The Amistad Rebellion (14 page)

Toward a Free Country

The final, and in many ways the biggest, questions about the revolt aboard the
Amistad
remained: Could the rebels sail the ship? Could they set and manage the sails, operate the windlass, raise and lower the anchor, handle the longboat, and steer the ship? Could they navigate the treacherous shoals of the Caribbean and survive violent tropical storms at sea? Could they, in the end, get themselves to a place
where their desperate rebellion would result in true emancipation? Could they work their way to freedom?

Cuban authorities, as soon as they learned of the revolt from the sailors who jumped overboard and made it to shore, assumed that the answer to all these questions was no. They dispatched a ship of war, the
Cubano
, to search for the
Amistad
, thinking that the Africans would run the vessel aground on the north coast of Cuba and go ashore as maroons. They would not, or could not, remain at sea. Yet this is precisely what the
Amistad
rebels decided to do, outthinking the government of the slaveholders and wagering that they could provide affirmative answers to the big questions facing them. For a disparate group of people who had grown up in non-seafaring societies and had had nothing to do with deep-sea sailing vessels until they were engulfed in the twin catastrophe of enslavement and Atlantic shipment, it was a bold and daring decision.
⁴¹

Even though the
Amistad
rebels had established their leadership roles before and during the uprising, the collective continued to meet and act together as the situation unfolded. As Ruiz noted, a few days after the rebellion, the group met and officially chose Cinqué as their leader, as the Poro Society might. He had earned the position in the customary Mende way, through action. Other positions also were established: Sessi, who apparently possessed some seafaring knowledge (probably acquired aboard the
Teçora)
, would steer and “make sail.” Foone would be delegated as the group’s cook.
⁴²

As the new masters of the
Amistad
, the rebels gave their most important order to Montes, who had once been a sea captain and therefore knew navigation, to take them home—to sail back across the “great waters” to Sierra Leone. Using Antonio as interpreter, they made it clear that they wanted to reverse the Middle Passage. Montes protested that he did not know the way, but the rebels refused to accept this as an answer. Cinqué told Montes that he should “steer toward the rising of the sun.” It had been behind them as they came westward on the
Teçora
and would now be ahead of them on the return voyage. The sun would guide the way.
⁴³

Montes had no choice but to do as he was told, for the demand was
made with cane knives hovering above his head. “Every moment my life was threatened,” Montes recalled. Yet he bravely and cleverly developed a plan to thwart his new masters and to save his and Ruiz’s lives. During the daylight hours he would sail, as instructed, toward the rising sun. He would do so slowly, with sails loose, beating in the wind, to limit headway. But at night he would tack back to the west and north, to stay in coastal waters, where he was more likely to encounter other vessels. The man who had done all he could to evade the British antislavery patrols in Cuban waters now hoped against hope that one of them might find him. Naval officers who once would have confiscated his property might now save his life.
⁴⁴

The Africans did not trust Montes, and rightly so. Fear and stress roiled the vessel. The first time Montes reversed course, they sensed something was wrong and worried that he was secretly taking the
Amistad
back to Havana. They held a “consultation”—another Poro meeting—and decided to kill both him and Ruiz. It would be better to go it alone than risk the treachery of the white men. When the time came for the killing, Montes fell upon his knees and begged again for his life, pleading for his children and family. The influential Burna probably supported him. A majority of the rebels relented again, and let Montes live.

Ruiz and Montes also wrote a letter and explained to Cinqué that if he would give it to the captain of any vessel they should encounter at sea, the recipient would take them to Sierra Leone. Cinqué took the letter, pretending to agree to the proposal, but afterwards discussed the matter with his brethren and expressed his suspicion. Unfamiliar with written language because they had none in Mende, and unable to read what the Spaniards had written, Cinqué and his comrades decided that it was impossible for them to know what was in the letter. The leader concluded, “There may be death in it.” Indeed there may have been, for Ruiz and Montes were undoubtedly trying to send a message that would result in the recapture of the vessel, their own liberation, and the reenslavement of the Africans. The Africans attached a piece of iron to the letter with a string and sent it “to the bottom of the sea.”
⁴⁵

