The Empire of Necessity (14 page)

Delano sat for the portrait when he was about fifty years old. It is a full-frontal bust image done in stipple engraving, where the contours of his face are created by thousands of black dots pressed on a white page. All its shading and texture come from contrasting black to white. The denser the dots, the brighter Delano’s cetacean whiteness. Melville was fascinated by this kind of black and white interplay, the way that blackness defines whiteness. He used the imagery of a dark backgrounded portrait or a lighted sphere “shrouded in blackness” as a symbol of sublime terror—the feeling a person gets when contemplating his or her smallness in relation to the “ghostly mystery of infinitude.”
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He didn’t, though, assign a simple color code to morality, where black meant bad and white meant good. That he didn’t is clear in one of
Moby-Dick
’s most famous chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which has the book’s narrator, Ishmael, offering an extended meditation on what it is about the color white, despite its association with things “sweet, and honorable, and sublime,” that strikes “panic to the soul.”
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To write the chapter, Melville read, among other things, Edmund Burke’s
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), which argues that there is something inherent in blackness that causes a shared repulsion in “all mankind.” Darkness doesn’t just conceal potential dangers, Burke writes, but causes a “very perceivable pain”: as light dims, pupils dilate, irises recede, and nerves strain, convulse, and spasm. To prove his point that darkness is “terrible in its own nature,” Burke gives the example of a young, presumably white, boy born blind who, after having his vision restored at the age of thirteen or fourteen, “accidentally” sees “a negro woman” and is “struck with great horror.” People can become accustomed to “black objects,” and once they do, the “terror abates.” But “black will always have something melancholy in it.”
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Melville says the same about the color white. The thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains calls forth “soft, dewy, distant dreaminess.” Yet just a “bare mention” of New Hampshire’s White Mountains causes a “gigantic ghostliness” to pass “over the soul.” The Yellow Sea merely “lulls us,” while the White Sea casts “spectralness over the fancy.” Melville doesn’t say that he believes the origin of this fear is to be found in slavery, yet he does have Ishmael mention in passing that the association of whiteness with goodness allows the “white man” to gain “mastership over every dusky tribe.”

He never really explains where the power of whiteness comes from. Maybe it is a matter of contrast. The polar bear’s whiteness, for instance, drapes its “irresponsible ferociousness” with a “fleece of celestial innocence and love,” uniting “opposite emotions in our minds.” “Were it not for the whiteness,” Melville writes, “you would not have that intensified terror.” Or it could be that since white isn’t “so much a color as the visible absence of color,” it reminds man that other, more pleasing hues are “subtile deceits” covering up the “charnel-house within.”

PART III

THE NEW EXTREME

There is boundless theft …

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,

That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen

From general excrement; each thing’s a thief;

The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power

Have unchecked theft.

—A PASSAGE MARKED BY HERMAN MELVILLE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
TIMON OF ATHENS

9

THE SKIN TRADE

On April 19, 1804, in Buenos Aires, Juan Nonell, a twenty-year-old Catalan recently arrived in the Americas, sold sixty-four Africans to Alejandro de Aranda, a merchant from the inland Argentine province of Mendoza. Among the slaves were a man named Babo and his son Mori.

The sale could have taken place in any of the many fetid human pens that dotted the city. Earlier, most slave transactions occurred in a few centralized locations, including in El Retiro, a large open-air compound built by the British when they had the slave trade monopoly with Spain, or in an auction house along the waterfront. But with the advent of free trade, the auction house was converted into the city’s customs building, while Retiro gave way to smaller corrals that had sprouted throughout the city center and near the wharves. Officials constantly complained of merchants who made no effort to keep up these enclosures or provide care for people “full of lice, skin diseases, and scurvy, and exuding from their body a foul and pestilential odor.” Those Africans who didn’t attract a buyer were simply “liberated,” turned out into the streets with no clothes, no Spanish, and no way of surviving. Nearly all died quickly following such midnight emancipations. Slavers wouldn’t even bury the bodies; instead, they’d have the corpses “dragged through the street” and “thrown in city ravines.”
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Aranda paid Nonell 13,000 pesos for the sixty-four Africans, a third in silver and a promissory note for the balance, which he committed to pay within a year after he had returned from Lima. Nonell had acquired the slaves in the lot from various sources. Some were the captives pulled off the
Neptune
and
Santa Eulalia
by royal officials, purchased by Nonell at public auction. The Catalan did most of his business with U.S. slave ships that worked the western bulge of Africa, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. In the months prior to the sale, Nonell had imported 188 Africans into Buenos Aires, including seventy-one that came in on the
Louisiana
and another ninety on the
Susan
, both U.S. brigs that embarked their cargo at the Gambia River. Of the fifteen
Tryal
rebel names that we do have, Samba is typical among the Fulani, as is Leobe, though it is also found among the Wolof. Atufal might have been the slavers’ compression of a first and last name—Fall is a common surname in Senegal. Alasan was a popular West African Muslim name. They all referred to West African peoples who could have been seized anywhere in Senegambia.
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The slaves purchased by Aranda probably hadn’t been branded. In 1784, Spain had dropped the requirement that a royal mark be seared into slaves’ skin as a receipt to prove that they had been imported legally and that the branding tax,
el derecho de marco
, had been paid (though some U.S., French, and British ships continued using the brand as a way of distinguishing their lots). They weren’t named in the promissory note he received from Aranda. When Spaniards referred to slaves as merchandise or cargo they generally used the word
piezas
(pieces or units). When Africans were huddled together in pens they were usually referred to simply as
la negrada
(the black mass) or
la esclavitud
—which roughly translates as a combination of servitude and slavery but was often applied collectively to the people subject to that condition, reducing them to that condition, as “in the
esclavitud
was fed” or “the
esclavitud
was disembarked.” In Nonell’s case, the import documentation just referred to the humans he was buying and selling as
negros
and
negros bozales—
that is, “raw” blacks, straight from Africa.
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It’s not that Spain didn’t encourage record keeping and paperwork. On the contrary, the Spanish empire floated on ink. To a far greater degree than any of their imperial rivals, Spaniards were obsessed with legalisms. Spain sent not just warriors, priests, and would-be aristocrats across the Atlantic but a legion of scriveners and notaries to create one of the most comprehensive bureaucratic edifices in world history. Content mattered. Spanish theologians debated for centuries the moral and religious justifications of conquest and slavery. They revived Roman law. They reread Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. And they reinterpreted Scripture.

