12. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China: Including Cursory Observations Made, and Information Obtained in Travelling through That Ancient Empire, and a Small Part of Chinese Tartary, London: G. Nicol, 1797, p. 236.
13. William Jardine, The Naturalist’s Library, vol. 8, Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1839, p. 222; Richard Phillips, A Million of Facts, of Correct Data, and Elementary Constants in the Entire Circle of the Sciences and on All Subjects of Speculation and Practice, London: Darton and Clark, 1840, pp. 172–73; Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 83 (1813): 339.
14. Antoine-Joseph Pernety, The History of a Voyage to the Malouine (or Falkland) Islands: Made in 1763 and 1764, under the Command of M. de Bougainville, London: T. Jefferys, 1771, p. 203.
15. Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 3 (1882): 148.
16. Edmund Fanning, Voyages round the World: With Selected Sketches, New York: Collins and Hamay, 1833, p. 26.
17. “Narrative of a Sealing and Trading Voyage in the Ship Huron, from New Haven, around the World, September, 1802, to October, 1806, by Joel Root, the Supercargo,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 5 (1894): 160.
18. William Moulton, A Concise Extract, from the Sea Journal of William Moulton, Utica: n.p., 1804, p. 62.
19. The Voyage of the Neptune: 1796–1799, exhibit pamphlet, New Haven Colony Historical Society, October 1996–June 1997; Edouard Stackpole, The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835, New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1953, p. 192; Diary of David Forbes, New Haven Colony Historical Society, MSS 22, box 1, folder L; Francis Bacon Trowbridge, The Trowbridge Genealogy: History of the Trowbridge Family in America, New Haven: n.p., 1908, p. 76.
20. “Letters of Sullivan Dorr,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 67 (October 1941–May 1944): 297–302.
21. Kirker, Adventures to China, p. 70.
22. Richard J. Cleveland, Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, of the Sons of New England, New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857, p. 9; Briton Cooper Busch, The War against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1985, p. 36.
14. ISOLATOS
1. Moby-Dick, p. 916.
2. Kirker, Adventures to China, p. 70.
3. Stackpole, Sea-Hunters, p. 192.
4. Kirker, Adventures to China, p. 77; Diary of David Forbes, May 2 and May 4, 1799.
5. Diary of David Forbes, April 13, 1799.
6. Rediker, Between the Devil, p. 218.
7. Samuel Eliot Morison, Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921, pp. 319–24.
8. Kirker, Adventures to China, p. 75; Eugenio Pereira Salas, Los primeros contactos entre Chile y los Estados Unidos, 1778–1809, Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1971, pp. 146–47; ANC (Santiago), Capitanía General, vol. 375 (“Caso de la Venta del Bergantín Mentor,” June 14, 1804); “Letters of Sullivan Dorr,” Proceedings, p. 352. For Strike, see Economic Review 5 (April 1895): 216; see also Rediker, Between the Devil, p. 205.
9. Tim Severin, In Search of Robinson Crusoe, New York: Basic, 2002, p. 52. There is some uncertainty as to who the captain of the Nancy was during this incident. Most accounts suggest it was J. Crocker out of either Boston or New London. But Russian sealers, according to Glynn Barratt, Russia and the South Pacific, 1696–1840: Southern and Eastern Polynesia, vol. 2, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988, p. 244, believed it was a captain named Adams. And Richard Cleveland, in Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, p. 212, lists the identity as “Captain H——.” There is also a discrepancy regarding the date, with some accounts saying the incident took place in 1805 and others in 1808. For the quotations, see Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery, into the South Sea and Beering’s Straits, vol. 1, London: Spottiswoode, 1821, p. 143.
10. Ralph Paine, The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem: The Record of a Brilliant Era of American Achievement, New York: Outing Publishing Co., 1908, pp. 323–24.
11. “Letters of Sullivan Dorr,” p. 361.
12. Ibid., p. 352.
13. “The Voyage of the Neptune,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 4 (1888): 48.
15. A TERRIFIC SOVEREIGNTY
1. Moulton, Concise Extract, 1804.
2. Rediker, Between the Devil, pp. 208, 218; Falconbridge, Account, p. 39.
3. Niles’ Weekly Register 48 (1835): 67; Cyrene M. Clark, Glances at Life Upon the Sea, or Journal of a Voyage to the Antarctic Ocean: In the Brig Parana, of Sag Harbor, L.I., in the Years ′53 ′54; Description of Sea-Elephant Hunting among the Icy Islands of South Shetland, Capture of Whales, Scenery in the Polar Regions, &c., Middletown: Charles H. Pelton, 1855, p. 49.
