6. AGI (Seville), Lima, 731, (“Carta n° 445 del virrey Marqués de Avilés a Miguel Cayetano Soler, ministro de Hacienda,” April 23, 1805).
19. MOHAMMED’S CURSED SECT
1. Herb Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 5–6; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, London: Verso, 1997, pp. 67–80; Stuart Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
2. John Esposito, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 134. Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: Género, raza, y religion, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2000, p. 435.
3. Federico Corriente, Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects, Leiden: Brill, 2008, p. 36.
4. James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 24. See James Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 152–53; Karoline Cook, “Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650,” PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2008, pp. 84–87; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 74; Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 25. The quotation in the previous paragraph is from Francisco López de Gomara, Histórica General de las Indias, Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacuch, 1979, p. 31.
5. Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 3.
6. Cook, “Forbidden Crossings,” p. 40.
7. See the discussion in Rudolph T. Ware, “The Longue Durée of Qur’anic Schooling, Society, and State in Senegambia,” in New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power, and Femininity, ed. Mamadou Diouf and Mara Leichtman, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 22–23. Mungo Park, traveling among Muslim Fulbe in the 1790s, wrote that “in the exercise of their faith, however, they are not very intolerant towards such of their countrymen as still retain their ancient superstitions” (Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, New York: E. Duyckinck, 1813, p. 57). See also Paul Lovejoy, “Slavery, the Bilād al-Sūdān, and the Frontiers of the African Diaspora,” in Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, ed. Paul Lovejoy, Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004, p. 16. For “lesser spirits,” see Lansiné Kapa, “The Pen, the Sword, and the Crown: Islam and Revolution in Songhay Reconsidered,” Journal of African History, vol. 25, no. 3 (1984): 241–56. See also William Desborough Cooley, The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained: Or, An Inquiry into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa, London: J. Arrowsmith, 1841, a fascinating interpretation by a nineteenth-century British geographer of centuries-old classical Arabic manuscripts describing relations between Arab traders and sub-Saharan Africans, including patterns of commerce, slavery, and religious conversion.
8. Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007, p. 29. The Christian Traveller: Western Africa: Being an Account of the Country and Its Products, of the People and Their Conditions, and of the Measures Taken for Their Religious and Social Benefit, London: Charles Knight, 1841, p. 73.
9. André Alvares de Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea, translated and edited by Paul Edward Hedley Hair, Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1984 [c. 1594], pp. 19; 46. See also a nineteenth-century Portuguese edition of Alvares de Almada, Tratado breve dos Rios de Guine’ do Cabo-Verde…, Porto: Commercial Portuense, 1841.
10. Balthasar Barreira, “Achievements on the Coast of Guinea and Sierra Leon,” in Jesuit Documents on the Guinea of Cape Verde and the Cape Verde Islands, 1585–1617, ed. and trans. P. E. H. Hair, Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1989, sect. 29, ch. 2, p. 6. For how literacy was spread along the Gambia River valley by itinerant Islamic clerics shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, see André Alvares de Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea, c. 1594, ed. and trans. P. E. H. Hair, Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1984, p. 46; Theodore Canot, Adventures of an African Slaver, Mineola: Courier Dover, 2002, p. 180.
11. Terry Alford, Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
12. Sandoval’s treatise was published in Spain in two editions during his life, first in 1627 and then a second, expanded version in 1646. Quotations come from an edition translated by Nicole von Germeten: Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2008. Quotations and relevant passages are found on pp. 33, 56, 68, 113, 120, and 136.
13. Manuel Barcia, “‘An Islamic Atlantic Revolution’: Dan Fodio’s Jihād and Slave Rebellion in Bahia and Cuba, 1904–1844,” Journal of African Diaspora, Archaeology, and Heritage 2, no. 1 (May 2013): 6–17. There is debate over the degree to which Sufism can be considered a “reform” movement. See Bernd Radtke and F. S. O’Fahey, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” Der Islam 70 (1993): 52–87; W. G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 153; Lovejoy, “Slavery, the Bilād al-Sūdān, and the Frontiers of the African Diaspora,” p. 15. In Benito Cereno, Melville writes that Babo in Africa was a “black man’s slave,” a fact not given in Delano’s account or found in other historical records, suggesting that he was aware of inter-African slavery.
