The Empire of Necessity (31 page)

Three decades earlier, when the
Perseverance
arrived in the harbor with the
Tryal
following, it was Spain’s political authority that was fast shifting. The great edifice of Catholic monarchism that for centuries had ruled over a sprawling world empire was crumbling. In just a few years’ time, Chile’s revolutionary war for independence would be under way. Delano didn’t know it, but the official who would receive him and rule on the fate of the West Africans—Concepción’s royal advocate, Juan Martínez de Rozas—was even then imagining an America without Spain.

Rozas was a plotter and a freethinker, later accused by Crown officials of being something worse: an admirer of Napoleon. The jurist was considered one of the best legal minds in the Spanish colonies. It is now known that, by the time the
Tryal
’s rebel leaders were delivered to Talcahuano’s port authorities, he was meeting secretly with a small circle of younger students to discuss republican ideas related to self-government. Even as Rozas and his young Voltaire- and Rousseau-reading disciples were conspiring against authority in the New World (one royalist around this time denounced Rousseau’s
Social Contract
as the “Anarchist’s Qur’an”), and just a few years before Rozas would begin to gather arms and build a revolutionary army to fight for freedom, he was sitting in judgment of the West Africans for acting on much the same principle on the
Tryal
.
³

Whatever philosophical problem the case of the
Tryal
might have presented to Rozas, it was for him also personal. His father was among Mendoza’s largest slaveholders, and Rozas, born and raised in the Argentine city’s close-knit, cousin-marrying community of Spaniards, grew up in a home just a few houses away from his childhood acquaintance, the executed slaver Alejandro de Aranda.
⁴

Rozas first deposed the two captains, listening to Cerreño’s grizzly description of Aranda’s murder and Delano’s account of how he saved the
Tryal
and its few surviving crew. When he was finished, he sent a priest to interrogate the slaves, who were being kept in a small holding cell in Talcahuano.

*   *   *

Most of the West Africans—the women, children, infants, older men, and young boys—remained on the
Tryal
. Only those surviving leaders of the rebellion had been taken ashore: Mori, Matunqui, Alasan, Yan, Yola, Luis (identified as one of the West Africans, despite a Spanish-sounding name; he perhaps is the same rebel listed elsewhere as Liché), Malpenda, and Samba, or Yambaio, along with the ship’s African caulker, Joaquín, and Aranda’s servants, José and Francisco.

The priest didn’t “speak their language” so he “got no information” from the prisoners. He either didn’t think of using Mori as an interpreter or Mori wasn’t cooperating. The cleric talked more easily with the “three Christians”—Joaquín, José, and Francisco—who defended themselves by saying that they “fought against the Spaniards to win their freedom and return to their country.” Unable to do much more, the priest finished his visit by performing the rite of confession on all eleven in Latin.

The captives were provided a public advocate, called the
defensor de los negros
, who argued their case to Rozas. The specifics of his defense are not included in the written summation of the trial. The scribe who recorded the proceedings didn’t even bother to mention the advocate’s name. The brief description of his defense suggests, however, that he had taken the three most insurgent principles of New World republicanism and tried to extend them to the West Africans: individuals are free, they have a right to revolt against any regime that takes away their freedom, and all men deserve equality before the law.

Even more radically, the
defensor
used a concrete example to flesh out these abstract ideas, comparing their revolt to a recent episode where Spanish prisoners of war murdered their British jailors and escaped: “The West Africans committed their crime with the intent of winning their liberty and returning to their country, having taken advantage of the negligence of the Spaniards to escape their servitude. Not too long ago, Spanish prisoners did the same … and they were called heroes. There is absolutely no difference between that action and this one.”

This summary of the lawyer’s argument runs, in its original Spanish, to eighty words. Thirty-five years later, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams would take 135 pages to defend the African rebels on the
Amistad
. Yet both attorneys based their cases on essentially the same terms: the right of individuals to revolt in defense of their liberty was absolute and universal.