4. Delano, Narrative, p. 291.
5. “Narrative of a Sealing and Trading Voyage in the Ship Huron,” p. 163; Busch, War against the Seals, pp. 15–16. Nantucket Historical Association, Ships Logs Collection, Topaz.
16. SLAVERY HAS GRADES
1. Anna Davis Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881, p. 32; Otelia Cromwell, Lucretia Mott, New York: Russell and Russell, 1958, p. 9. For the Tryal, see NARA (College Park), RG 76, Spain, Disallowed Claims, vol. 55, Trial or Tryal; ANC (Santiago), Capitanía General, vols. 789 and 908; see also ANC (Santiago), notary records, José María Sánchez, Valparaíso, May 18, 1802, and Escribanos de Valparaíso, vol. 24, April 29, 1802, and December 16, 1803. See Rogers, Cruising Voyage, pp. 140–80, for a firsthand account of a series of privateering raids in 1709 launched from Pacific islands on Spanish commercial ships, including two vessels carrying fifty African slaves en route from Panama to Lima. Carol Faulkner, Lucretica Motts’ Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, p. 22.
2. Peabody Essex Museum, 1800 Mashpee Census, miscellaneous bound documents, MSS 48, box 2, folder 16 (“Levi Mye the son of Newport half blood, has a numerous family by his first, of full blood and by his second wife, partly Negroe, has two or three children”).
3. Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991, p. 88; Peabody Essex Museum, 1800 Mashpee Census. For presettlement epidemics, as well as a more detailed discussion of the historiography on New England Native Americans during this period, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, New York: Penguin, 2006, pp. 48–49; 372–73.
4. Jean Hankins, “Solomon Briant and Joseph Johnson: Indian Teachers and Preachers in Colonial New England,” Connecticut History 33 (1992): 49; Mark Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring’s Impact on Community Development,” American Indian Quarterly 26 (Spring 2002): 165–97. For Amos Haskins, see Daniel Vickers, “Nantucket Whalemen in the Deep-Sea Fishery: The Changing Anatomy of an Early American Labor Force,” Journal of American History 72 (1985): 277–96.
5. “Stephen Hall and Another versus Paul Gardner, Jun., & al.,” October term, 1804, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, vol. 1, Boston: Little, Brown, 1851, pp. 172–80.
6. James D. Schmidt, “‘Restless Movements Characteristic of Childhood’: The Legal Construction of Child Labor in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 23 (Summer 2005): 323. For the phrase “boundless license of removal”—that is, the right of masters to send their apprentices anywhere, see the case Commonwealth v. Edwards (which cites Hall et al. v. Gardner et al.) in Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Reports of Cases … 1754–1845, vol. 6, Philadelphia: Kay and Brothers, 1891, p. 204. Hall et al. v. Gardner et al. would be cited or mentioned in at least nineteen subsequent cases, in both northern and southern states (as well as Hawaii): Weeks v. Holmes (Mass. 1853); Randall v. Rotch (Mass. 1831); Coffin v. Bassett (Mass. 1824); Mason v. Waite (Mass. 1823); Davis v. Coburn (Mass. 1811); Br
ooks v. Byam (Mass. 1843); J. Nott & Co. v. Kanahele (Hawaii King. Jul Term 1877); In re Gip Ah Chan (Hawaii King. Aug Term 1870); W. B. Conkey Co. v. Goldman (Ill. App. 1 Dist. Dec 04, 1905); Vickere v. Pierce (Me. 1835); Futrell v. Vann (N.C. Jun Term 1848); Dyer v. Hunt (N.H. 1831); Overseers of Town of Guilderland v. Overseers of Town of Knox (N.Y. Sup. 1826); Commonwealth v. Edwards (Pa. 1813); Lobdell v. Allen (Mass. Oct Term 1857); Lord v. Pierce (Me. 1851); and Gill v. Ferris (Mo. Apr Term 1884). Thanks to Ron Brown, associate director for Collection Services at New York University School of Law Library, for providing these citations. Claiming that chattel slaves were really indentured servants was one way slave owners moving from a slave state to a free one tried to keep their property. One of the cases above, Commonwealth v. Edwards, citing Hall et al. v. Gardner et al., helped limit that practice. See Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity, Clark: Lawbook Exchange, 2000, p. 58.
7. Decisions at Chambers by Single Justices of the Supreme Court of the Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., 1889, pp. 25–41.
