The Empire of Necessity (34 page)

Numbering in the thousands, these emancipated rebel soldiers, now joined by Chile’s free and freed blacks, continued to follow the route of the
Tryal
rebels. They set sail from Valparaiso bound for Lima in August 1820, part of San Martín’s expeditionary fleet that vowed to bring down the “tyrants who believed they could enslave with impunity the sons of liberty.” The flotilla first landed south of Lima. Up and down the crisscrossing valleys that connect the Pacific to the Andes, slaves fled their haciendas to join San Martín, bringing with them food, livestock, and horses pilfered from their plantations. Others simply used the chaos caused by the invasion to escape, joining neither the
patriotas
nor the
realistas
.
⁴

On November 9, 1820, San Martín sailed north of Lima, to the Bay of Huacho, at the bottom of the Huaura Valley. Shortly thereafter, his troops marched up the valley with the power to liberate any slave who joined their ranks. On December 27—exactly sixteen years to the day of the
Tryal
revolt—a rebel detachment arrived outside the gates of Humaya. Cerreño, having survived one insurrection, didn’t wait around to be caught up in another. He was gone when the soldiers entered the next day, having fled to Lima and abandoned the hacienda to his slaves.
⁵

For a while, Lima acted as if what was would always be. Rozas was right about the city’s merchants. They were servile. Even as Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, Bogotá, and Santiago, along with provincial towns like Concepción and Mendoza, were throwing in with independence, “fortress Lima,” with its surfeit of priests and lords, wealthy merchants tied to the great trading houses of Seville and Cádiz, and well-armed viceregal army, stayed true to Spain. The inhabitants of the city and its surrounding estates, wrote one observer, “went on in their usual style of splendid luxury, in thoughtless ease and security, till the enemy came and knocked at the ‘silver gates of the city of kings.’”
⁶

The knock came in July 1821. San Martín and his army entered Lima and its residents finally realized they were living in new times. “The consternation was excessive,” wrote the same witness, “the men were pacing about in fearful doubt what was to be done; the women were flying in all directions to the convents; and the narrow streets were literally choked up with wagons and mules, and mounted horsemen.” Cerreño was likely among those trying to escape the city “on foot, in carts, on horseback,… men, women, and children with horses and mules, and numbers of slaves laden with baggage and other valuables … all was outcry and confusion.” Soon, though, the streets were empty, as fear spread that the “slave population of the city meant to take advantage of the absence of troops, to rise in a body and massacre the whites.”
⁷

The lords and ladies of Lima had little to fear. San Martín, after taking Lima, did issue a number of decrees limiting the slave trade and slavery. But, still facing a strong royal army outside of the city, he hoped to win over rural landlords to his cause. He walked a fine line, emancipating slaves who joined his ranks but making clear that runaways still belonged to their owners. Fighting dragged on for years more. It wasn’t until December 1824, at the Battle of Ayacucho, that royalist forces were finally driven out.

By that point, the early radical promise of Spanish American independence, which saw the revolutionary armies marching across hacienda lands, freeing slaves by the thousands, had been contained. The legal process of abolition that started in Chile in 1811 would continue. But it did so gradually and conservatively, through measures, laws, and decrees designed to maintain the power of the region’s landed elite. Still, by 1855—ten years before the U.S. Civil War ended at Appomattox—the buying, selling, and holding of human beings as chattel was over in all of the American republics that had broken from Spain.

*   *   *

As to Benito Cerreño, he was thrown in jail for a few days on charges of aiding royalist forces shortly after he fled San Martín’s troops.
⁸
But he was soon released and, when life returned to normal, allowed to reclaim Humaya and its people, resuming an aristocratic life now accommodated to republican rule. In 1829, he suffered a hemiplegic seizure that left him paralyzed. He died in 1830. His widow, Francisca, lived until 1853. Abolition was still a year away in Peru, yet on her death she freed all of Humaya’s “large number of slaves” except one, who was left to her daughter.
⁹

