The Empire of Necessity (25 page)

As they approached Callao, Lima’s port town, Cerreño grew nervous that the West Africans would see the city’s lights, so he turned the ship around and headed south. He didn’t have a plan but settled on the idea of sailing past Valparaiso to the uninhabited island of Santa María, which was often used as a safe harbor by sealers and whalers. With luck, he might be able to quietly come upon another vessel. At least his ship would be able to replenish its water casks out of sight of a town.

On January 16, a few days after changing directions and about three weeks after the West Africans had taken over the ship, they decided in their morning meeting that they had to kill Alejandro de Aranda. There are other cases of slave ship rebels singling out their owners for execution. In 1786, on the Danish slaver
Christiansborg
sailing from Africa’s Gold Coast
,
insurgents dragged Paul Erdmann Isert, who was traveling as a passenger to the Caribbean, to the bow, and slashed his face with a razor, barely missing his temple artery. Isert later learned that the rebels tried to kill him because they thought that, as one of the last white people to board the ship, he was their “owner” and “that it would be best to send me into the other world first, after which the Europeans, like mercenaries, would surrender all the sooner.” In that case, the West African slaves seemed to have imagined slavery as a unified, hierarchical institution, headed by one man. Kill the leader and his slaves would be set free.
¹⁰

On the
Tryal
, the decision to execute Aranda was also calculated. Mori told Cerreño that he and the others had to kill Aranda—not for revenge or to administer justice but to secure their freedom. But it is hard to say what exactly the calculation was. Generally, in West African Islamic law, killing one’s owner was not a legitimate means for gaining freedom from slavery (we don’t know if the West Africans on board the
Christiansborg
were Muslim or not). Moreover, Babo, Mori, and their companions couldn’t have thought that simply killing Aranda would result in their freedom. Over the course of more than a year, they had been passed from one master to another, one driver to another, and they would have seen that American slavery was extremely decentralized, entailing many different venues—ships, wagons, holding pens—run by a varied cast of captains, sailors, teamsters, and jailers. The fact that they repeatedly warned Cerreño to avoid other ships indicates that they knew that if they were discovered and subdued they would be returned to captivity, whether Aranda was alive or not. Maybe they thought they had to kill Aranda to make sure he wouldn’t reclaim them as property in the event they did make it to Senegal or Cape Verde. Yet that wouldn’t explain the sudden sense of urgency.
¹¹

Cerreño said later that he tried to stop the execution. Mori told him they would kill all the Spaniards and
Tryal
sailors if he interfered. “
La cosa no tenía remedio
,” Mori said—literally,
the thing had no remedy
, or, more loosely,
there was no option
, or
there was no other way
.

The words come to us from Cerreño’s testimony and might only be conveying the fatalism often associated with Catholicism, heightened, in this case, by a harrowing ordeal. But Islam, too, has its fatalistic dimension. Like Christianity, it wrestles with the idea of free will, trying to understand the role that human action plays in a universe where a sovereign God determines all things.

Three weeks had passed since the revolt, restoring to the West Africans what their forced voyage across the Atlantic and America had nearly taken from them: their sense of time as the ordering of meaningful activity. For over a year, from one Ramadan to another, they had fought off their powerlessness by counting the months of the Islamic calendar, fulfilling, by sheer force of intellect and resolve, the Qur’an’s promise of deliverance, when God would intervene in history: “Therein come down the Angels.” They had risen up and seized the ship. But now the new moon of Eid had passed, and though life was hardly normal, another cycle had started.

Having taken control of their destiny, the rebels now found themselves lost in a strange sea on a meandering ship with dwindling supplies, perhaps trying to reconcile their belief that history was guided by some unknowable combination of free will and divine providence with the fear that they were drifting aimlessly, that the power to control the circumstances of their lives was again slipping out of their hands.

January nights in the South Pacific near the coast of Peru and Chile are extremely clear. The new masters of the
Tryal
would have been sailing under a firmament of stars and a low summer moon, settling on the idea that Aranda had to die immediately for them to keep the power they had so audaciously seized. As Mori told Cerreño, there was “no other way.”

