The Empire of Necessity (54 page)

3
. See “At the First Performance of Lamartine’s Play in Paris,”
North Star
, June 13, 1850. See also “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”
North Star,
June 13, 1850; “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, September 4, 1851; “Isaac Toussaint L’Ouverture, Son of the Haitian Negro General,”
Frederick Douglass’ Paper,
November 25, 1854. Douglass himself wouldn’t discuss Haiti and its revolution in detail until after his 1861 visit to the country. Prior to this, he reserved the topic for “certain audiences to avoid conjuring images of a race war.” See Clavin,
Toussaint Louverture
, p. 218;
Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings
, ed. Philip Foner and Yval Taylor, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. The scholar Robert Wallace has recently made a strong case for the covert but important influence Douglass had on Melville, who incorporated ideas and images from the speeches of the former slave and abolitionist into his writing. See
Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style
, New Bedford: Spinner Publications, 2005, pp. 110–18, for the comparison between Douglass’s and Melville’s uses of the volcano metaphor, as well as other influences Douglass might have had on
Benito Cereno.

4
. Eric J. Sundquist,
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
, Cambridge: Belknap, 1998, p. 170.

5
. In a personal communication, Hershel Parker says he believes Melville was at his home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on February 26, 1855. Elliott (sometimes spelled Elliot) didn’t explicitly compare Haiti to the South. But the
Times
did in its review of the lecture: “Your men, your slaves, chattels—have the old, human, inextinguishable passion for Liberty within them”; slave discontent “does not show itself now” and neither did it for a long time in “St. Domingo.” The paper even recycled Frederick Douglass’s metaphor to warn slavers about “the volcano on which you dwell” (“Toussaint L’Ouverture”—Lecture by C. W. Elliott,”
New York Times
, February 27, 1855). See also “The Danger to the South,”
New York Times
, May 9, 1855 and C. W. Elliott,
Heroes Are Historic Men: St. Domingo, Its Revolution, and Its Hero, Toussaint Louverture. An Historical Discourse Condensed for the New York Library Association, February 26, 1855
, New York: J. A. Dix, 1855. Elliott was a friend and colleague of Frederick Law Olmsted—the two men would soon begin to work together to lay out New York’s Central Park—and it was Olmsted who proofread
Benito Cereno
for
Putnam’s Monthly
.

20. DESPERATION

  
1
. Delano,
Narrative
, pp. 277, 299.

  
2
. Mention of William’s clubfoot comes from the Hoyt Papers, in DRHS. Thanks to Carolyn Ravenscroft.

  
3
.
Delano, Narrative
, pp. 420–21.

  
4
. François Péron,
King Island and the Sealing Trade, 1802
, Canberra: Roebuck Society, 1971, p. 14.

  
5
. Marjorie Tipping,
Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and Their Settlement in Australia
, Ringwood Penguin Books Australia, 1988; Robert Knopwood,
The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803–1838
, Hobart: Historical Research Association, 1977, p. 47; F. M. Bladen, ed.,
Historical Records of New South Wales
, vol. 5, Sidney: N.S.W. Government, 1895, pp. 172–77, 186–97, 225, 263, 813–15, William Joy,
The Exiles
, Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press, p. 52; James Backhouse Walker,
Early Tasmania: Papers Read before the Royal Society of Tasmania during the Years 1888 to 1899
, Hobart: The Society, 1902, p. 45.

  
6
. Delano,
Narrative
, p. 430; C. H. Gill, “Notes on the Sealing Industry of Early Australia,”
Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland
8 (1967): 234; Patsy Adam Smith,
Moonbird People
, Sydney: Rigby Limited, 1965, p. 41.

  
7
. Walker,
Early Tasmania
, pp. 41–42.

  
8
.
Sydney Gazette
, August 19, 1804.

  
9
. Ibid., April 22, 1804; August 19, 1804; August 26, 1804; September 2, 1804; and October 7, 1804, tracked the movement of the
Perseverance
and the
Pilgrim
in New South Wales.

10
. Juan Fernández was used as a prison colony and, as Delano and his men were arriving in the middle of a series of escapes, the Spaniards didn’t want any foreigners on the island. See Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna,
Juan Fernández, historia verdadera de la isla de Robinson Crusoe
, Santiago: R. Jover, 1883, p. 308; Ralph Lee Woodward,
Robinson Crusoe’s Island: A History of the Juan Fernández Islands
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969; José Toribio Medina,
Cosas de la colonia
:
Apuntes para la cronica del siglo XVIII en Chile
, Santiago: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José Toribio Medina, 1952, pp. 100, 266–67.