Cerreño had years earlier lost the vessel previously known as the
Tryal
to his creditors.
La Dichosa
, the Lucky One, was spotted thereafter by Mayhew Folger, the Quaker captain of the
Topaz
, famous for having rescued the survivors of Bligh’s
Bounty
from Pitcairn Island. Upon returning to Nantucket in 1810, he told his friend Thomas Coffin that Coffin’s old ship was rotting away in the port of Valparaiso, “stripped, weatherbeaten, and settled in the water.”
¹⁰

26

UNDISTRIBUTED

Schools of porpoises and flocks of seabirds trailed the
Perseverance
as it approached the Cape of Good Hope in May 1807, heading back to New England from China with a hull half filled with porcelain and tea not worth close to enough to cover what Delano owed his men or to pay back his creditors. The vessel was worn down. According to its log, “all hands” were needed to keep it afloat. “The ship was very leaky,” and its men were “obliged to pump her every half an hour.” The weather turned “gloomy” after it entered the South Atlantic, with flying clouds, baffling winds, and heavy swells from the west. The Fourth of July dawned “dark and squally.” There was no liquor left on board, but the crew celebrated by dining on lobscouse, a meat stew. On Friday, July 24, “the highland of Cape Cod” came into sight. A few days later the
Perseverance
was in Boston, having ended a voyage of nearly four years, circling the globe twice and sailing over fifty thousand miles.
¹

Delano had expected something to be waiting for him on his return. “Many powerful friends” in Lima had told him, he said, that the king of Spain, Carlos IV, would personally send him an additional reward, beyond the gold he had received from Cerreño. It’s easy to imagine, as he pleaded his case in one office after another, royal bureaucrats telling him such a thing in the hope he’d move on. As it turned out, there was a gift for him in Boston, though it wasn’t what he had hoped. It was a gold medallion embossed with Carlos’s profile, along with a letter from Spain’s envoy to the United States thanking Delano on the king’s behalf for his humane and noble service. Within a few months, Carlos would be dethroned by Napoleon, ending once and for all Delano’s hope of receiving, as he put it, “something essentially to my advantage.”
²

*   *   *

Delano could have used it. America had changed while he was away. Debt had taken a more central role in the growing nation’s economy, and Delano was trapped in its grip, dragged through court and, it seems, thrown into debtors’ prison. He had owed significant amounts to various creditors even before the
Perseverance
’s first sail (including to Ezra Weston back in Duxbury). But now he was being sued by people he had never met, by creditors who had bought his debt from earlier creditors or by individuals claiming to be the executors of deceased sailors. He owed thousands of dollars to various people when most of the prisoners in the Boston Gaol were sailors serving time for demands of less than twenty. One George Riley owed about fifty dollars, and he spent six years in the jail. A blind Bostonian was put in for owing six dollars.
³

Delano continued to run the
Perseverance
for a while more, bringing dried codfish to the Caribbean, his debt, along with the pressure of having to support his family, forcing him to put aside earlier qualms about trading with slave islands. With the help of the Reverend Horace Holley, his pastor at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church, Delano was able to call on some of the city’s most prominent residents for help. A young lawyer just starting out, Lemuel Shaw, who would go on to be the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as well as Herman Melville’s father-in-law, offered his services pro bono to keep him out of jail. Delano also wrote to Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, later famous for his ruling in favor of the
Amistad
rebels, asking him to intervene on his behalf with a judge presiding over one case.
“
Pray befriend an honest man, and oblige,” he begged. Delano defaulted in most of the debt trials. He just didn’t show up in court.
⁴

Delano sold his ship in late 1810, paying off some of what he owed but not all. He took a job at the Boston Custom House and settled on Summer Street, a short walk from Boston’s India Wharf, the broke head of a household of eight, including sisters, nephews, and nieces. It was around this point that, encouraged by Reverend Holley, he began to write his memoirs. His lawyer, Shaw, drew up a contract between Delano and three men, possibly friends but maybe just more creditors, who advanced the money to have the book printed. Sold by subscription, it was meant to reverse Delano’s string of “misfortunes and embarrassments.” “It is a matter of regret,” Holley wrote in a biographical sketch included in the memoir as an appendix, that a man of Delano’s “generous and disinterested feelings, and who has made such great exertions to secure a handsome living in the world, should be thus unfortunate at this time of his life.”
⁵

