for his soul in that “sickly place,” reminding him that God had “sent his only begotten son into the world veiled in humanity to be scourged, buffeted, nailed to the cross, bled and die that we … would repent of our sins.” “Be prepared to die,” he said, for after “death then comes judgment.” Samuel even had his own prophetic “night vision,” a confused jumble of “women,” “lust,” and “flesh” that he managed to interpret as a “confirmation” of the “sacred scriptures.” He’d come a long way from the exercises in logic that passed as religious sermons in the pews of his childhood church, when ministers like Elijah Brown talked about reason as being the “guide to bliss.”9
Amasa went the other way. In his memoir, he displays a toleration and relativism toward other cultures that would become more common later in the nineteenth century, when Melville was writing, but was rare for the early 1800s. Delano is most analytical, most aware of larger social forces, when discussing the impact Europeans had on non-Europeans. In his description of Palau, for example, he is critical of how the arrival of ships full of guns, textiles, jewelry, and brandy upset the balance between vice and virtue that had existed among the island’s residents. Delano appears to be borrowing directly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality when he writes that the merchandise deepened their desires, creating more personal “wants,” making them more calculating, more instrumental, deceptive even, in pursuing “dishonest means of gratification.” He also seems to be drawing on Rousseau, as well as the lectures of Duxbury preachers such as Charles Turner and Elijah Brown, writing that civilization is dependent on the creation of a system of virtues to check and balance “evil … base passions.” A rapid increase in “wants” could make even “polished nations … more miserable than any savages.” It was worse with “Islanders,” not because of any intrinsic fault but because “white people” didn’t give them time to develop counterweights. “Europeans” immediately moved in to accelerate the disruption, using their “arts and force … to betray, to kidnap, or to seize openly and violently, the natives for the most selfish and inhuman purposes.” Such actions, he writes, in turn elicited “reprisals.”
For all its censure, this critique was still grounded in faith, in the Christian optimism Delano took in during his youth. He thought trade, given time and restraint on the part of Europeans, would eventually help “Islanders” multiply their “virtues and blessings, and call out a greater variety of talents and sympathies.” But by the 1820s, after yet more misfortunes and embarrassments, probably including jail time, his heart broken and his book not selling, Delano’s questioning pluralism evolved into a deeper doubt.
In September 1821, he came across an article in a Boston newspaper, “Sketches of Indian History,” recounting a meeting between a Seneca warrior named Red-Jacket and Boston missionaries that took place
at Buffalo Creek, New York, in November 1805. The encounter ended with Red-Jacket instructing his would-be tutors in the deductive method: “You say that you are right, and we are lost; how do we know this to be true?” Whether Delano was moved by the suffering of the Indians described by Red-Jacket or impressed with his question, he clipped the article and sent it along with a letter to Samuel in Duxbury.*
“Pray read, and ponder well on every sentence,” Amasa wrote his fundamentalist brother. “Bring to your mind what you know the Christian race has done to make other people, even one another miserable.” Samuel, too, was struggling with debt, which Amasa here might have been referring to. “Let me ask you,” he went on, “who has made you so extremely unhappy in this world but Christians. Consider if any Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, or any other Islanders, has ever done you much wrong, where there was no Christian … mixed with it.” In an illegible part of the letter, Amasa seems to say he would not “abolish Christianity,” as it was the “religion of our fathers.” But those Christians who took advantage of Indians deserved little respect.10
Delano then links this cultural imperialism to his own spiritual unease. After describing himself as unmoored, as “listing, this way, or that,” he continues:
I will speak one or two words more on the state of my own mind and then leave the subject: my mind for many years has been undistributed as to a here-after, as much so it has been for fear the moon would fall down on me and squeeze me to death, I always think when it comes into my mind, that I know nothing about it, and that no other man knows, or ever did know, or ever will know, this till the grave but my Prayer is ever like the soldier who was going into battle—viz—please God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.
Your affectionate brother,
Amasa Delano
Amasa died two years later, in 1823, from what seems to have been a heart attack. He wasn’t alone. Delano lived with his wife, sisters, and nephews. Judging from his correspondence, though, he felt isolated.
He shouldn’t have, not just because of his extended family but because Boston during his last years was something like his hometown, Duxbury, writ large, at least when it came to the triumph of anti-Calvinist Christianity. His brother might have embraced a hellfire Christ, and he himself came close to rejecting Christianity altogether, but the city’s religious and intellectual life was dominated by a new generation of Unitarian preachers like Delano’s minister, Horace Holley, and the more influential William Ellery Channing, who were even more certain than were Reverends Turner and Brown that men had free will, that both individuals and the world could be governed by reason, that faith could be purged of the gloomy doctrine of predestination, and that Christianity could be reconciled with the Enlightenment. Their theology found expression in reform associations focused on ending slavery, improving the lot of the laboring classes, and women’s emancipation, as well as in various secular “self-improvement” movements popular among a growing middle class. In other ways, too, the American experiment in democracy seemed to be still vital, still dynamic. Throughout New England, for instance, a cultural revival was about to begin, an “American Renaissance” that would produce philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and writers like Herman Melville and Margaret Fuller.11
But the contours of the crisis were coming into view. The Missouri Compromise had just divided the nation between free and slave states, turning a moral dispute into a territorial one. Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri had recently been admitted into the Union and settlers were moving west, taking their slaves with them into Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, and Texas. A year before Delano’s death, over thirty African American slaves, including their reported leader, Denmark Vesey, were hung in Charleston, South Carolina, on charges they were plotting an uprising inspired by the Haitian Revolution.
