The Empire of Necessity (11 page)

All told, Amasa Delano spent the better part of three decades at sea.

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Delano thought that traveling the world would enlarge his mind and add to his wisdom, helping him to “subdue his prejudices,” rise above petty provocations, and master the “divine art of extracting good from evil.” But since, as he put it, he owed his tolerance and open-mindedness to his ability to “generalise his observations, principles, and feelings,” he was, in a way, expecting to confirm what he already believed, ideas concerning reason, free will, and man’s capacity for self-mastery that he had been taught by ministers like Turner and Brown. But what he found in the world was quite different, something that didn’t confirm his certainty but crushed it.
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7

THE LEVELLING SYSTEM

One of Delano’s first commissions as an officer was on a British East India Company ship engaged in smuggling opium and mapping Pacific islands. After two years on board, Delano cashed out. He took part of his wages in the drug, which he smuggled into China and sold, doubling his earnings. It was early 1793 and, wanting very much to leave Canton and return home, he took command of a ship bound for Europe called the
Eliza
, freighted with sugar by a Dutchman named Van Braam.
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The
Eliza
was not a good ship. It was “dull in sailing” and “very leaky.” Water seeped into the hold and mingled with the sugar, which dissolved into a syrup that the ship’s pumps then ejected back into the ocean. This sweet mixture began to attract fish, first a small escort, then a detachment, more and more until the
Eliza
was enveloped in a vast, shimmering silver troop of maritime life.

Across the Indian Ocean, from the Straits of Sunda to Île de France, the
Eliza
was followed by “an immense multitude of fish,” of “all varieties, from the largest whale down to the smallest sprat.” It was a movable feast, a never-ending banquet: a few hooks and a bit of grain were enough to catch a ship’s worth. But one of the species, Delano didn’t know which though suspected the bonito, proved noxious. “The greater part of the crew was poisoned.”
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Delano arrived in Île de France, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, in July 1793. A harbor pilot rode out to the
Eliza
and told Amasa the news: King Louis XVI had been guillotined; France was now a republic and aristocratic Europe had joined together to crush it; the island was under siege from without and governed by radicals within; mobs roamed the street, sacking the stores of rich merchants and forcing them to sell their wares in exchange for the revolution’s practically worthless paper currency; privateers filled the port, some of them pierced for forty or more guns, armed to seize ships and cargo. No vessels were safe, not even if they flew under a flag friendly to the republic.

“The information struck us dumb,” Delano said.

With its sweet wake in trail, the
Eliza
had cruised into a tropical hothouse of revolutionary passion. Ideas then convulsing Europe were embraced with even more fervor on that small sugar and slave island. Delano was horrified by what he saw. He knew the people of Île de France to be honest and honorable, he said, recalling an earlier visit. In the decades prior to the regicide, the colony had prospered from increasing trade between Europe and Asia, and many of its merchants, sugar planters, and slavers had become rich. The price of sugar was high and the island’s Port Louis serviced ships sailing between Europe and Asia. But the colony was also home to a growing number of poor whites and free people of color, natural-born sansculottes. And when news arrived of Louis’s beheading, everything fell apart.

