The Amistad Rebellion (10 page)

Lower deck, Middle Passage

The Middle Passage

Because the
Teçora
was an illegal slaver, very little documentation about it has survived. Yet the experience of the
Amistad
Africans can be reconstructed by drawing on evidence about other, similar slave ships and voyages from the same era, and by analyzing carefully what nine of the Africans—Bau, Burna, Cinqué, Fabanna, Grabeau, Kale, Kinna, Margru, and Teme—said about the ship and its Middle Passage. Within an ordeal of violence, suffering, and death lay a bonding experience that would prove crucial to their resistance and survival.
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The vessel was said to have been Portuguese, but it may have been Brazilian. Its name may not have been
Teçora
at all, but rather
Tesoura
(scissors) or, more likely,
Tesouro
(treasure), a not uncommon way to refer to the black gold it carried. Cinqué and Bau explained that the vessel was “crowded with slaves,” five or six hundred in all, with
“plenty of children.” It was a brig, a two-masted vessel, and it was middling in size as slave ships went, probably between a hundred fifty and two hundred tons carrying capacity. It was therefore significantly more crowded than British slave ships as regulated by the Dolben Act of 1788—and those vessels were certainly crowded enough, as the infamous depiction of the Liverpool slave ship
Brooks
made chillingly clear. Like all other slavers in the post-abolition era, the vessel would have been designed for speed: it had to be able to outrun the vessels of the British anti-slave-trade patrol.
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The
Teçora
possessed the standard equipment of a slave ship. It had hundreds of sets of irons—shackles for the ankles, manacles for the wrists, and rings for the neck—as well as numerous chains and padlocks. Bau testified that they were “two and two chained together by hands and feet, night and day, until near Havana, when the chains were taken off.” On the main deck was a huge copper pot, used to prepare the victuals of the enslaved (and the crew) for a passage that took “two moons,” roughly eight weeks. In the hold, below the slave deck, sat the huge water casks, on top of which were piled wood for cooking, naval stores, and provisions, especially the rice that most peoples of the Gallinas region were accustomed to eat.
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The
Teçora
had a main deck, and below it a “slave deck,” where the
Amistad
Africans and the hundreds of others would spend sixteen hours a day, more in bad weather. Men and women were stowed separately, the former forward, the latter aft. The lower deck itself featured platforms, built by the ship’s carpenter in order to squeeze another hundred or more people into the vessel. According to Captain Forbes, who had sailed aboard a slave ship captured off the Gallinas Coast in 1838 and had seen many others, the usual distance between the lower deck and the main deck above was between thirty-six and forty-eight inches. He had seen one lower deck with a height of only eighteen inches. This claustrophobic nightmare had been specially designed to ship children, perhaps like another vessel Forbes saw that carried boys and girls between the ages of four and nine.
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Grabeau estimated that on the
Teçora
, the distance from the deck below them to the underside of the deck above was about four feet.
Those who were stowed on or below the platforms would therefore have had about twenty-two inches head space—not enough to sit up straight, as Thompson had noted. Even those with maximum headroom could not stand up, but were forced, as Grabeau and Kimbo explained, always “to keep a crouching posture.” So tight was the typical stowage, remarked Forbes, that “when one moves, the mass must.” The sea of bodies below deck rippled like the ocean waves outside.
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These bodies forced into small spaces were often left contorted and disfigured. This was evident in Freetown where some Liberated Africans—many of whom had probably spent less time on the lower deck of a slaver than the
Amistad
Africans because they had usually been captured
before
the Middle Passage—came off the slave ships in frozen deformity. F. Harrison Rankin saw “liberated slaves” on the streets of Freetown “in every conceivable state of distortion.” Many would “never resume the upright posture.” Some fit the bill described by an African constable: “He no good. He go for die.”
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The men and women aboard the
Teçora
came from a broad array of culture groups in southern Sierra Leone. Probably the largest group were the Mende, as on the
Amistad
. And since people of Gbandi, Kono, Temne, Bullom, Gola, Loma, Kissi, and Kondo backgrounds were later aboard the
Amistad
and all had crossed the Atlantic on the same vessel, they must have been aboard the
Teçora
as well. Burna also mentioned the Mandingo, who were probably present along with several other groups, perhaps including some Vai who had fallen afoul of the law and been sold to Pedro Blanco. The
Teçora
thus contained a multiplicity of nations and ethnicities, some of whom, it must be emphasized, had been at war with each other. Had mercenary warboy Gnakwoi fought the Gola man Beri? Former enemies might find themselves sold to the same merchant and placed aboard the same ship. Each blamed the other for the horrific situation in which he now found himself, and vicious fights broke out regularly. “Warlike habits” filled the ship, and would eventually find their way onto the
Amistad
.
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The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database provides a statistical portrait based on 531 voyages of Portuguese or Brazilian slave ships between
1835 and 1840. They shipped 223,790 Africans and delivered 201,063 to the New World, with an average mortality rate of 13.8 percent (data for 496 voyages). The vessels averaged 169.2 tons and carried 451 slaves, 70.5 percent of whom were male and 49.8 percent children. These ships carried 2.67 slaves per ton on a Middle Passage that lasted 46.9 days. The database also contains evidence on fifty-four voyages that originated in Sierra Leone or the Windward Coast between 1835 and 1840. These vessels were considerably smaller at 89.4 tons, and more crowded: they carried an average of 323 slaves, 3.61 slaves per ton, shipping 17,442 and delivering alive 15,403. They made faster voyages—the Middle Passage was 42.6 days—and they relatedly suffered lower mortality: 9.6 percent. They had fewer males (68.2 percent) and more children (55.1 percent). In comparative terms, the