8. Despite his loss, Coffin continued to warmly defend Spanish Americans and taught many Spanish phrases to his daughter Lucretia, who would go on to be a prominent abolitionist and suffragist. See Faulkner, Lucrecia Mott’s Heresy.
9. AGN (Lima), notary records, Vicente de Aizcorbe, no. 72; 1802–3, ff. 642v–44.
INTERLUDE: A MERRY REPAST
1. In Billy Budd and Other Stories, pp. 73, 78–79.
17. NIGHT OF POWER
1. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, London: Jack Books, 1980, pp. 81, 86; Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, London: George Bell, 1914, p. 20; Samar Attar, Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe, Lanham: University Press of America, 2010, p. 62; Cheikh Anta Mbacké Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007; Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History, Hoboken: John Wiley, 2012. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, London: Oxford University Press, 1937, p. 2.
2. Ousman Murzik Kobo, Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms, Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 134; Lansiné Kapa, The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 49.
3. There is only one Arabic version of the Qur’an, with many English editions. I’ve used the translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary, Singapore: Muslim Converts’ Association, 1946. Court records differ on whether the rebellion occurred early in the morning of December 27 or December 28, 1804. Likewise there are two-day discrepancies between Delano’s dating of the rebellion and Cerreño’s. But Laylat al-Qadr can fall on the last ten odd-numbered days in Ramadan; December 28, 1804, converts in the Islamic calendar to the 25th of Ramadan, 1219. See Reis, Slave Rebellion, pp. 118–19, for a comparison with the Bahian Malê revolt. Port and tax documents found in ANC (Santiago), Contaduría Mayor, 1st ser., vols. 1993, 1998, 2335, 2338, and 2339, give the itinerary of the Tryal for 1804: July, Lima to Valparaiso and ports south; September, Valparaiso to Lima, carrying, among other cargo, an unnamed African male slave and an unnamed female slave brought overland from Buenos Aires to be sold in Lima; October 3, Lima to ports south, including Concepción; November 20, return from Concepción to ports north, carrying wheat, lard, cypress and pine planks, bottles and casks of wine, butter, cheese, oregano, pine nuts, chickens, and fresadas, or biscuits; December 2, arrival in Valparaiso. For the description of the early nineteenth-century traveler, see Schmidtmeyer, Travels into Chile, p. 208.
4. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Tars: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
5. Concolorcorva, El lazarillo, pp. 250–51.
6. For information on the Cerreños of Calañas, see the following documents in AMC (Calañas, Spain): legajo 252 (assorted resolutions 1827–94); legajos 202–3 (militia lists, 1771–1830); legajo 559 (asset holders, A–L); legajo 560 (ecclesiastical and other holdings); legajo 561 (tax lists covering years 1760–1850); legajo 562 (the Unica Contribución tax of 1771); legajo 1134 (sundry records of estate partitions and inheritance distribution); legajos 1129–30 (estate partitions and inheritance distribution, 1762–72); legajos 1092–95; 1099–1100 (notary records, 1757–1804). See also Antonio Ramírez Borrero, Calañas en la segunda mitad del s. XVIII, Huelva: Diputación Provincial, 1995; José de la Puente, Historia marítima del Perú: La independencia de 1790–1826, part 5, vol. 2, Lima: Editorial Ausonis, 1972, p. 168. For Cerreño’s ongoing indebtedness to his Peruvian creditors, see AGN (Lima), notary record, Francisco Munárriz, no. 453, f. 432 (“Obligación a Don Juan Ignacio Rotalde”). Cerreño’s cousin, Ramón Marques, was also involved in the financing of the Tryal; see AGN (Lima), notary record, Vicente de Aizcorbe, no. 72, ff. 642v–644r. For his cousin’s coming to Cerreño’s aid, see AGN (Lima), notary record, José Escudero de Sicilia, no. 214, ff. 980r–981v and 1048r–1049r. For Cerreño serving as guardian of Marques’s daughters after Marques’s death, see AGN (Lima), notary record, Francisco Munárriz, no. 453, f. 428r.
7. Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, vol. 2, Paris: Chapelot, 1912, p. 18; Alice Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969, pp. 80–107; Albany Gazette, November 25, 1793, reprinted in the New-York Daily Gazette, November 25, 1793; “Examination of Bet Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer, Esquire,” New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections; Albany Chronicles: A History of the City Arranged Chronologically, from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time; Illustrated with Many Historical Pictures of Rarity and Reproductions of the Robert C. Pruyn Collection of the Mayors of Albany, Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1906, p. 384.