Amasa Delano had lived through revolutionary fervor before. The people of Duxbury had united in near-unanimous support of the Sons of Liberty and the Continental Congress. He was a young boy when the town raised a liberty pole. “We had a very high one,” recalled one Duxbury resident. Yet his hometown had been spared much of the internal strife that gripped other communities. Throughout New England, patriots gave suspected Tories a choice: kiss the liberty pole and proclaim support for independence, or be tarred and feathered. Duxbury, though, had very few “liberty-pole recantations,” remembered one veteran of the revolution, because there “was none to recant.” There was one incident where patriots caught a Halifax trader named Jessie Dunbar selling butchered meat to the British. They beat him in the face with cow tripe. Yet for the most part, war against the British bred neither “bigots nor enthusiasts” among Delano’s neighbors, who, once the fighting was over, returned to their shipbuilding and seafaring businesses—despite the fact that a few in town were getting richer, and many other were becoming poorer.
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In Île de France, however, Delano watched a world unhinged by revolution. A Jacobin club was formed that effectively seized power from the colony’s merchant- and slaver-dominated assembly. Women dyed their hair red, white, and blue, planters renamed their slaves after Greek gods, and Jacobins held one “festival” after another: one celebrated “Virtue,” another “the Harvest,” yet another extolled “Innocence.” The girl who played Innocence was dressed in a white tunic and garlanded with flowers, but she was left exposed too long to the cold and died the next day. The Festival of the Grape Harvest featured two female “citizens” who “enacted scenes of debauchery.”
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“They soon learned to cry, ‘liberty and equality,’” Delano wrote. There were other slogans as well: “The tyrant is dead.” “Oppression is destroyed.” “The rights of man are triumphant.” A guillotine was raised in the plaza, hung with a sign that read, “A cure for aristocracy.”

The island’s slaves didn’t rise up, and the colony’s planters managed to ignore Paris’s 1794 decree abolishing slavery. But paranoia increased and conspiracies multiplied. The planter class lived in constant fear. Rumors flew that artisans were plotting with slaves and that sailors were arming them both. English spies and counterrevolutionaries were thought to be everywhere. Food supplies dwindled.

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One of the things the French Revolution did that Delano found especially distressing was to democratize piracy. In the past, as with Mordeille’s merchant partners in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and the slavers’ mercenary fleet in Liverpool, it was the wealthy and well connected who financed privateers, men who could afford to outfit a corsair ship and send it off to see what it could catch. Now, though, in Île de France, privateers were selling cheap shares in their operation, as many as 500 per ship, to anyone who would buy them. “All ranks of men,” Delano noted, could now profit from piracy (similar to the way “free trade” was at this time democratizing the slave trade in Spanish America). Later, after Napoleon came to power in Paris, these privateers would be nationalized, their actions coordinated with the French republican navy to disrupt British commerce. But in the years immediately following the execution of Louis XVI, piracy was open to all: every man a privateer.

Though Delano as a young man had for a short time served in the crew of an Atlantic corsair, he now condemned the practice. He had known many a fellow captain laid low by privateers and had himself escaped them on more than one occasion. Privateering was little more than a “system of licensed robbery,” a “wicked” commerce that he compared to slavery. Just as humans could be seized from their homes, losing everything they held dear, an “honest sailor” who had his life’s work invested in his hold could be robbed of “every cent”—and the thievery “done according to law.”

Delano was immediately affected by the island’s lawlessness. His cargo of sugar, that part which hadn’t melted into the ocean, was arbitrarily embargoed by the colony’s authorities. Prohibited from leaving port, Delano was furious. The island’s administrators didn’t “treat us with respect or justice,” he complained. It was “mortifying” to see “very low men, without talents or integrity, in possession of power, and using it for the worst purposes, under the name of liberty.”

A child of the American Revolution, Delano found himself trapped in a place that was a perversion of the world of morality and reason promised by that revolution. “I soon discovered,” he later wrote, that what French revolutionaries meant by the word
liberty
“was to do as they pleased, while others should be bound to conform, or die.” “Those who declaim the most vehemently in favour of the levelling system, are, as far as my experience has extended,” Delano thought, “among the greatest tyrants when they get the power.… The attempt to establish perfect liberty, or what the unthinking sometimes call perfect liberty, must of course fail.”

Delano’s ship was registered in the United States, but its cargo was owned by a citizen of Holland. And France was at war with the Dutch. Delano therefore had to hide his bills of lading to make it seem the sugar was his. Weeks passed and nothing was resolved. His crew was “eating out” his supplies and worms were “eating up” his ship. Delano secretly managed to sell his sugar. But it was too late. The
Eliza
was rotted through and through and had to be scuttled.