On another occasion, Cinqué perceived what he thought was deception and demanded that the anchor be dropped so that progress in the wrong direction might be halted. When Montes told him the waters were too deep to anchor at that location, Cinqué, an adept swimmer and diver, “jumped overboard and was under so long they thought he would never rise.” Finally he emerged from the water to say that “there was no bottom to be found.” Montes was right: the ocean was too deep for anchoring. Westward they drifted—not by accident and not for the last time.
⁴⁶

Uncertainty about where they were going was soon compounded by another, more immediate problem, one that would plague them for the entire voyage and severely limit what they could do: they did not have enough water. Because water puncheons and casks had been scarce in Havana when the
Amistad
set sail, they not only lacked water, they lacked enough
containers
for water, so they had to stop every few days, under dangerous circumstances, to refill the vessels they had. They caught all the rainwater they could, squeezing the sails for each lifesaving drop. Every time they went ashore for water, on one isolated cay after another across the Bahamas, they did so with dire fear of being discovered and recaptured. Even when they could fill their demijohns, pots, and bottles, “it was soon drunk up” and the search began all over again. They spent more than a month sailing around a relatively small geographic area in the Bahamas in search of water.
⁴⁷

The rebels were plagued by another big problem: they simply did not know where they were. They had no maps, no navigational knowledge, and few visual markers at sea by which to judge the ship’s location or progress. To make matters worse, they did not know where they could get reliable information or who they could trust in the perilous Caribbean world of bondage. They did not realize, for example, that in the very Bahama Islands around which they were now sailing, the British government had freed all slaves less than a year before, on August 1, 1838, and that they might have found refuge there, as other self-emancipated people had done and would continue to do. They went ashore to look for water in one place because Montes told them “there were only negroes in that part and no slaves.” The rebels
proceeded cautiously, and upon seeing two white men they jumped back into their boat, rowed back to the schooner, hastily weighed anchor, and sailed back out to sea.
⁴⁸

Encounters with other vessels at sea were fairly common and always terrifying. Small fishing smacks, pilot boats, schooners, brigs, and big ships—all sailed nearby, especially since Montes tried to keep the
Amistad
in busy sea-lanes. Several vessels approached, whereupon the Africans immediately sent Ruiz and Montes below. The strangers wondered if the schooner was in distress or needed a pilot to navigate the dangerous waters, but they rarely got close enough to ask their questions. When they saw forty-odd men armed with cane knives, they usually backed away in fear. They must have known that something dramatic had happened on the vessel. Ruiz and Montes hoped they would inform local authorities, who might in turn dispatch a warship to investigate, but the prisoners were repeatedly disappointed in this hope. Meanwhile, the Africans regarded every vessel they encountered with suspicion and hostility, a threat to their hard-won freedom. Sometimes they slept with cane knives in their hands.

Meanwhile, the Africans worked the ship, but the sailing was not easy. Lacking a pilot and having no local knowledge, on several occasions they got into dangerously shallow waters, hitting the bottom or, worse, rock formations invisible beneath the surface, which damaged the hull. Accidents tore away pieces of the hull that gave protection, strength, and lateral resistance to the keel. Another time they lost an anchor. Montes recalled a moment when they repeatedly struck rocks; “it was next to a miracle that [the vessel] was not wrecked.” This being summer in the Caribbean, they also experienced several tropical storms. They were forced to weather “violent gales” under “bare poles”—that is, without sails, to reduce resistance to the winds and prevent capsizing. They rocked and rolled with the winds and waves, thinking all the while that everyone aboard was going to die.
⁴⁹