8. Cristina Soriano, “Rumors of Change: Repercussions of Caribbean Turmoil and Social Conflicts in Venezuela (1790–1810),” PhD dissertation, New York University, 2011, p. 151.
9. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 40–66.
10. Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Erdmann Isert’s Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia (1788), trans. and ed. Selena Axelrod Winsnes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 180.
11. I thank Jennifer Lofkrantz, who in a personal communication provided information on slavery and Islamic law in West Africa.
18. THE STORY OF THE SAN JUAN
1. María Luisa Laviana Cuetos, Guayaquil en el siglo XVIII: Recursos naturales y desarrollo económico, Seville: CSIC, 1987, p. 292. For the free and enslaved people of color in Guayaquil’s shipyards, see Lawrence Clayton, Caulkers and Carpenters in a New World: The Shipyards of Colonial Guayaquil, Athens: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 1980. The San Juan’s West Africans might have arrived in Montevideo on one of the following two ships: the Rainbow, which arrived in August 1800 carrying ninety-one slaves (AGN-A, Sala IX, 18-8-11; thanks to Alex Borucki for the citation), or the Astigarraga, owned by the Montevidean merchant José Ramón Milá de la Roca, which came into Montevideo on June 15, 1800, carrying fifty-eight Senegalese. See AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 483 (“Testimonio de Ramón Milá de la Roca,” May 29, 1807), f. 11. For the San Juan’s cargo, as well as its alias, God’s Blessing, see the “Derechos de Alcaldía” and “Derechos de Almojarifazgo” documents in AGN (Buenos Aires), Sala XIII, 39-9-3, Aduana Montevideo, for the months September through November 1800. For Rotalde, see Patricia Marks, Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007, p. 32. For Ollague, see Ronald Escobedo Mansilla, Ana de Zaballa Beascoechea, and Óscar Álvarez Gila, eds., Comerciantes, mineros y nautas: Los vascos en la economía americana,
Bilbao: Servicio Editorial, Universidad del País Vasco, 1996, p. 86.
2. Telégrafo Mercantil, December 16, 1801. The French colonial archives contain nine documents related to this revolt, dated from 1816, when the ship’s Peruvian owner took advantage of the fall of Napoleon (and the “return of the august House of Bourbon to the throne of its ancestors, which restored the ancient relationship between the monarchies of Spain and France”) to win compensation for its loss. See Archives nationales d’outre mer (Aix-en-Provence, France), Fonds Ministeriel, Series Geographique, Senegal Papers, series 6, dossier 3. Mention of the event is also found in “Correspondance du gouverneur Blanchot (François Emilie de Verly), gouverneur de Gorée et du Sénégal de 1786 á 1807, avec le ministre (an X/1808),” located in Fonds Ministerial, in the subcategory Sénégal et Côtes d’Afrique—Sous-série C6 1588/1810.
3. Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die in This Way, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002, p. 172; see also David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (January 2001): 69–92.
4. Letters on West Africa, p. 176; Taylor, If We Must Die, p. 110. Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 167, writes that the explosion was caused by a cannon blast from a hostile ship.
5. For Saint-Louis around this time, see Howard Brown, “The Search for Stability,” in Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon, ed. Howard Brown and Judith Miller, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 37. See also George Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters, and African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century, Boston: Boston University Press, 1970; Lucie Gallistel Colvin, Historical Dictionary of Senegal, Scarecrow Press / Metuchen, 1981, pp. 81–98. For Charbonnier, see Sylvain Sankalé, À la mode du pays: Chroniques saint-lousiennes d’Antoine François Feuiltaine, Saint-Louis du Sénégal, 1788–1835, Paris: Riveneuve, 2007; Léon Diouf, Église locale et crise africaine: Le diocèse de Dakar, Paris: Karthala, 2001; Joseph-Roger de Benoist, Histoire de l’Eglise catholique au Sénégal du milieu du XVe siècle à l’aube du troisième millénaire, Paris: Karthala, 2008; Martin Klein, “Slaves, Gum, and Peanuts: Adaptation to the End of the Slave Trade in Senegal, 1817–48,” William and Mary Quarterly 66 (October 1999): 895–914; Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975; James Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. For Spaniards’ still taking slaves out of Saint-Louis despite abolition, at least prior to the tenure of Charbonnier, see AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 483 (“Testimonio de Ramón Mila, de la Roca,” May 29, 1807). For Charbonnier’s troubled administration, see Archives du Sénégal, Dakar, Sous-Série 3 B 1 “Correspondance depart du Gourverneur du Sénégal à toutes personnes autres que le Ministre (1788–1893)” 3 B 1, documents 91 to 104.
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