The Empire of Necessity (18 page)

The experience, he said, would strip them of their “pride and soften their hearts.”

*   *   *

One of the things that must have seemed familiar yet different to Babo, Mori, and their fellow captives would have been the progression of the Southern Hemisphere moon. Lunar phases are the same on both sides of the equator, yet they move in opposite directions. In the Northern Hemisphere, where all the Africans brought by Aranda were from, the bright part of the moon grows bigger from right to left. Then, halfway through the cycle following the full moon, the dark part grows larger from the same direction. But Buenos Aires, Mendoza, and Valparaiso are located well below the equator, where the moon waxes and wanes from the left.

It had to have seemed strange, this inverted moon, made brilliant by the high, dry Andean air. It was yet another sign of not just their world but heaven turned upside down. But since the new moon and the full moon are the same on either side of the equator, the West Africans had been able to mark the passing of lunar months on their more than yearlong journey from the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, then over the American continent to the foothills of the Andes.

And from what happened next, it appears they knew that December 3, 1804, about a week before they started up the mountains, was the first full day of Ramadan. And that December 27, a week after they boarded the
Tryal
bound for Lima, was the eve of the holiest day of that holy month: Laylat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power.

INTERLUDE

Heaven’s Sense

In
Moby-Dick
, out of all the
Pequod
’s many hands, Herman Melville chose to give Pip, a young African American cabin boy, the ability to truly see, a gift that comes to him after he nearly drowns in the Pacific.

Pip has already jumped out of the whaleboat on that “beautiful, bounteous, blue day,” frightened by a rap a harpooned whale gives to the boat’s bottom with its tail. The whale has to be lost so that Pip can be saved, a trade that earns him a rebuke from Stubb, the
Pequod
’s second mate. “Stick to the boat,” Stubb says. “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.”

But Pip is soon in the water again. True to his word, Stubb leaves him to drift while he chases another whale. The young boy is absolutely alone. “Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves,” the “ringed horizon” expanding “around him miserably.” “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”

Pip is finally rescued, but before he is pulled from the sea he has a vision. He sees the totality of the world, its origins and inner workings, in a single moment:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
¹

Pip is not the only one on the
Pequod
given a glimpse into the absolute. Ishmael, standing among a pile of whale bones, is also “borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.” But the vision doesn’t disturb Ishmael the way it does Pip. The two characters are about as distant from each other in social status as possible. Ishmael makes it clear that his decision to sign on the
Pequod
is entirely his own. He does say his purse is light. But the main reason he joins the voyage is because he is bored by and alienated from the artificiality of modern city living. Ishmael hopes going to sea will be a bracing experience, or at least provide entertainment to distract him from his ennui. And he makes clear that he could have joined as an officer rather than as a common sailor, but preferred not to. “Who aint a slave? Tell me that,” he says to explain his decision.

It is a curious question coming from Ishmael, who is about as free a man as one can imagine. White, educated, mobile, and a man, he has, as far as we know, no family and no debt. Yet he thinks his own condition can be generalized—and in antebellum America, no less—to all humanity. And so, standing amid the whale bones, Ishmael sees infinity but isn’t troubled. He still thinks that he is the subject of history, that “time began with man.”

Pip, though, comes out of the sea seemingly made mad by God’s indifference, and his madness is Melville’s. Melville had read the geologists, naturalists, and other scientists of his day, including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and immediately grasped the frightening potential of their arguments: that existence had no meaning, that the earth was so old, that time itself was so incomprehensible, that it rendered belief and faith in man’s centrality in the order of the universe impossible.

Over the last decades, literary scholars have scoured Melville’s writings for political meaning. Some have found the influence of a racist, expansionist culture. Others see a generous humanism, reading works like
Moby-Dick
and
Benito Cereno
as sophisticated indictments of “American values and institutions,” of slavery, empire, alienating individualism, and white supremacy. There are, though, many Melvilleans who resist turning the author into a scolding social critic. Melville could, they admit, write in sly and cutting ways about his country’s shortcomings, but he was too much of a metaphysician, and too much of an agnostic concerning his metaphysics, to turn his criticism into a political program. Melville would later pay close attention to the Civil War. There is no evidence, though, that in the 1850s he was especially concerned about the plight of actual existing slaves in the South. After the disappointment of
Moby-Dick,
he became preoccupied with philosophy, with larger questions of ethics, withdrawn into himself to the point that he broke down. His disquiets were at once psychic and cosmic but not, apparently, primarily political.
²

Yet it is exactly Melville’s existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity. Melville wrestled with whether life had meaning, and if it had, whether its meaning was rooted in radical individualism, in human interconnectivity, or in larger moral structures; he grappled with the despair of losing one’s self in a godless cosmos, with the conflict between notions of free will and predestination and thus between belief and disbelief, with the idea that the physical world was a mirage, that one needed to punch through the pasteboard mask of surface things and grasp the underlying reality. Slavery, in a way, was the concrete manifestation of such metaphysical terrors, for it represented the same threat to real individuals as the possibility of a meaningless universe posed to the idea of the individual: obliteration.