With proceeds from the sugar, along with the money he had made from selling his opium
,
Delano joined with another American captain and purchased from a privateer a large 1,400-ton prize, the
Hector
. The island’s port was filled with such ships, taken by corsairs, for sale. Delano’s need to get off the island overcame whatever misgivings he might have had about buying a seized vessel. “Ships at this time,” he wrote his brother in Duxbury, are “as cheap as you could wish them.”
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The idea was to sail to Bombay and take on a cargo of cotton, which Delano would then sell in Canton. “We thought that we might be able to do something handsome for ourselves,” as well as pay Van Braam back for his lost sugar, he said. He soon realized that the “undertaking was too much for us.” Daily expenses to cover provisions, wages, and repairs exhausted whatever money the two Americans had. And the port’s Jacobin authorities “laid one embargo after another” on them, saying that because the
Hector
mounted sixty guns it wouldn’t be allowed to sail to an “English port in India,” where it might be taken by the British and used to blockade the island. Delano and his associate were forced to borrow money at an “exorbitant interest to be paid at Bombay,” in order to cover their operating costs.

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Although Delano and his partner finally got away, their fortunes didn’t improve. A few days out from Île de France the
Hector
hit an eight-hour hurricane and nearly broke apart. “We lost three topsails,” Delano reported, and the foreyard split in its sling. They repaired the ship and made it to India. But since the French were seizing American vessels, they found no merchant willing to ship their cargo with them. They were stuck in Bombay for months, missing the best sailing season to China. The debt contracted in Île de France mounted. It now stood at $20,000. Taking out a second loan to pay the first, the two men moved on to Calcutta. They still couldn’t find a merchant willing to risk the run. The captains were forced to sell the
Hector
when the holder of their new loan demanded payment, with the proceeds barely covering the debt.

Delano was broke, down and out in Calcutta. His “accumulated losses” weighed on him “constantly.” He was dismayed that he had lost Van Braam’s property. He knew that his motives were “pure and honest” when he used the profits from the Dutchman’s sugar to buy a prize ship. He had felt that he had been held hostage in Île de France, that Jacobin island, and he wrote Van Braam telling him every detail of his misfortune, saying that he had planned to pay him from the profits made on the
Hector
. He just couldn’t make it work. “On reflection, the attempt to manage so large an enterprise with so small a capital was unwise, and now caused me much self reproach.” “We went beyond our depth,” he said. His soundings were off.

Delano caught a schooner back to Philadelphia, arriving with “but one gold moore,” his “high hopes” disappointed, his “mind wounded and mortified.”
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8

SOUTH SEA DREAMS

After five years at sea, Amasa Delano came home to Duxbury with his hands “empty,” his “dress thread bare,” and “nothing but his wants abundant.” “I never saw my native country with so little pleasure,” he wrote of what he called the “disastrous termination of my enterprises and my hopes.” Successful captains return from prosperous voyages with their holds full of exotic gifts and are warmly welcomed by friends and family. He, in contrast, had nothing to give. As Delano walked the streets, he was “alive to every symptom” of “affected pity” and “scanty sympathy.” When he ran into acquaintances, he feigned good cheer. But his “downcast eye and wounded mind” were turned away from the indifferent world. “The heart must feel its losses.”
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Amasa went back to work at his father’s shipyard, determined to recover from his defeat. He began building his own vessel, finding a few investors in Boston so he could buy the best material. He worked methodically, being careful to choose the right wood for each part of the ship. Delano used hard white oak and hackmatack, or larch, which was brought into Duxbury’s shipyards on oxcarts and cut into thick wide and long boards. Once they were seasoned, he estimated they would stay strong and staunch for thirty years. Pine was used for the masts and thrice-tarred spruce for the spars. Delano planed yellow pine for deck planks and beams and sheathed the ship in the best copper he could find.

“There should never be a doubt as to the fitness of a ship” for a long voyage. Rather than rely on “luck,” since luck “partakes of the miraculous,” one should take care to prepare for any “hazard, without an
if
or a
but
remaining.” The vessel had two good chain pumps on the lower deck, front and aft of the mainmast, made of hard pine and iron.
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