The Empire of Necessity (17 page)

In his inquiry into the beautiful and the sublime, Edmund Burke wrote that a large tract of land, like an open level plain, provokes nothing like the fear “as the ocean itself.” The voyage across the Atlantic was undoubtedly more terrifying to the West Africans than the trip across South America. Burke, though, also recognized boredom as its own terror. “Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder,” he wrote, “is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body.” The coerced kind of boredom that Babo, Mori, and the others suffered must have been especially so. It stole, along with their freedom, another thing that made them human: the experience of time as the ordering of purposeful activity. Hour after hour they looked out from their carts and watched something that seemed like their world pass by, with slightly different smells and subtly different colors.
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Two-thirds through their journey, after the caravan crossed a major river, the Quinto, they came upon an even more desolate stretch of land called
la travesía
, the crossing, a phrase also used by Spanish slave traders to refer to the Middle Passage. The stony road gave way to sand, and they went long periods seeing not a tree or a drop of water, not a variation in the topography, only the occasional ox or mule skeleton lying on the side of the road. One English-speaking traveler said this part of the journey looked like nothing so much as “similar tracts in Africa.” The day would have been searing, hotter than their homes during the dry season. The austral nights were cold.

Then, even before ending
la travesía
, about the time they reached yet another river—“as broad as the Thames at Windsor,” thought an English traveler—they’d have caught their first glimpse of the Andes.

The Andes are the longest mountain chain in the world. What makes them stunning, however, is that they are the thinnest. The Himalayas are wide and sprawling, with long, slow ascents of hundreds of miles that gradually raise the traveler up and dilute the view, so much so that some of their highest peaks give the impressions of hillocks. In contrast, only a short distance separates Andean crown from foot, making them appear like a great wall running the length of South America. The effect is especially striking if the Andes are approached from the pampas. The haze that occasionally hangs over the far horizon blocks the view but also heightens the impact, drawing one’s eye to snow-covered summits that seem to float in the sky like “stationary white pillars of clouds.” As Babo, Mori, and their companions moved closer, the full “view of this stupendous barrier” would become clearer. They were still days away, yet they would have had to lift their “necks back to look up” at the mountains.

Just beyond
la travesía
was Mendoza, Aranda’s hometown, with its poplar-lined roads, fenced farms, vineyards, and orchids. Having crossed the pampas before the summer rains came, the West Africans now had to wait until the winter’s mountain snows melted before moving on. By early December they were on the move again, on a straight road west heading toward the Andes.

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DIAMONDS ON THE SOLES OF THEIR FEET

Enslaved peoples had been traveling along, and dying on, this road for centuries, ever since the Spaniards arrived in the area in the 1540s. When Pedro de Valdivia led an expedition down from Peru to claim the territory today known as Chile, he named the city he founded Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura. Santiago was the patron saint of Spain, also known as Santiago Matamoros, or the Moor Killer, for having intervened in an early battle to drive Islam off the Iberian Peninsula. And Extremadura was the name of the Spanish province where Valdivia was born. Sometimes, though, the Spaniards simply called this far edge of empire, wedged between the Andes and the Pacific, La Nueva Extrema, the New Extreme.

Africans died on one of the first Spanish attempts to find a way over the Andes, in 1551, during Francisco de Villagrán’s disastrous trek. Villagrán only made it across with the help of Native Americans, wrote a Spanish chronicler, and along the way he lost “two slaves and two horses” to the ice and cold. In 1561, Mendoza was established as an outpost of Santiago, and soon Spaniards were passing back and forth regularly over the mountains. The going was still treacherous. Even during the summer months, when the passes were open, travelers moved slowly along narrow paths, tethered together by guide ropes for support. Native Americans would fly by them. They “traveled liberally, without these ropes,” wrote one Spaniard, “as if they had diamonds on the soles of their feet.”
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The valleys that spread out from both sides of the mountains enjoyed a mild climate, leading settlers to think they could re-create the great feudal estates of Europe in the Americas. Workers, though, were needed to plant wheat, grow grapes, and raise cattle. And before Africans started arriving in great numbers, the colonists tried to turn Indians into slaves. The Mapuche, or
araucanos
, on the Pacific side of the Andes were difficult to subdue, so the Spaniards turned to the Huarpes, who lived in small villages in the region north of Mendoza. Most of the demand for labor came from Santiago, which sent raiding parties over the mountains. It was the Huarpes who had saved the Spaniards from certain death when they first tried to cross the mountains, teaching them the best trails.