The republicanism of Delano’s youth had begun to fray, pulled one way by radicals who wanted to extend the promise of freedom to all men and the other by preservationists who might be personally opposed to slavery but thought ending it wasn’t worth the risk it posed to the country. In Duxbury, Seth Sprague, just a few years older than Amasa, thought slavery was a sin that needed to be extirpated from the land at all costs. But his son, Peleg, who became a U.S. senator, said Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t support abolition if it meant “putting in jeopardy our Government and our Union, under which we have prospered as no people has ever before prospered, and which is shedding upon the nations of the earth a light that no political luminary has ever before shed.”12
Amasa started out in the world when it was possible to have that kind of faith in America without needing to openly argue that liberty for some meant slavery for others. He left it thinking he would never know his own mind, nothing about it at all, and that no other man ever could or ever would.
Amasa’s total estate comprised one threadbare hammock, assessed at fifty cents, an old pine writing desk, also worth fifty cents, and seven hundred copies of A Narrative of Voyages and Travels—that is, a relic from his sailing life, the hammock, another from his writing life, the desk, and his books, the unsold sum of both.13
EPILOGUE: HERMAN MELVILLE’S AMERICA
By the early 1800s, the same fever that had gripped Spanish America had started to spread throughout the southern United States. Just as merchants decades earlier had begun sending more and more slaves over the pampas and then up the Andes, drivers now were moving ever greater numbers of enslaved peoples out of the old slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, and Maryland to new sugar and cotton plantations in the Deep South and the Southwest.
Many of them traveled the way Babo, Mori, and untold numbers of other captives did, in single or double columns on foot, their necks shackled together like links in a chain, across flatlands and over mountains. Others went on barges down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. And just as Mordeille had unloaded contraband slaves along Río de la Plata’s porous beaches, French privateers, most famously Jean Lafitte, worked with merchants in Louisiana, the Mississippi territory, and Texas, dumping slaves they had seized off prize ships on empty stretches along the Gulf Coast, including Galveston Island. When Delano boarded the Tryal in early 1805, there were less than a million slaves in the United States, most of them concentrated in the coastal south or just inland, in the states of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Mississippi and the Orleans territories. Four decades later, there were nearly four million, spread from the Atlantic to Missouri and Texas, in total worth over $3 billion, “more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined.” A trade and a system, slavery in the United States was also a delirium, a “fever”—a “perfect fever,” a “negro-fever,” as newspapers in Georgia described the demand for slaves.1
As late as 1850, Herman Melville, along with many others of his generation, could still think that “to become American is essentially to divest oneself of a past identity, to make a radical break with the past.”2 “The past is dead,” he writes in his novel White-Jacket. “The future is both hope and fruition.… It is for America to make precedents, and not to obey them.” The remarks come in a lengthy passage advocating for the “abolition” of flogging on navy ships, a cause Melville uses as a metaphor for other forms of arbitrary, absolute power, including slavery. “Exempt yourself from the lash,” he tells America’s “captains and commodores.” Later in the passage, Melville imagines the march into the future as a movement across the West to the Pacific: he compares the whole of the American continent to God’s covenant with “Israel of old,” the “birthright” of a free people. “We Americans,” he writes, “bear the ark of the liberties of the world.… We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.”3
But it was enslaved peoples, in the South and Southwest at least, who were beating that “new path,” cutting down forests, turning America’s “wilderness of untried things�
�� into plantations and marketable real estate and picking the cotton and cutting the sugar that drew more and more territory into a thriving Atlantic economy. Far from quarantining slavery in the South while spreading republican liberties west, expansion revitalized the slave system, allowing southern planters to escape their exhausted soil. Politically as well, by the mid-1840s efforts to realize the nation’s manifest destiny, a phrase just then coined, had deepened the predicament caused by slavery. The 1846 annexation of Texas, followed by the invasion of Mexico that same year, had removed the last obstacles to the Pacific. Rather than solving the problems slavery posed to the nation, expansion across the frontier worsened the crisis as slavers, free soilers, and abolitionists fought against losing ground in a growing United States.
Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, joined by most of the rest of Spanish America by the mid-1850s. But southerners, feeling hemmed in by the North, saw a chance: “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States,” said Mississippi senator Albert Gallatin Brown in 1859, “and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.” Augusta’s Daily Constitutionalist was even more ambitious in its call to reestablish slavery in Spanish America. The Georgia paper wanted southerners to build a slave “empire,” extending from “San Diego, on the Pacific Ocean, thence southward along the shore line of Mexico and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus of Panama; thence South—still South!—along the western shoreline of New Granada and Ecuador, to where the southern boundary of the latter strikes the ocean”—near to the Chilean waters where Amasa Delano’s Perseverance met Benito Cerreño’s Tryal. In a way, this vision brings the story full circle, with the nightmare Delano sailed into in 1805 transformed into a dream slavers had five decades later for the whole hemisphere.4
* * *
For those paying attention, the situation was as alarming as a “fire bell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson in 1820 described the division of an expanding republic into competing free and slave camps. Still, through the 1840s, it was possible to believe that abolition would be achieved within the legal and political institutions of the country, by letting the reality of the law catch up with its promise: that all men are created equal. This possibility seemed to be confirmed in 1841, when former U.S. president John Quincy Adams invoked the principle of natural rights to successfully defend the African Amistad rebels before the U.S. Supreme Court. In a bid to obtain their freedom, fifty-three Africans (forty-nine adults and four children) had risen up, seized the slave ship that was holding them captive, and murdered its captain and some of the crew. Adams argued, among other things, that this act was fully within the “law of Nature and of Nature’s God on which our fathers placed our own national existence.” The rebels were freed and allowed to return to Africa.
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 26