*   *   *

Just after dawn, Mori ordered Matunqui and Liché to bring Aranda on deck. They entered the forecastle, where Aranda had been confined since the uprising, with their knives drawn. Aranda was asleep in his bunk. His executioners raised their weapons and brought them down into the slaver’s chest. Aranda’s clerk Lorenzo Bargas was in the adjoining berth. Opening his eyes to see black arms and slashing daggers and feeling Aranda’s warm blood spray his face, he threw himself out a porthole into the sea to drown.

Aranda was dragged on deck half dead and the women again began to sing a dirge urging the men to finish the deed. Matunqui and Liché tied Aranda’s hands behind his back and, lifting his body by his head and legs, threw him into the sea. The rebels then did the same to Aranda’s brother-in-law, Francisco Maza, and his other two clerks and, perhaps looking to save water and food, a number of sailors who were wounded during the uprising. The
Tryal
’s boatswain
,
Juan Robles, was a strong swimmer and he kept himself the longest above the waves, saying acts of contrition that could be heard on the deck of the ship as he drifted away, his last faint words begging Benito Cerreño to sponsor a mass in the name of Our Lady of Succor to save his soul.

*   *   *

When the killing ended, Mori turned to Cerreño and said, “All is done.” He then threatened to kill the rest of the prisoners if the captain continued to stall in delivering the West Africans to Senegal.

Mori repeated the threat for the next two days. On the third day, he, Babo, and Atufal approached Cerreño and proposed signing “a paper.” The West Africans had drawn up what in essence was a contract, perhaps in Arabic, whereby Cerreño would take them home and they, in exchange, would return the ship and its cargo once they reached their destination. “Even though they were raw and from Africa,” Cerreño later said, “they knew how to write in their language.” The three men signed the document, and with that, Cerreño testified, the West Africans were “satisfied and appeased.”

18

THE STORY OF THE
SAN JUAN

The odds were long that Babo, Mori, and the others would have been able to take the
Tryal
through the straits or round the treacherous Cape Horn into the Southern Ocean and across the Atlantic to Senegal. But it was not impossible. Just four years earlier, a group of Muslim slaves on a Spanish ship called the
San Juan Nepomuceno
had managed to complete a voyage nearly as audacious, carrying out perhaps the greatest escape in the history of New World slavery.

*   *   *

Built in Guayaquil, Ecuador, by free and enslaved people of color, the
San Juan
, which also sailed under the name
God’s Blessing
, was a fine display of Spanish American ship craft, displacing over a thousand tons of water and mounting thirty cannons. When it set out for Lima from Montevideo at the end of 1800, it carried ninety sailors, including its Basque captain, Anselmo Ollague, and between sixty-five and seventy slaves, mostly “Negros and Moors from Senegal” who had been brought into Montevideo on another ship. The vessel was loaded with more than a quarter of a million pesos’ worth of merchandise, including beeswax, oil, ivory combs, ribbons, glass windows, silver watches, silk handkerchiefs, cashmere wool, English sheets, floral cotton prints, bolts of muslin, “finely worked cowbells,” vials of mercury, leather shoes, silk, hats, gold chains, and silver crosses. Nearly the whole lot, including the Africans, belonged to one man, the ship’s owner, Ignacio Santiago de Rotalde, proprietor of the biggest commercial house in Lima and a member of one of the twenty richest families in Spain.
¹

The uprising took place about a week out of port, as the ship was nearing the Cape. The captain and officers were asleep in their bunks for their midday rest and the remainder of the crew members were in the fore of the ship with their guard down. The revolt was led not by one of the West Africans but by a thirty-year-old slave named Antonio, described as a determined and desperate fellow who had once worked as a ship carpenter but had run away from his master. Apparently he had been captured and was included among the other slaves to be sold.

Having come into possession of the ship’s weapons, the slaves divided into two groups, one moving on the officer’s quarters, the other advancing to the bow. Four officers were killed and the captain was fatally wounded, cut with a saber across the neck and stabbed with a knife in his side. The next day, Antonio, now in charge of the ship, transferred the dying Captain Ollague and twenty-four sailors to a small Spanish ship that the
San Juan
had come upon. Antonio then ordered the first officer, José de Riti, and the remaining crew to sail to Senegal.