Teçora
appears to be a fairly typical ship of its time, similar to other Portuguese or Brazilian vessels in size, number of slaves carried, and the slave/ton ratio or degree of crowding. Its less common characteristics were its longer voyage and its higher incidence of mortality.
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The Middle Passage of the Africans was vexed and deadly from the beginning. After Kru canoemen had loaded the five to six hundred slaves, a British anti-slave-trade warship was spotted, which necessitated a frantic unloading and the hiding of the captives in a large, hot, airless cave, where several died. That vessel of unknown name, empty but equipped as a slaver, was captured by the British, taken to Freetown, and condemned. A short time later, when the coast was again clear, another vessel appeared and everyone was reloaded. Once aboard, the hardware of bondage was attached, said Grabeau: “They were fastened together in couples by the wrists and legs, and kept in that situation day and night.” Women and children were not shackled; the latter had the free run of the ship except in bad weather when the hatches were battened down with everyone stowed beneath. It was common for the captain and crew to enlist the help of a few Africans to help control the others. The largest males were often made “head men” to oversee groups of ten to twenty. Once the voyage began, the captain spotted another British patrol vessel off the coast, hid the ship in a nearby inlet, and delayed the passage.
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The daily routine of the slave ship under sail was standard: two meals a day, taken on the main deck, with singing and dancing afterward, organized by the captain to preserve health and protect investment. Grabeau recalled that “they had rice enough to eat, but had very little to drink. If they left any of the rice that was given to them uneaten, either from sickness or any other cause, they were whipped. It was a common thing for them to be forced to eat so much as to vomit.” Kale confirmed the dismal picture: “When we eat rice white man no give us to drink.” Worse, he whipped “all who no eat fast.” Kinna added that he “was sick & was forced to eat.” He also recalled that “on their way to Cuba, they had scarcely any water & were sometimes brought upon deck to take the fresh air & chained down in the full blaze of a tropical sun, this was so intolerable that they often begged to go below again.” That they wished to return to a lower deck where they would face seasickness, disease, overcrowding, and the pungent “smell of bondage” among the prisoners—the stench for which slave ships were infamous—is remarkable. In Brazil, slavers were sometimes burned after the voyage because it was impossible to eradicate the odor. Perhaps this was the fate of the
Teçora.
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On the wide Atlantic, Cinqué exercised what may have been his first act of leadership: he “tried various ways to animate & keep up the depressed spirits of his countrymen.” He exhorted his comrades to get rid of the “sad faces” and to make the best of the situation. “Is not ours a bold warlike nation?” he demanded to know. He reminded all that they were freeborn and that “who knows but we may be freemen yet!” He had plans of rebellion already in mind.
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It is powerfully suggestive that the Mende way of describing death was “crossing the waters,” that is, crossing from the human to the spirit world. Whether the slave ship crossing the “great waters” was experienced as a kind of living death, one can only wonder. But actual, not merely metaphorical, death aboard the
Teçora
was certainly real and pervasive. All of the
Amistad
witnesses commented on the number who died. Bau explained in court that there were a “good many in the vessel, and many died.” Burna noted the many who “died on the passage from Africa to Havana—signifying by gestures that they
were thrown into the sea,” as indeed happened each morning, when dead bodies were brought up from the lower deck. Some may still have been alive when thrown overboard by the illegal slavers as they sought to lighten ship when being chased by British vessels: the captain cynically wagered that their pursuer would stop to rescue those thrown overboard rather than continue the chase.
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Several of the
Amistad
captives resorted to a kind of guerilla theater to represent their experience of the Middle Passage. In order to make real the horrors of life below deck for those in a federal courtroom in January 1840, Cinqué sat on the floor, acting out how they had been manacled and shackled, their heads stooped low because there was so little headroom. On another occasion, in jail, he “got down on the floor, to show us [visitors] how they were stowed on board, then moved about on his knees, and as he rose put his hand of the top of his head, to indicate how low the deck was.” Grabeau and Kinna did likewise: they “lay down upon the floor, to show the painful position in which they were obliged to sleep” aboard the slaver.
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Throughout these demonstrations, Cinqué emphasized the common experience of the Middle Passage. Speaking of the forty-nine men aboard the
Amistad
, he recalled, “We all came to Havana in same vessel.” They were, in short, shipmates, or “ship-friends” as the relationship was sometimes called in Freetown in the 1830s: theirs were “the bonds of fellowship, bound in days of misery.” The Mende word was
ndehun
, which means brotherhood. Fellow inductees of the Poro called each other “mates.” It was noted of Burna that he “manifests much feeling when reference is made to his companions who have died,” those people of many nations aboard both the
Teçora
and the
Amistad
. The social bonding—what anthropologists call “fictive kinship”—began in Lomboko, continued aboard the
Teçora
and in the barracoons of Havana, and reached a kind of apotheosis in action aboard the
Amistad
. It would continue in the New Haven jail and emerge finally as ethnogenesis, the formation of a new group called “the Mendi People.”