14. Thomas Ewbank, Life in Brazil; or, A Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956, p. 439.
15. Rout, African Experience, p. 24; Charles Christian and Sari Bennett, Black Saga: The African American Experience. A Chronology, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998, p. 4; Jane Landers, and Barry Robinson, eds., Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006, p. 49.
16. For the presence of Islam in American slavery, see the following important work: Paul Lovejoy, “Muslim Freedman in the Atlantic World: Images of Manumission and Self-Redemption,” in Lovejoy, ed., Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004; Allan Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Source Book, New York: Garland, 1984; Edward Curtis, Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, vol. 1, Infobase Publishing, 2010; Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, and The Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, New York: New York University Press, 1997; and Vincent Thompson, Africans of the Diaspora: Evolution of Leadership, 18th Century to 20th Century, Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 2000. For the ideological threat of Islam to Catholicism, see Cook, “Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650,” and Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, p. 74. For firsthand perceptions of this threat, see, in addition to the work already cited, António Galvão, Tratado dos descobrimentos antigos, e modernos…, Lisbon: Officina Ferreiriana, 1731, and Gomes Eannes de Azurara (Gomes Eanes de Zurara), Chronica do descobrimento e conquisita de Guiné, Paris: Aillaud, 1841; for the role slavery played in Islamic theology, especially in West Africa during the epoch of jihads, see Lovejoy, “Slavery, the Bilād al-Sūdān, and the Frontiers of the African Diaspora”; Radtke and O’Fahey, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” Der islam 70 (1993): 52–87; W
. G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad, and David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; for possible Islamic influence in a series of powerful slave revolts in Cuba throughout the first decades of the 1800s, see Manuel Barcia, Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Slave Resistance on Cuban Plantations, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. João José Reis’s study of the 1835 Bahia rebellion is the key study of the largest urban slave revolt in American history: Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Reis has slightly revised his earlier position regarding the centrality of Islam in the Bahia rebellion: Muslims were undoubtedly leaders of the rebels, but he now emphasizes “an ethnic rationale guiding their collective action.” After the rebellion was suppressed, Brazilian authorities singled out Muslims for punishment: “Muslims had been badly hit by repression in 1835, the religion became strictly prohibited, while hundreds of Muslim slaves were sold to the South, freed Muslims were deported or left spontaneously to Africa, while others migrated to Rio de Janeiro and other southern cities. Although a few Muslims in Bahia were still active in the second half of the century, Islam was unable to recruit among creoles, and eventually disappeared as an organized religion…;” Reis, “American Counterpoint: New Approaches to Slavery and Abolition in Brazil,” paper presented at the Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University, October 29–30, 2010, available at http://www.yale.edu/glc/brazil/papers/reis-paper.pdf.
INTERLUDE: ABOMINABLE, CONTEMPTIBLE HAYTI
1. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, New York: Norton, 2010.
2. Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, The World of the Haitian Revolution, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, p. 320; David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, New York: Norton, 2011. p. 75; Matthew Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 41–43.
3. See “At the First Performance of Lamartine’s Play in Paris,” North Star, June 13, 1850. See also “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” North Star, June 13, 1850; “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 4, 1851; “Isaac Toussaint L’Ouverture, Son of the Haitian Negro General,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, November 25, 1854. Douglass himself wouldn’t discuss Haiti and its revolution in detail until after his 1861 visit to the country. Prior to this, he reserved the topic for “certain audiences to avoid conjuring images of a race war.” See Clavin, Toussaint Louverture, p. 218; Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner and Yval Taylor, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. The scholar Robert Wallace has recently made a strong case for the covert but important influence Douglass had on Melville, who incorporated ideas and images from the speeches of the former slave and abolitionist into his writing. See Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style, New Bedford: Spinner Publications, 2005, pp. 110–18, for the comparison between Douglass’s and Melville’s uses of the volcano metaphor, as well as other influences Douglass might have had on Benito Cereno.
4. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge: Belknap, 1998, p. 170.