11
. Delano,
Narrative
, pp. 467–68. For a moment, it seemed as if neither Amasa nor his “hurl-footed” brother would survive. Looking behind him, Amasa saw William weighed down with a heavy peacoat “struggling very hard” to stay afloat on a brace of wood “with his lame feet and confined arms.” He then turned away, toward the far-off
Pilgrim
, to see his other brother, Samuel, running back and forth from one mast to the other. In that moment of horse-market panic, Delano calmed himself by thinking of whales. “As the female species of whale when her young is struck stays braving all the harpoons and lances that can be used for her destruction, until her offspring has breathed its last, and not till then the mother disappears,” so Delano knew that as long as his brother before him kept a frantic watch, the “brother behind” him was still afloat. If Samuel were to withdraw from the deck, then William “should be drowned.” Amasa then serenely reflected on what would happen to him should he die, brushing off his world of woe: “For myself I could not perceive that life was of such great importance as I had already suffered a great many hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustices, ingratitude, and disappointments.” The scene is faintly similar to one of
Moby-Dick
’s most moving passages, in a chapter called “The Grand Armada,” where, in the middle of a frantic hunt, Ishmael, on the
Pequod
’s whaleboat, finds himself suddenly in the middle of a pod of nursing whales: “Far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.” The scene soothes Ishmael, just as thoughts of a whale and her cub soothed Amasa: “And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

12
. For Rufus Low on the
Essex
, see Library of Congress, “Sailing Master Rufus Low’s Journal,” Edward Preble Papers; George Henry Preble,
The First Cruise of the United States Frigate Essex
, Salem: Essex Institute, 1870, p. 43; Christopher McKee,
Edward Preble: A Naval Biography, 1761–1807
, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996, p. 81.

21. DECEPTION

  
1
. Rogers,
Cruising Voyage
, p. 145.

  
2
. Ibid., p. 146.

  
3
. For Santa María Island, see ANC (Santiago), Capitanía General, vol. 772, no. 5 (1804); Capitanía General, vol. 522, no. 22 (1757); Real Audiencia, vol. 3000, no. 279 (1665); Real Audiencia, vol. 3030, no. 36 (1637). Also in AGI (Seville), in Chile 25 and 221, correspondencia, there are documents describing Spain’s fear, in 1804, of losing the island to British pirates and smugglers.

  
4
. Melville,
Benito Cereno
, p. 161.

  
5
. Scholars have celebrated the trickster tradition among African Americans, who kept alive oral fables about wily humans and crafty animals such as Brer Rabbit, who use their wits to outfox the powerful. The tales, told at night around the hearth, could be traced back to peasant and pastoralist communities in Africa and not only allowed slaves to laugh at their masters but to pass on survival strategies, how to use guile as a weapon, to the next generation. See Larry E. Hudson,
Walking toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South
, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994, pp. 150–52; Lawrence Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 125. Sterling Stuckey explicitly links
Benito Cereno
’s Babo to Brer Rabbit: “The play of irony that informs Babo’s activities … is precisely that adopted by Brer Rabbit in his African American expression.… What is certain is that Babo is so much like Brer Rabbit that it is perfectly logical that he should have come from Senegal, a thriving center of tales of the African hare, Brer Rabbit’s ancestral model.” Both Brer Rabbit and Babo are “linked to a shared sense of moral righteousness, which leads them to become forces of retribution that unsentimentally punish the purveyors of greed and cruelty” (
Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 165, 167). Babacar M’Baye, in
The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives
, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, examines the influence of Senegalese folklore, particularly that associated with the Wolof, on African American culture.

  
6
. For Islam and ideas of slavery and freedom, see William Gervase Clarence-Smith,
Islam and the Abolition of Slavery
, London: Hurst and Co., 1988, pp. 1–4, 19–25, 152–54, 223–29; Franz Rosenthal,
The Muslim Concept of Freedom prior to the Nineteenth Century
, Leiden: Brill, 1960, pp. 32, 110–12; Paul Lovejoy, “The Context of Enslavement in West Africa: Ahmad Baba and the Ethics of Slavery
,” Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives
, ed. Landers and Robinson, pp. 9–38.

  
7
. Delano,
Narrative
, pp. 324–25.

22. RETRIBUTION

  
1
. Quotations for this chapter are found in Delano,
Narrative
, pp. 325–28. For the evolution of maritime insurance, see Jonathan Levy,
Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. For the
Zong
, see Jane Webster, “The
Zong
, in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade,” and James Oldham, “Insurance Litigation Involving the
Zong
and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807,” both in
Journal of Legal History
28 (December 2007): 285–98 and 299–318. See also Ian Baucom,
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.