Conquering warriors had been assimilating people from other cultures for centuries. As Arthur Abraham has noted, to this day Mende
people “with no degree of consanguinity” routinely call each other father, mother, brother, and sister. Indeed, this seems to have been a regional phenomenon in Sierra Leone. Surgeon Robert Clarke noted that the multiethnic Liberated Africans in Freetown commonly used the terms “mammy,” “daddee,” “broder,” and “sissa” as forms of address. The “additive” nature of Mende and other West African cultures served the
Amistad
Africans well when they were far from home. Life itself depended on
ndehun
.
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The Barracoons of Havana

In the middle of June 1839, after an eight-week voyage from Pedro Blanco’s factory, the
Teçora
encountered another British antislave frigate as it neared Havana. Foone and Kimbo testified that they were landed “by night.” Slavery was legal in Cuba, but the slave trade was not, for Spain had signed a treaty outlawing the trade, and the British meant to enforce it. Security was tight during disembarkation and afterward: Cinqué and Bau recalled that they were “ironed hand and foot.” In addition, “every two were chained together at the waist and by the neck.” The vessel was one of many slave ships arriving in the dynamic slave society of Cuba at the time: British Superintendent of Liberated Africans Richard Robert Madden claimed in November 1839 that some eighty vessels, bearing twenty-five thousand enslaved Africans, had already arrived in Havana during the year. It was customary for the slavers to allow a couple of weeks for their human cargo to recover their health before final sale.
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