And so it is Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” told just before his near death that his labor is worth less than the energy produced by an animal’s oil, whose free will consists entirely of choosing between life on board a whale ship and life on an Alabama slave plantation (if he even had that choice; the terms of Pip’s service are not revealed), whom Melville has fully realize the implication of infinity: that man’s existence itself is insignificant. And it is Pip to whom Melville gives the power to see. What the rest of the crew thinks is babble is really an expression of his ability to take in everything all at once from every perspective; Melville has him going about the deck chanting a visionary conjugation: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

Melville read Darwin’s account of the voyage of HMS
Beagle
, most likely during his own sea travels in the early 1840s, when he visited many of the same shores and islands Darwin had less than a decade earlier. And Pip’s vision might have been inspired by one of its most dramatic passages.

There is a section where Darwin, during his trek over the Andes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, comes across a grove of calcified trees standing white and straight “like Lot’s wife.” He looks back behind him toward the pampas and realizes he is standing in what had once been a sea, a vast tectonic elevator that had been lifted up, brought down, and then raised up again. Darwin unfolds a quarter-billion-year history in a single burst:

I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now driven back 700 miles) came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out. The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now beheld the bed of that ocean forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height.

Having dived, like Pip, down to the ocean’s bottom, Darwin soars up over the Andes. Gazing east at what millennia ago was a “green and budding” valley but is now the desert pampas, he pronounces that “all is utterly irreclaimable.”
³

Darwin didn’t know it, but the mountain pass where he had this vision was the old slave road connecting Argentina to Chile. The naturalist was moving along exactly the same route that, three decades earlier, Babo, his son Mori, and their other captured West African companions had traveled, past the exact same grove of white stone trees.

PART IV

FURTHER

Sealer, Slaver & Pirate are all of a trade.

—CHARLES DARWIN,
BEAGLE
DIARY, MARCH 24, 1833

13

KILLING SEALS

The
Perseverance
left Boston on November 10, 1799, captained by Amasa Delano, with his brother Samuel as first officer. The currents were contrary and the weather unhelpful. Constant rains and hot, sultry air were followed, after the ship passed the 12th parallel north, by a maddening calm that mildewed the ship’s sails and covered everything on board with a “blue mould.” Then, rounding Cape Horn, the brothers hit a “violent head sea” that rolled into them like a “mountain,” tossing their ship into the “foul” shallows, where it wandered in the night fog.

But by early 1800 they had made it into the calm blue Pacific, to the many islands that dotted Chile’s southern coast, ready to enter on the upside of one of the most dramatic boom and busts in economic history.

With increasing frequency starting in the early 1790s, and then in a mad rush beginning in 1798, ships left New Haven, Norwich, Stonington, New London, or Boston, calling first on the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal to pick up a load of salt and then cutting southeast to the great half-moon sealing archipelago of remote islands running from Argentina in the Atlantic to Chile in the Pacific. They’d be on the hunt for a certain species of Pacific fur seal, the kind that wears a layer of velvety down like an undergarment just below an outer coat of stiff gray-black hair. Some of the skins would be brought to Europe, where furriers had recently perfected a technique for peeling the fur intact off the hair, turning the skins into capes, coats, muffs, and mittens for ladies and belts, sashes, wallets, and waistcoats for gentlemen. Most would go to Canton and be traded for silk, tea, and ceramics.
¹

Along with whalers, sealers like Amasa and Samuel were part of a first generation of republicans who, with the Alleghenies not yet completely breached, saw America’s frontier as lying not to the west but to the south, past Brazil and Argentina, around Cape Horn, bringing New Englanders deep into the Pacific, to the Hawaiian Islands and beyond, to Japan and China. Whaling, though, took place in the bountiful, unclaimable sea. Whalers might fight over whether any given fish was fast or loose, but they hunted in a watery commons open to all. Sealing, in contrast, happened on land, and it was through the spectacularly rapid growth of the industry that New Englanders took their first informal possession of island colonies—one sailor indeed described his ship as a “floating metropolis,” moving from one island to another, leaving behind “little colonies” of skinners to stake their ground.
²

Bostoneses—
as the Chileans called New England mariners—brought with them the ideas and institutions of the American Revolution, of rule and revolt. There among the coves, gulches, and beaches of islands hundreds of miles off the coast of Chile and many thousands of miles from the United States, a strange order took shape. Seal ship captains planted the stars and stripes and on the Fourth of July celebrated the independence of the thirteen colonies by setting ablaze thirteen coils of oil-soaked rope. They presided over makeshift courts of law that settled disputes related to property and debt. They even had their own secular sacred texts: if no Bible was available, witnesses swore on the collected plays of William Shakespeare, found in the libraries of most ships.
³