5. In a personal communication, Hershel Parker says he believes Melville was at his home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on February 26, 1855. Elliott (sometimes spelled Elliot) didn’t explicitly compare Haiti to the South. But the Times did in its review of the lecture: “Your men, your slaves, chattels—have the old, human, inextinguishable passion for Liberty within them”; slave discontent “does not show itself now” and neither did it for a long time in “St. Domingo.” The paper even recycled Frederick Douglass’s metaphor to warn slavers about “the volcano on which you dwell” (“Toussaint L’Ouverture”—Lecture by C. W. Elliott,” New York Times, February 27, 1855). See also “The Danger to the South,” New York Times, May 9, 1855 and C. W. Elliott, Heroes Are Historic Men: St. Domingo, Its Revolution, and Its Hero, Toussaint Louverture. An Historical Discourse Condensed for the New York Library Association, February 26, 1855, New York: J. A. Dix, 1855. Elliott was a friend and colleague of Frederick Law Olmsted—the two men would soon begin to work together to lay out New York’s Central Park—and it was Olmsted who proofread Benito Cereno for Putnam’s Monthly.
20. DESPERATION
1. Delano, Narrative, pp. 277, 299.
2. Mention of William’s clubfoot comes from the Hoyt Papers, in DRHS. Thanks to Carolyn Ravenscroft.
3. Delano, Narrative, pp. 420–21.
4. François Péron, King Island and the Sealing Trade, 1802, Canberra: Roebuck Society, 1971, p. 14.
5. Marjorie Tipping, Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and Their Settlement in Australia, Ringwood Penguin Books Australia, 1988; Robert Knopwood, The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803–1838, Hobart: Historical Research Association, 1977, p. 47; F. M. Bladen, ed., Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 5, Sidney: N.S.W. Government, 1895, pp. 172–77, 186–97, 225, 263, 813–15, William Joy, The Exiles, Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press, p. 52; James Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania: Papers Read before the Royal Society of Tasmania during the Years 1888 to 1899, Hobart: The Society, 1902, p. 45.
6. Delano, Narrative, p. 430; C. H. Gill, “Notes on the Sealing Industry of Early Australia,” Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 8 (1967): 234; Patsy Adam Smith, Moonbird People, Sydney: Rigby Limited, 1965, p. 41.
7. Walker, Early Tasmania, pp. 41–42.
8. Sydney Gazette, August 19, 1804.
9. Ibid., April 22, 1804; August 19, 1804; August 26, 1804; September 2, 1804; and October 7, 1804, tracked the movement of the Perseverance and the Pilgrim in New South Wales.
10. Juan Fernández was used as a prison colony and, as Delano and his men were arriving in the middle of a series of escapes, the Spaniards didn’t want any foreigners on the island. See Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Juan Fernández, historia verdadera de la isla de Robinson Crusoe, Santiago: R. Jover, 1883, p. 308; Ralph Lee Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island: A History of the Juan Fernández Islands, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969; José Toribio Medina, Cosas de la colonia: Apuntes para la cronica del siglo XVIII en Chile, Santiago: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José Toribio Medina, 1952, pp. 100, 266–67.
11. Delano, Narrative, pp. 467–68. For a moment, it seemed as if neither Amasa nor his “hurl-footed” brother would survive. Looking behind him, Amasa saw William weighed down with a heavy peacoat “struggling very hard” to stay afloat on a brace of wood “with his lame feet and confined arms.” He then turned away, toward the far-off Pilgrim, to see his other brother, Samuel, running back and forth from one mast to the other. In that moment of horse-market panic, Delano calmed himself by thinking of whales. “As the female species of whale when her young is struck stays braving all the harpoons and lances that can be used for her destruction, until her offspring has breathed its last, and not till then the mother disappears,” so Delano knew that as long as his brother before him kept a frantic watch, the “brother behind” him was still afloat. If Samuel were to withdraw from the deck, then William “should be drowned.” Amasa then serenely reflected on what would happen to him should he die, brushing off his world of woe: “For myself I could not perceive that life was of such great importance as I had already suffered a great many hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustices, ingratitude, and disappointments.” The scene is faintly similar to one of Moby-Dick’s most moving passages, in a chapter called “The Grand Armada,” where, in the middle of a frantic hunt, Ishmael, on the Pequod’s whaleboat, finds himself suddenly in the middle of a pod of nursing whales: “Far beneath this wondrou
s world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.” The scene soothes Ishmael, just as thoughts of a whale and her cub soothed Amasa: “And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”
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