In early April of 1839 the Portuguese slave merchants at Lomboko, on the west coast of Africa, were loading their human cargo onto the Teçora, in preparation for the long Middle Passage to Cuba. For weeks this process had been under way, and now, under the blazing equatorial sun, the slave dealers tried to make haste in order to reduce their crew’s exposure to African fever, to avoid a seizure by pirates or enemy vessels, and to lessen chances of a slave revolt before the ship could get to sea. Along the tributaries and lagoons of the Gallinas River, most of the factories, crude buildings in which captured blacks were stored until departure, belonged to the house of Martinez in Havana. Indeed, the vessels engaged in the trade—American and Russian as well as Portuguese—flew that house’s flag, white with the letter M on it. The most notorious slave trader in the area was Pedro Blanco of Havana, who had organized the business in the region during the mid-1820s, and with the help of Europeans and “Settler subagents” he would retire a rich man—after British cruisers had destroyed his factories.1 Despite British efforts to suppress the trade, in the 1830s, it was still, according to one firsthand observer, the “universal business” of Africa, “by far the most profitable” of all enterprises and sanctioned by the “law of usage.”2
The factories that were to supply the Teçora came alive as the European businessmen closed deals with their black counterparts in Africa. The black captives, largely seized in the continental interior by other Africans, were marched out of the dark, damp, and dingy constructions, their eyes throbbing from the sun. Many had never seen the ocean and were terrified by the roaring surf of the Atlantic, but they were forced into large canoes waiting to carry them to the slave ship. At last, when the Teçora was filled, it slowly broke harbor. In the darkened and stifling hold was the slaver’s cargo, over five hundred black Africans, mostly women and children, with no one older than the mid-twenties and all of them chained two by two, hands to feet, and packed into layered decks less than four feet high that prevented standing except in a crouch.3
Among the blacks was Joseph Cinqué, twenty-five years of age and, like the others around him, horrified by the events that had catapulted him into his present plight. Cinqué’s thoughts may well have turned back to the day when four black strangers had seized him while he was at work on a road between villages. He was strong and agile, taller than most of his fellow tribesmen at five feet eight inches, but he had had no chance against superior numbers. Chained by the neck to other blacks, some of whom he recognized, he had been force-marched three days from his Mende homeland in Sierra Leone to the West African coast. The situation was bewildering. He knew that many towns and villages regularly warred on each other for the purpose of selling captives to slave dealers. But he also knew that not all slaves were prisoners of war—that some had been sentenced to slavery for committing crimes punishable by death, whereas others had been captured in the jungle and sold to pay off debts. Cinqué’s people were peace loving, and this led him to believe that he himself was the payoff on a debt he owed a business acquaintance. Whatever the truth, Cinqué was now a slave, captured by people he did not know, loaded onto a vessel by strange and hostile white people, and bound for some unimaginable destination. His wife and three children were certainly aware of his disappearance. But, for all they knew, Cinqué had been killed by animals in the African bush.4
Cinqué and the others around him would be on the Teçora for two months. During that time, more than a third would die from sickness and disease caused by inadequate provisions and unsanitary conditions. The slaver carried plenty of rice but not enough water. If the blacks failed to eat all of their rice, they were whipped. A common occurrence, according to one of the captives, was to eat so much they vomited. Many of the survivors would never be the same again, either physically or emotionally. None, it seemed certain, would make the return voyage.5
At long last, Cinqué could discern by increased activity on deck that the ship was approaching land. Cuba—wherever that was—appeared to mark the end of the journey. He had sensed that the vessel was nearing its destination when, a few days earlier, the captain had ordered his black cargo unchained, brought on deck, bathed, and given clean clothing. Larger quantities of food and water had temporarily lifted the spirits of his fellow captives, although Cinqué and others were immediately fearful of what lay ahead. Hoping to see this new land as the slaver entered the harbor, Cinqué was disappointed when the vessel suddenly came to a halt on the high seas, some distance offshore. The Teçora would not make port until dark—for what reason Cinqué could not understand, but the captain’s visibly apprehensive crew and officers knew that British cruisers were on anti-slave-trade patrol in the waters surrounding Cuba. The Portuguese slaver was operating in violation of an Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817, which prohibited the African slave trade and promised death to its violators. Experience dictated an entrance at night.6