The Africans did their best not only to sail the vessel, but to appease the apparently angry water spirits (
jina
) who governed their way. The two went hand in hand, as the peoples of southern Sierra Leone, especially
those who lived on or near riverine systems, as many of the rebels did, saw supernatural beings associated with the water as important figures. Such spirits, they believed, could help the waterborne traveler or, if they were unhappy and not properly placated, could create utter disaster. When the
Amistad
was once run aground, Montes recalled, “the negroes began to perform superstitious ceremonies; they threw their shirts over board, the pots and other utensils.” Some of these “utensils” were apparently the manacles, shackles, neck-rings, and chains from which they had liberated themselves, now thrown into the angry seas. The rebels then brought to Montes “a piece of plate, a pistol and other articles [so] that he might throw them overboard.” They then explained to him and Ruiz that “the object of these ceremonies was to break the charm in which they supposed they were; they said the plate, which was white, was to please God, and that the dirty and black articles were to please the Devil”—or so the matter seemed to Montes as he translated it into Christian categories. On another occasion, everyone took off their clothes and cast them into the sea, donning new, clean ones immediately thereafter. The old clothes were likely meant as gifts to appease Mami Wata, the female water spirit worshiped by peoples from Senegal to Angola and around the Black Atlantic. Her name grew from the pidgin language of trade on the African coast and she was thought to mediate relationships between Africans and foreigners. The
Amistad
Africans desperately needed her help.
⁵⁰

They also needed fresh water, and often the only available source was other vessels. Thirst compelled communication. One such encounter was with the
Kingston
, whose sailors were at first afraid to come alongside the
Amistad
, but eventually did so. In broken English Burna “asked those on board of the schooner if they were very far from Africa, and if they would sell them water, rice, and rum.” At the end of a halting, confused conversation, he exchanged a doubloon and a few shillings for a quarter cask of water, sweet potatoes, and sea biscuit, but he got no information about proximity to their native land.
⁵¹

After about six weeks Montes grew discouraged. He thought that
he, and indeed everyone on the ship, was doomed. He “made up his mind to die.” By this time they had only one cask of water on board and no prospect of getting more anytime soon; they were heading east with no land in sight and no other vessels nearby. As Burna noted, “hard wind—broke the sails” and of course they had no instruments of navigation. In desperation, Montes asked Ruiz if they should propose going to the United States. It seemed their only hope. Ruiz agreed that they should try it.
⁵²

Montes then “asked the negroes if they wished to go to a free country where there were no slaves.” In terrible need of water and knowing that a long voyage was at this point out of the question, they answered yes, they were “willing to go.” To the long-term goal of “going home to Mendi” was now added another, necessary short-term goal: to find a place that was not “slavery country.” Was the United States such a place? Montes lied, saying that it was, adding that it was not far away, only an eight-to ten-day voyage “if the weather was good.” Montes “intended to go to the southern part of the United States,” because it was nearest and no doubt because officials there were most likely to be sympathetic and turn the world right side up—that is, free the white Cubans and restore the Africans to bondage. In any case, the rebels now had an immediate, achievable objective. They tacked west and north, riding the North Equatorial Current, moving into the powerful Gulf Stream that would carry them more than a thousand miles up the North American coast.
⁵³

This would be the most difficult part of the voyage. Some of the Africans had already grown weak, some with dysentery, more with dehydration. Several would die; survivors would be reduced to drinking and cooking with sea water, which of course only made the dehydration worse, leading to muscle spasms, bloated limbs, seizures, kidney failure, and death. Some lost so much weight that they were “emaciated to mere skeletons.”
⁵⁴

Under such circumstances, suspicions continued to run high against Montes and Ruiz, who were thought still to be plotting to take them back to Havana. Another Poro meeting resulted in yet another death sentence for Montes. Cinqué came up on the main deck with a
dagger and a sword, and he and the rest of the men “sung the death song round him; all joined in the song and in the threats.” This ritual song and dance of Mende warriors again reverberated around the
Amistad
. Making “the most horrible contortions with his eyes” as he engaged in Mende war ritual, Cinqué prepared to kill Montes, but once again he was restrained, this time by two or three of his comrades, one of whom was surely Burna, who remained the Spaniards’ steadfast protector. Burna even promised to “sleep near them” so that they would not be killed in the middle of the night.
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