The Empire of Necessity (7 page)

Montevideo’s harbor doctors tried to identify the most serious illnesses: scurvy, consumption, dropsy, malaria, measles, yellow fever, typhoid, ophthalmia, flux (or unending dysentery, which easily spread in the packed-tight holds), something called
el mal de Luanda
(Angola sickness, a vitamin C deficiency that Spaniards distinguished from scurvy), ringworm, and gonorrhea and syphilis, also known as
mal de Gálico
, Galician sickness. Smallpox was especially deadly. Before a working vaccine was fabricated in the early 1800s, Africans who arrived in Río de la Plata suffering from the disease were unloaded for less than half of their expected price had they been healthy. But those who had recovered from smallpox were sold at a premium, since it was assumed they had built up immunity.
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Slave ships were more than floating tombs. They were floating laboratories, offering doctors and scientists opportunities to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Often learning of cases from a ship’s surgeon, medical professionals used high slave ship mortality to identify a bewildering number of symptoms and classify them into diseases, to hypothesize about causes and isolate variables, and to advance medical knowledge.
*

Among the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean, as well, a corps of doctors, some of them committed to relieving the sufferings of their charges, others looking to make the slave system more efficient, did important early work on epidemiology. They identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility (more slaves were dying than being born), experimented with how much water they needed to give slaves in order for them to survive on a diet of salted fish and jerk, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. And when slaves couldn’t be kept alive, their autopsied bodies provided useful information. Medical knowledge then filtered out of the slave industry to benefit the broader international community; slavers made no proprietary claims on the techniques or data that derived from treating slaves.
⁵

For instance, an epidemic of blindness that broke out on the French slaver
Rôdeur
, which sailed from Bonny Island in 1819 with about seventy-two slaves, helped eye doctors identify important information concerning ophthalmia, or trachoma. The disease appeared not long out to sea, first in the hold among the slaves and then on deck, blinding all the voyagers save one member of the crew. According to a passenger’s account, sightless sailors worked under the direction of the one seeing man “like machines,” tied to the captain with a thick rope. “We were blind—stone blind, drifting like a wreck upon the ocean.” Some sailors went mad and tried to drink themselves to death. Others cursed through the day and night. Still others retired to their hammocks, immobilized. Each “lived in a little dark world of his own, peopled by shadows and phantasms. We did not see the ship, nor the heavens, nor the sea, nor the faces of our comrades.” But they could hear the cries of the slaves in the hold.
⁶

This went on for ten days, through storms and calms, until the voyagers heard the sound of another ship. A Spanish slaver, the
San León
, had drifted alongside the
Rôdeur
. But the entire crew and all the slaves of that ship had been blinded by disease as well: when the sailors of each vessel realized this “horrible coincidence,” they fell into silence, “like that of death.” Eventually the
León
drifted away and was never heard from again.

The
Rôdeur
’s one seeing mate managed to pilot the ship to Guadeloupe. By now, a few of the crew members, including the captain, had begun to regain some of their vision. But thirty-nine Africans hadn’t, so before entering the harbor the captain decided to drown them, tying weights to their legs and throwing them overboard. The ship was insured and their loss would be covered. (The practice of insuring slaves and slave ships, which had become common by this point, extended a new kind of economic rationality into the trade, helping slavers decide that a dead slave might be worth more than living labor.) The case of the
Rôdeur
caught the attention of Sébastien Guillié, director and chief of medicine at Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth. He wrote up his findings and published them in
Bibliothèque ophtalmologique,
which was then cited in other medical journals.
*

*   *   *

What killed the Africans on the
Joaquín
, which arrived in Montevideo a few months after the
Neptune
, was the subject of a long debate. Of the 301 East Africans who boarded the Portuguese frigate in Mozambique on November 19, 1803, only thirty survived the nearly half-year journey to Montevideo. The deaths started shortly after setting sail, one a day until the ship reached the Cape of Good Hope forty-six days later. The mortality rate steadily increased as the slaver rounded into the Atlantic and continued on to Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Brazil. After a layover, the
Joaquín
made for Río de la Plata.
⁷