Delano had high hopes for
A Narrative of Voyages and Travels
. He sent a copy to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in Washington, asking for a favorable comment that might help sell it and telling Adams that he wrote the book to add to the “great stock of knowledge already collected by Capt. Cook and others.”
*
The memoir is filled with extended descriptions of the natural world (“the serpents of Bouro are most remarkable”) and useful nautical information, such as the direction of currents, the location of underwater rocks, and which way winds normally blow as one enters this or that harbor. “The westerly head” of San Félix Island “is of a different colour from the easterly part.” “Between the red and black parts is the best place to land.” Delano takes long philosophical detours throughout, considering, for example, the underlying universality of world religions and the similarity between the Greek “system of dialectics” and Hinduism. “There is scarcely a notion,” he writes, “advanced by metaphysicans” that can’t be found in “bramincial writings.”
⁶

But as one moves through its pages,
A Narrative
reads less like an encyclopedia of world knowledge than like a long catalog of botches, fiascos, and debacles testifying to the impossibility of knowledge, or at least the impossibility of doing anything with knowledge once it is collected. Having been catapulted into the world by the great egalitarian thrust of the American Revolution, Delano found it to be one long parade of mortifications, a word that comes up often in his memoir. I’ve described only some of his defeats here. But there were many more. Delano himself described his life, when he was in the Bass Strait thinking he was going to drown, as filled with
“
hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustice, ingratitude, and disappointment.”

*   *   *

Delano thought his book would help demythologize the world, the way as a young man he thought going to sea would allow him to judge the truth of all the many “exaggerated accounts” he had read in books and “false statements” peddled by sailors. He valued seeing the world as it really is, seeing it with, as he put it, “two eyes.” Perhaps that’s why he started his memoir with a story about an effort to trick his crew into reason.

Mariners were a strange “class of men,” he wrote. They lived their lives charting the movements of the natural world, the expected comings and goings of stars, planets, tides, and currents. But if sailing was a learnable trade, it was also a “mystery,” as apprentice contracts stipulated. “Sailors, though usually the boldest men alive, are yet frequently the abject slaves of superstitious fear,” complained Delano. On voyages where gale followed gale in unfathomable succession, mariners, continually exposed to nature’s capriciousness, put great stock in the “traditions which are handed down from generation to generation concerning omens, charms, predictions, and the agency of invisible spirits.” Whistling might summon Satan, drowning a cat would bring a storm, seamen could equally hang a kingfisher by the bill to judge the weather as consult a barometer, and just one word from an astrologer could cause a whole crew to quit a ship.

Delano thought such practices mocked the “Deity,” as if God would intervene in nature’s mechanics for the “most trifling purposes,” to make, say, the North Star shine in the south. So after overhearing a few of his men on watch one night debating the existence of ghosts, Delano decided he had to do something. He found an old deck mop and outfitted it with white linen to look like a shrouded, slender-waisted woman and hung it from a block above the ship’s stern. He intended to gently frighten the night watch and then reveal the hoax, in the hope that reality would “cure” the men of “their folly.”
⁷

The joke worked too well. A group of men sitting aft upon the quarterdeck were “struck dumb, fixed immovable with terror, and seemed like so many breathless but gazing petrifactions.” They moved to address the specter, asking her in the “name of the Holy God, who are you, and what do you want?” Fearing he had gone too far, Delano took the apparition down and withdrew to his cabin to sleep, planning to reveal the hoax in the morning. But he was woken in the middle of the night by his chief mate, who told him that the crew had gathered on deck “filled with anxiety and alarm.” Delano tried to calm his men down, but their sufferings were so “extreme” he couldn’t. Afraid to reveal his ploy, he kept quiet. For the rest of the voyage, the affair haunted Delano and caused him a “great deal of anxiety.” It did not, he admitted, “accomplish the good that I designed by it.”