Forms, elaborate forms, mattered as well. Royal decrees, commercial transactions, tax and tariff records, legal inquiries and testimonies were copied again and again and deposited in archives throughout Spain’s dominion. The copying might be rushed, done in illegible handwriting. Or it could be ornate, adorned with elaborate flourishes left over from when Arabs ruled the Iberian Peninsula, and filled with phrases so oft repeated they had become meaningless. Sales receipts frequently said a given slave was “subject to servitude” or “taken in a just war and not in peace.” It was legalese from an earlier time, when Catholic theologians were consciously arguing that the enslavement of Africans was legitimate since they were prisoners of a war deemed to be just. By the late eighteenth century the expression was used by rote, applied not only to slaves captured in the field but to those who had been in America for generations.
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Another term, employed throughout the four centuries of Spanish American slavery, said a given slave was to be sold
como huesos en costal y alma en boca
,
“
like bones in a sack and with its soul in its mouth.” It was a vivid way of saying “as is”—what you see is what there is—providing a blanket exoneration to the seller should the goods expire after the transaction.

By the early 1800s, the descriptive power of this paperwork was overwhelmed by the giddiness created, and the fast money to be made, from trading slaves. The Crown tried to stem the vertigo. With deregulation came new rules for how to document the commerce. It was now required that each slave ship have an individual register listing the number of imported Africans and their breakdown by sex. Importers, though, were not obligated to give the names of the Africans or where they were from. Ship captains were supposed to describe their itinerary, but writing down “sailing to the coast of Africa to buy slaves” was good enough.

*   *   *

Despite his young age, Juan Nonell had already established himself as a rancher and hide trader who was taking good advantage of Spain’s liberalization of commerce to diversify his operations. In other places in the Americas, especially the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the growth of slavery mostly created single-crop-plantation societies, founded nearly exclusively on the forced, uncompensated labor of large numbers of slaves concentrated in individual enterprises. In Río de la Plata, however, “free trade of blacks” helped make a more varied commercial society. Nonell, for instance, now could use the increasing number of available slaves to pick the small scale insects that live on prickly pear cacti and then have them boil, dry, and mash the bugs into a red dye called cochineal, popular in those revolutionary years in Buenos Aires’ local textile industry. Mostly, though, he bought and sold Africans wholesale to support his ranching and shipping operations. He expanded slowly, investing the profits in his business. Soon Nonell was sending twenty thousand hides to Liverpool at a time, selling them for eight to ten cents apiece.
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He had become a successful player in Buenos Aires’s skin trade. Spaniards in Buenos Aires had been exchanging the skins of cows, oxen, and bulls for slaves for nearly two centuries. Holds that had just been filled with humans were packed with dried hides laid flat one on top of the other until they reached close to the beam of the top deck. The pile would be covered with brine and then laid over with canvas to prevent damage from leaks. Since the weight of hides was relatively light, they didn’t provide sufficient ballast, so casks of boiled-down fat—tallow—were also packed to deliver draft and steady the vessel. Through the eighteenth century, one healthy, male slave fetched 100 hides, worth 200 pesos, and if a given ship wasn’t big enough to carry an equal exchange, the difference would be paid in contraband gold and silver.
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Pampas leather was valued in Europe; softened and scented, it sold well in Paris and London. Using a method learned from Arab artisans, craftsmen soaked the hides in limewater, scraped off the epidermis and hair, then pickled and tanned them with oak and sumac bark into tawny book covers, altar mantels, mural hangings, church vestments, casket linings, and cloaks, boots, and gloves perfumed with orange and jasmine.

It was a slow, steady trade. But starting in the late 1700s, with Spain’s deregulation of commerce, the industry exploded—not just for hides but for everything related to flesh and skin. For over a century, gauchos, or cowboys, and ranchers had left most of the carcasses of the animals they skinned to rot. There wasn’t a large enough local market for the meat, only a small part of which was preserved by salting, smoking, or sun drying. But once Spain granted permission to merchants and ranchers to sail directly to Brazil and the Caribbean and sell salted beef and horsemeat as food for plantation slaves, teamsters set off for the salt flats in the foothills of the Andes and brigs sailed down the coast to Patagonia, bringing back load after load of salt. Flesh was cured by the ton and then exported to points north. At the same time, the increase in the number of slaves arriving in Río de la Plata provided ranches and slaughterhouses the labor to keep this growth going.

The drying of skins had once been crude and cheap, performed in the open pampas or on ranches where the cattle were slaughtered. The expansion of slavery concentrated and intensified the manufacturing process. Most of this at first took place on the Montevideo side of the Río de la Plata. But starting in the early 1800s, travelers coming into and out of Buenos Aires would have noticed gradual changes along the roadside. There would be one more slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city, one more
saladero
, or salting plant, on the banks of the river. This was the birth of Argentina’s modern meatpacking industry, which would drive the country to the heights of the world economy in the early twentieth century. And it was all made possible by slave labor and the slave trade.
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