Montevideo’s surgeon, Juan Cayetano Molina, along with the harbormaster, boarded the
Joaquín
the afternoon it arrived in port. When they opened its hatch, they were horrified by what they saw below: thirty bone-thin East Africans in a foul, bare room, otherwise empty save for hundreds of unused shackles. Told that the most recent death had occurred just that morning and that a few Africans had died the day before, Molina and the harbormaster panicked and ordered the ship’s captain to weigh anchor and leave immediately. The captain at first refused. The barometer was dropping and a storm was coming. He yielded, though, when the harbormaster threatened to seize the ship and throw him in jail if he didn’t comply. After food and water were brought on board, the
Joaquín
sailed back out into the gulf with its exhausted crew and emaciated slaves.

Almost as soon as the ship left Montevideo’s snug harbor, a fierce wind came out of the pampas, creating a strong tidal bore that rolled through the estuary. A
pampero
is a sight to see: as the pressure falls, grasshoppers, moths, and other insects fly off the land, driven forward by gusts of air. Thick black-cotton clouds advance like a wall from the west, mixing water with blown dirt to rain mud. At times, the wind can be so strong as to push an enormous amount of gulf water into the Atlantic, exposing large patches of the riverbed. The storm turned the
Joaquín
, nearly capsizing it. First its furled sails blew out of their gaskets and then all three masts snapped, leaving the ship “half-destroyed.” With what was left of its jib and foresail, the ship limped back into Montevideo, beaching on a sandbar close to shore.

There now began a lengthy, drawn-out legal battle of charges and countercharges. The merchant who imported the slaves, Martín de Alzaga, accused Molina of incompetence. Alzaga is a familiar type in Argentine history, a staunch antisubversive who defined subversion as any understanding of
libertad
beyond his right to buy and sell Africans (it was Alzaga who, during the investigation into Buenos Aires’s rumored French Revolution–inspired rebellion, had personally presided over the torture sessions of suspects, black and white, who exhibited “dangerous egalitarian leanings”). The slaver wanted to disembark the survivors and sell them, to recoup some of his loss. City officials, going on Molina’s diagnosis that they were carrying a transmittable disease, refused his request.
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Alzaga sued the doctor for malice. The Africans perished not from an infectious disease, the slaver insisted, but rather from lack of water and from the extreme variations of temperature they suffered on their long voyage, which, he said, had a debilitating effect on the “miserable uprooted beings.” There was proof that Montevideo wasn’t in danger: none of the Portuguese crew members had died on the crossing.

Royal officials convened a commission of inquiry, which became a curious exercise in the limits of inductive reasoning, the kind of reasoning that held that matters of law, science, and medicine were to be decided through observation. The commission took testimony from the
Joaquín
’s crew, since they witnessed the sickness spread over the course of the voyage. And it called on the expertise of five surgeons—two British doctors, a Spaniard, a Swiss Italian, and one from the United States. They all had firsthand experience ministering to ailing slaves, either because they had previously sailed on a slave ship or because they had spent time in Mozambique. Everybody, the doctors, the sailors, and the ship’s officers, gave their opinion about what had killed the East Africans. No one, though, thought to ask the surviving East Africans themselves, who were being confined to the hold of the
Joaquín
for the duration of the investigation.

The doctors agreed that the slaves had died not from an infection but rather from dehydration and chronic diarrhea, aggravated by the physical and psychological hardships of slavery. Those surgeons who had been to Mozambique confirmed that long before being boarded on the ship, the captives would have felt extreme anguish, forced to survive on roots and bugs and arriving at the coast emaciated and with their stomachs distended. Then, once on the ocean, crowded in a dark hold with no ventilation, they’d have had nothing to do other than listen to the cries of their companions and the clanking of their chains. Many would have gone mad trying to make sense of their situation, trying to ponder the “imponderable.” They had developed a “total indifference to life,” the Swiss Italian doctor, Carlos Joseph Guezzi, testified. No one illness was to blame for their condition. Rather, they had wasted away emotionally. An “abandonment of the self,” in Guezzi’s opinion, had led to their demise.