Riti did what other Europeans in similar situations, including Benito Cerreño four years later, often did: he went one way but told the Africans he was going another. In this case, rather than sailing east, to Africa, Riti tried to make it northeast, to Brazil. The currents, though, in the part of the South Atlantic where the
San Juan
sailed are difficult to navigate, flowing mostly south and east—that is, away from Brazil. Riti had to both tack against the stream and conceal his true direction from Antonio and the others, probably sailing one way during the day and another at night. Unable to keep his bearings, he drifted deeper and deeper into the middle Atlantic.

Weeks turned into months. The ship had plenty of food—its holds were stocked with fifteen hundred eggs, five casks of lard, twenty-five barrels of bacon, ham, bread, wheat, beans, lentils, butter, cheese, vegetables, twenty-two quadrupeds (goats? pigs? cows?), and three hundred chickens, as well as delicacies such as figs, chocolate, dried peaches, capers, cloves, cacao, grapes, pears, and wine. But its water supply dwindled. And what was left had become contaminated. Twenty-four of the rebels died of scurvy and dysentery. That no sailors succumbed suggests that the West Africans’ immune systems had been weakened during the Middle Passage that brought them to Montevideo. Along the way, the
San Juan
crossed paths with two other ships, which the rebels scared off by firing their vessel’s cannons.

The situation deteriorated, and the ship’s caulker, an older African said to be from Senegal named Daure, began to challenge Antonio’s command. As the voyagers grew desperate, Daure became more suspicious and erratic. Fearing for his life, Riti gave up zigzagging and sailed northeast. The
San Juan
eventually came on São Nicolau, one of the windward islands of the Cape Verde archipelago, then a Portuguese colony. Riti tricked Antonio into accompanying him and a contingent of Spanish sailors to shore to find water. The ruse led to the rebel leader’s capture and the
San Juan
’s flight from the island under fire from pounding battery cannons. With Daure now in command, the ship arrived at French-run Saint-Louis, a port city near the mouth of the Senegal River, ten days later. The
San Juan
entered the harbor flying the Spanish flag and giving a customary eleven-gun salute, which was returned in welcome by a harbor cannon. Led by Daure, the rebels went ashore, delivered the ship to the island’s French governor, and claimed their liberty.
²

The fact alone that the rebels managed to reverse the Middle Passage is extraordinary. According to one study, 493 slave ship revolts took place between 1509 and 1869. The actual number is at least twice that, since many obscure uprisings, like those attempted on the
Neptune
and
Santa Eulalia
, aren’t included in the tally. The vast majority were unsuccessful. As many as six thousand Africans might have died in these 493 cases, either killed in the revolts or executed following their suppression. Others committed suicide after their bid failed, as some of the slaves on the
Neptune
tried to do. Revolts that did lead to freedom tended to take place close to the shores of either Africa or America, where rebels could run the ship aground and escape.
³

Mostly what constituted success was to capture and hold a ship for some time, establishing fleeting floating communities of free men and women until catastrophe struck, until they were recaptured or, adrift in the ocean, they ran out of food and water and slowly died. Some decided not to wait: in 1785, Africans who had taken a Dutch slaver chose death, according to one report, when it became clear they were about to be recaptured. They ignited the ship’s powder magazine, blowing it to timbers and killing between two and five hundred insurgent slaves. The
San Juan
rebels, though, had crossed the entire Atlantic, surviving a five-month journey that included at least three armed skirmishes.
⁴

They arrived at the perfect moment. For a very short time
,
January 1801 to July 1802, Saint-Louis was being run by a former French Catholic priest turned revolutionary, Aymar-Joseph-François Charbonnier, who seemed to be more committed to abolition than either his predecessor or successor. Citizen Charbonnier, apparently acting without consulting his superiors, and perhaps even against their wishes since the
San Juan
was a Spanish ship and France was allied with Spain, auctioned the ship and its merchandise, used the money to send its crew and passengers back to America, and let the rebel slaves go free. As to the ship, soon after its auction, a British corsair sailing off the island of Gorée burned it to the sea.
⁵