Now they found themselves dragged in irons over those very trails. Many froze to death. “When I crossed the cordillera,” Santiago’s archbishop wrote to King Philip II in 1601, “I saw with my own eyes the frozen bodies of Indians.” Twenty years later, his successor wrote that he had witnessed “things that made my heart cry tears.” Indians were brought over the Andes in chains and collars, and when one collapsed or died, it was easier to cut off his hands or his head rather than break the iron. The weakest were left alive to freeze to death, some of them crawling into caves to find shelter. Many tried to commit suicide by using their iron collars to choke themselves. Enslaved Indians arrived in Chile “thirsty and hungry, treated worse than the barbarians and gentiles treated the Christians of the primitive church.” The Huarpes soon disappeared as a distinct people.
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In 1601, the same year Santiago’s archbishop wrote Spain about the treatment of Native Americans, the first large consignment of Africans made the crossing. Ninety-one “Guinea Angolans” were shipped from Brazil via Buenos Aires to Santiago, with Mendoza as a transit point. They were on their way to be sold in Lima. From this point forward, the overland slave trade steadily increased, though the Crown tried at first to route all slaves into Peru through Panama. As part of the general system of mercantile restrictions, only a small number of merchants were allowed to ship slaves overland from Río de la Plata.
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But slave smuggling, especially of small groups of two or three Africans, was rampant. By the early 1600s, royal officials were complaining that there was nothing they could do to stop it. “Every year,” one wrote the king in 1639, “many unregistered blacks cross the Andes into Chile from the port of Buenos Aires.” If they were caught, merchants simply said that the slaves they were bringing over the mountains to sell in Santiago were their personal servants. In 1762, a slaver named José Matus, in order to gain the cooperation of his two slaves during the trek, told them that a land of freedom existed on the other side of the Andes and that once over they would be emancipated. When they arrived in Santiago, Matus sold them.
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No record exists of the details of the West Africans’ trip across the Andes, what Aranda’s slaves thought or felt as they began the ascent. If it weren’t for what came next, after they arrived at Valparaiso and boarded the
Tryal
, their journey would have slipped into history unnoticed.

The first leg of the trip, the road out of Mendoza, is dead flat and wide open, like most of the rest of the pampas. It enters the foothills through a deep valley, turning into a path that winds between two high ridges. At that point, the mules, teamsters, travelers, and about 170 Africans (Aranda had combined his shipment with those of other slavers) would have moved in a single line. After just a few turns on the switchback trail, the open pampas would have disappeared behind them. Officials had built some rudimentary bridges, and, after postmen caught in a storm were forced to burn the mail to stay alive, a few limestone-and-brick shelters to protect travelers. Otherwise, the road had changed little from when those first two Africans died on it in 1551.
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The voyagers went on foot, linked together with neck chokers made of either iron or tightly woven hemp. It was steep going, with no vegetation to bind the loose and slippery soil. The path zigzagged north by northwest along deep ravines and through gaps as narrow as eighteen inches. For much of the way up, a river of rushing snow melt followed the trail on one side, and overhanging rocks on the other. Small wooden crosses marked the places where someone had lost his footing and tumbled into the ravine. At this point, slavers took the time to remove the neck collars, afraid that if one slave decided to commit suicide they would lose the whole procession to the abyss.