*   *   *

Rozas was unconvinced. Setting aside whatever personal feelings the judge might have had toward the West Africans who murdered Aranda, he had little sympathy for the argument made by their advocate.

Rozas read Roman law for “moral lessons” and smuggled in French books for political philosophy; France was for lettered Spanish Americans like Rozas what Haiti was for slaves like Mori: a chance to think about alternatives. He was also in regular touch with sailors from New England with news of the American Revolution. William Moulton, the Thomas Paine of the
Onico
, wrote in his diary of conversing while on shore in Talcahuano with a “learned man” well versed in “sacred and profane history.” He was probably describing Rozas, who he said assured him that “the fire of liberty was enkindling thro’ all of the Spanish South America.”
⁵

Yet Rozas’s republicanism had less to do with the inviolability of individual natural rights than with establishing a unified realm of rational public authority that would sweep away all the shadowy spheres of power that existed under Spanish colonialism, such as the privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Later, Rozas would support the abolition of slavery. But in 1805, slavery was still a legal and public institution, and rebellion against it was a crime against public order.

It took Rozas one week to issue his ruling. Finding sufficient evidence that the actions of the West Africans and their three allies were premeditated, the judge emphasized the brutality of their crimes. He pronounced the eleven slaves guilty of the murder of eighteen men on the day of the revolt and the execution of Alejandro de Aranda and others in the days that followed. He also ruled that their revolt was illegitimate, though he didn’t elaborate the reasons why, and that the slaves were guilty of waging unjust “war” against Delano and his men.
⁶

Rozas sentenced Mori, Matunqui, Alasan, Yola, Yan, Malpenda, Luis, Samba, and Joaquín to death.
*
He showed leniency to José and Francisco, giving them ten years of labor in the Patagonian prison colony of Valdivia, about 250 miles south of Concepción. At the end of March, the royal court in Santiago ordered the executions to proceed.
⁷

*   *   *

The nine condemned men had been transferred from Talcahuano to a jail in Concepción and a gallows built in the town square. On the morning of the day of their execution, soldiers took them out of their cell and chained them one behind the other in a single column, at the head of which was Mori. He then was tied to the tail of a mule. Residents had come out of their houses, and priests, nuns, and monks had gathered in front of churches and convents, and as the procession passed roundabout through the city’s streets, the onlookers fell in behind, ringing bells and burning incense. When the parade arrived in the plaza with its gallows, the African women and children who had remained on the
Tryal
were there waiting: Rozas had ordered that they be brought to the city to witness the execution.
⁸

Years later, a British consul in Concepción, Henry William Rouse, recounted a story he heard when he first arrived in town: just before the trapdoor sprung and Mori’s body fell through, the West African finally spoke. He damned the “cruel inhumanity of his captors, who, in the complete absence of the law steal men out of their homes.”

The corpses of the nine rebels were cut loose from the gallows and decapitated. Their heads were placed on pikes around the plaza and their bodies burned in a large pyre in its center. Concepción was then a marshy city, dotted with lagoons and swamps, including one near the main plaza where town authorities disposed of the bodies of men and women denied Christian burials. That’s where the city’s executioners scattered the ashes and bones of Mori and his companions. The swamp has long since been filled in and built over, but throughout the rest of the 1800s and into the early twentieth century, Concepción’s chroniclers would refer to the lake as the
Laguna de los Negros—
The Lagoon of the Blacks. After the ashes of the “miserable negros were thrown in the lagoon,” reported one local historian, “they were converted into
animitas
,” or spirits.
⁹

*   *   *

Things had begun to go bad between Amasa Delano and Benito Cerreño even before Mori was hanged. On that first day on dry land upon arriving at Talcahuano, in the initial statement Cerreño gave to Rozas, he had praised the generosity and skill of his friend Masa—as Spaniards tended to pronounce Delano’s first name. It was “divine providence,” he said, “that sent Masa Delano to repress the Blacks.” Soon, though, the Spaniard realized that the American intended to hold him to the promise he made when, during their brief private conversation on board the
Perseverance
, he offered to compensate Delano for putting down the rebels and returning his ship to him.