*   *   *

The commission decided that the East Africans had died from an intestinal illness aggravated by
nostalgia
,
melancolía
, and
cisma
—nostalgia, melancholia, and brooding, or mourning. Montevideo had nothing to fear. Alzaga could disembark the survivors and sell them.

It was a strange ruling, holding in favor of an individual trader while condemning, implicitly at least, the trade itself. In doing so, the decision revealed the way that medical professionals were beginning to use in a more clinical fashion terms that in the past had been associated with religion, morality, and emotions.
Cisma
literally meant schism. In Spanish theological texts, the word referred not just to the political division of Christianity between Catholicism and Protestantism but to the spiritual split of fallen man: Adam’s rebellion against God resulted in a
cisma
“between body and soul, between flesh and spirit.” As to
melancolía
, two decades prior to the arrival of the
Joaquín
in Montevideo, the Royal Spanish Academy was still associating the term with nighttime demon possession, with dreams that “compress and squeeze the heart.” In Great Britain, melancholics could be geniuses, sublime souls capable of producing beautiful poetry; more often, though, moral and religious philosophers of the time tended to think of extreme sadness as a vice, as a dissipating self-indulgence manifesting itself in a fondness for “love-tales,” “melodramatic escapades,” and other “popular nonsense” that leads to a softening of the brain.
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The doctors investigating the
Joaquín
, however, used these concepts in a decidedly secular, matter-of-fact manner and, more importantly, in ways that unmistakably affirmed the humanity of the slaves. To diagnose enslaved Africans as suffering from nostalgia and melancholia was to acknowledge that they had selves that could be lost, inner lives that could suffer schism, or alienation, and pasts that could be mourned over. The Spanish doctor, Josef Capdevila
,
was the most empathetic, emphasizing the “sadness” that overcame captives when they realized they were being forced to leave behind their “family, their homeland, their freedom—all the familiar objects that sooth the senses and make people happy.”

After reading the opinion of the five surgeons, who collectively represented the state of medical knowledge in the United States, Protestant Great Britain, and Catholic Spain, one comes away with the sense that slavery must have played an important but largely unacknowledged role in disenchanting medicine, in taking concepts like melancholy out of the hands of priests, poets, and philosophers and giving them to doctors. The intellectual historian Thomas Laqueur notes that, starting in the 1700s, a new kind of forensic writing, at once clinical and humane, began to reveal “in extraordinarily detailed fashion” the “pains and deaths of ordinary people in such a way as to make apparent the causal chains that might connect the actions of its readers with the suffering of its subjects.” There was an unprecedented outpouring of “fact, of minute observations, about people who had before been beneath notice.” Laqueur includes the “realistic novel, the autopsy, the clinical report, and the social inquiry,” to which could be added the observations of slave ship doctors.
¹⁰

Two decades after the incident involving the
Joaquín
, the Spanish medical profession no longer considered
melancolía
to be caused by an incubus or a sign of moral weakness. It rather was understood as a type of delirium, related to dementia and mania. Spanish doctors also began to use the word to refer to seasickness, describing, though they didn’t directly mention slavery, the condition in terms very similar to the way critics of the Middle Passage did, as caused by rancid food, too close contact, extreme weather, and above all the “isolation” and the “uniform and monotonous life” one experiences at sea, which can induce violent nervous disorders and intestinal disease. It was as if with each time a doctor threw back a slave hatch to reveal the human-made horrors below, it became just a bit more difficult to blame mental illness on demons and personal failings.
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