Born and raised somewhere along the warm flatlands of West Africa, Aranda’s slaves had spent most of their lives in terrain where mangrove swamps and savannas gently rise into foothills. Some of them might have been from one of West Africa’s highland regions, such as Fouta Djallon, made up of sandstone plateaus out of which flow the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal Rivers, as well as some of the tributaries that feed into the Niger. On average, Fouta Djallon stands at about 3,000 feet above sea level, with its tallest point not much more than that. Now, though, the voyagers were climbing up a steep path that passed under the two tallest mountains in America. Mount Aconcagua, at 23,000 feet, is “startling in its magnitude,” wrote one nineteenth-century traveler, “overwhelming in its solitude and isolation.” Behind that, the slightly smaller yet more imposing Mount Tupungato, its vertical face scoured “crude and naked” by a never-ending “fury of wind,” looked like a rock avalanche suspended in motion that at any moment might resume its fall. The whole scene, another traveler observed of the approach to the two peaks, offered an “immense, inanimate but magnificent view of desolation.”
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Everywhere the climbers looked, they would have seen giant overhanging precipices and signs of violent earthquakes, landslides, and avalanches. Turn one way, and there was “nothing but broken, sterile mountains covered with ice.” Turn another, and there was an even “more horrible view” of “even blacker mountains, covered with even more ice.” After three days of climbing, the procession came to the Puente de Inca, a narrow, icy natural rock bridge that spanned a deep gorge. It was here that, nearly three centuries earlier, an observer had commented that Native Americans must have “diamonds on the soles of their feet,” as he watched them glide across. It sounds like an attribution of grace but perhaps merely meant that their feet were rough and hard and had traction. In any case, the bridge terrified the Spaniards. “Only the man who has made his confessions” should venture across it, said yet another traveler.
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The higher the group went and the colder it became, the more intense the disorientation. After about three days, it would have reached the trail’s high point, around the spot where Charles Darwin, traveling along this road decades later, would notice what he called the “perfect transparency of the air” and “increased brilliancy of the moon and stars.” Like Ocampo commenting that the pampas offered “no middle ground,” Darwin said it was hard to gauge perspective and to judge “heights and distance.” Not, as in the case of the flatlands, because of the boundlessness of the view but because the air contained no moisture that might refract light. Darwin described the effect as bringing “all objects … nearly into one plane, as in a drawing or panorama.” The air was so dry that the naturalist’s wooden instruments shrank noticeably and his bread petrified. Static electricity flashed from nearly everything. When Darwin rubbed his flannel waistcoat in the dark, it “appeared as if it had been washed with phosphorus.” The hair on a dog’s back “crackled” and his linen sheets “emitted sparks.”
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All this strangeness must have increased the disorientation Babo, Mori, and the others felt, of moving through a physical world that seemed not of this world. Altitude sickness would have added to their exhaustion. Africans forced along this road suffered horribly from the penetrating cold, and, like the Huape slaves before them, were often found “frozen in place.” Those who hadn’t completely succumbed were whipped to get them moving again. The sweat they built up (despite the cold) on their daylong marches froze on their skin and made the night that much more horrible. Extreme fatigue weakened resistance. The year before, in 1803, smallpox had struck a group of about a hundred Africans as they were making the crossing, killing two. The rest arrived in Valparaiso “full of scabs.” At least four Africans who left Mendoza around the time Babo and the others started out didn’t make it across. There are stories today that still circulate among the region’s surviving Native Americans, handed down by their ancestors, of coming upon the frozen bodies of Africans, their heads or arms cut off so that their handlers didn’t have to waste time breaking their chains or cutting and then retying the hemp. A Frenchman who witnessed Africans being brought along this route a few years after Aranda’s slaves made the climb said he wished that his “prideful” countrymen could be forced to “travel through such a forsaken, steep, and ice-covered place, so that they would understand suffering.”
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