Cerreño complained to Spanish authorities that Delano’s harassment was “multiplying his past afflictions.” He was out of his mind when he made the offer, he said. What else could he have done? They had already rowed back to the
Perseverance
and Delano had readied his men for battle. The American, though, refused to give the final order to retake the
Tryal
until he knew “what part of the prize” he could expect in return. Cerreño said he begged Delano for “mercy.” He pleaded with the American to help save the “wretched” sailors who remained on the ship from the “barbarous, cruel, and bloody hands of the negro slaves.” Yet Delano refused to act until Cerreño said what he wanted to hear.

“Half the ship,” Cerreño said he cried in desperation, but he would have agreed to anything at that moment. “I just as well could have told him
all of it
, since at that moment my anguish prevented me from reasoning.”

What kind of human being, Cerreño wanted to know, would hold someone to that promise considering the circumstances? He was distraught, terrified, and hardly capable of “transacting business or negotiating percentages.” The remaining cargo wasn’t his to give away. Nor should his misfortunes force him into ruinous debt. Cerreño cited maritime law requiring that property recovered from pirates—as Cerreño considered the West Africans—be returned to its rightful owner. Delano, therefore, was obligated to help a ship in distress. Instead he took advantage of Cerreño’s vulnerability to “bargain.” Cerreño admitted he owed Delano his life. But he insisted he didn’t owe him half the value of his ship and his cargo. What the American was calling his due for services rendered was but pirate booty.

Five
Perseverance
crew members who had jumped ship at Santa María only to be taken into custody by Spanish authorities supported Cerreño’s allegations. From their jail cells in Talcahuano, they unanimously testified to Delano’s calamitous command. The
Perseverance
had been over a year out from Boston, two of them said, and had collected only seven thousand sealskins. John McCain complained that all he had to show for months at sea was a “jacket, a vest, and two pairs of pants.” Another told of Delano’s increasingly frantic captaincy, his meting out floggings for the smallest offense. “Nothing pleases him,” testified David Brown, who requested permission to stay in Chile. William Brown, “seeing that the situation was hopeless, resolved not to follow” Delano “any longer.” Peter Sanson said that “having wasted the voyage,” the
Perseverance
“would have to resort to piracy in order to cover its expenses.” This, he claimed, is why he deserted Delano.

These testimonies, Cerreño argued, proved that Delano was little better than a brigand. He asked Rozas to keep Delano away from him. Other “Anglo-Americans” frequently came into Spanish ports, seeking refuge and testing Spanish “hospitality,” he said. Delano, with his ingratiating flattery and bad attempts at humor, was something else. With him, the new United States of America had “produced a monster.”

*   *   *

By early April, Rozas had had enough of both Delano and Cerreño. In general, Rozas liked
bostoneses
. Delano, though, seemed a bit too eager to please and too desperate for praise. As to Cerreño, Rozas had a strong antipathy for most Spanish residents of Lima. Their shipowners monopolized transportation between Concepción and Peru, charging Chileans exorbitant fees to ship their wheat to Lima’s market. Moreover,
Limeños
were servile and mannered. “They were always kneeling and bowing to their viceroys,” he once wrote in a letter to a friend. “They are obsequious, groveling before the worst and flattering the inept. They are incapable of either noble or wicked deeds, which would require too much energy or strength of character.”
¹⁰

The judge had tried to negotiate an agreement between the two captains, proposing what he thought a fair compensation of three thousand pesos. Delano rejected the offer with much “heat and fire,” saying that he had already compromised and was willing to take ten thousand, considerably less than half the ship’s worth. Cerreño, he said, knew what he was doing when he promised him recompense but, now that the ship was back in his possession, was trying to renege on a fair offer. Delano argued that he could have claimed possession of all the ship’s cargo and the ship itself. Instead he made sure the vessel was “safely conducted into harbor.” And so he wanted his reward.