When darkness fell, only the pale glow of the lights onshore guided the Teçora inland. Passing quietly through the still waters, it eased into a secluded inlet along the Cuban shoreline. Once anchored, the vessel gave way to full-scale activity as the captain ordered his men to quickly load the blacks onto small boats and take them ashore. After the entire cargo was on the beach, the crew hustled the captives into the jungle, where after a three-mile march they were jammed into crude dwellings. For almost two weeks, they remained in these warehouses, until one night in June the captain ordered the blacks to form lines and begin another long trek through the thickets. After a while, they came within sight of the city of Havana, where they settled once again, outside the walls, to await morning. At daylight Cinqué and his black companions were put into a barracoon, an oblong enclosure without a roof, which during the day served as a slave market and at night was a prison.7
Importation of slaves into Cuba was a violation of Spanish law and treaty, although the institution of slavery itself was legal. A paradox had resulted on the island: on the one hand, the slave trade was forbidden; but on the other, if the trader succeeded in getting his merchandise ashore, the blacks, for practical purposes, assumed the status.8 The British and Spanish governments had established a mixed commission to enforce prohibitions against the slave traffic, but that body's powers cased once the cargo reached land. Hence, the Portuguese captain had taken his captives ashore by night and then transported them overland by night, in preparation for the rich profits awaiting him at the slave market.
David Turnbull, an outspoken British abolitionist who was to become consul in Havana in late 1840, only to have the Spanish government secure his withdrawal in less than two years, described the conditions on the island. The Spaniards, he wrote in a journal of his travels in the Caribbean, erected two large barracoons “for the reception and sale of newly imported Africans.” Located beneath the windows of the residence of the highest Spanish official on the island, the captain general, one enclosure held up to one thousand slaves, the other fifteen hundred. During Turnbull’s time in Havana they were full, serving both as a marketplace and as a prison. The barracoons were situated at the point of “greatest attraction”—at the end of the new paseo, which connected the palace of the captain general with the city. Moreover, a railroad into the interior passed the area, frightening recent arrivals from Africa but allowing passengers to observe the blacks crowded in the barracoons. Indeed, Spaniards often took strangers to the barracoons as a tourist attraction. The slave importer generally treated his captives well, feeding and clothing them, giving them tobacco, encouraging them to exercise in the large courtyard of the buildings. Spirits had to remain high; a depressed, homesick black brought less on the market. The barracoon, Turnbull lamented, was a virtual Spanish monument to Britain’s failure to halt the African slave trade.9
Turnbull insisted that the barracoons constituted a “well-organized system of kidnapping.” Captives of an advanced age were not as adaptable to requirements of the plantation; consequently, slaveowners needed youths for the fields. Their ages appeared to range from twelve to eighteen, and males outnumbered females about three to one because of the greater demand for their labor. Indeed, the planter found it cheaper to increase his labor supply by buying young, recently imported Africans in the barracoons than by depending on procreation. Some estates were filled only with males, forcing their owners to lock them up at night to prevent wanderings. Another reason for slaveowners’ wanting to continue the slave trade, Turnbull explained, was the “well-known fact” that children of plantation slaves had less physical strength than those imported from Africa. Black Africans brought more profit on the market.10
The situation in Cuba described by Turnbull originated shortly after the Napoleonic Wars ended, in 1815, when Spain’s need for African slaves temporarily declined, and its government two years afterward signed a treaty with England outlawing the slave trade. In the spirit of humanity, some argued, the nefarious practice had to end. Others insisted that the advantages to Africans of being exposed to a civilized country like Spain had declined; missionaries could now civilize them in their own lands. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 agreed on the necessity of abolishing the African slave trade. Two years later, the Spanish king announced a treaty with England, which prohibited the purchase of blacks in Africa and declared that as of May 1820, when the pact went into effect, those brought into Spanish dominions became free.11
A major flaw in the treaty of 1817 was Article 7, which assured eventual freedom for emancipados but in actuality prolonged slavery on the island. According to the system, blacks rescued from captured slavers were to receive certificates of emancipation from the mixed commission before being taken to the government in whose territory the offense had occurred. If British or Spanish cruisers seized a slaver off the Cuban coast, the blacks would go to the government of Cuba, which was to furnish them a place of work for five to seven years as servants or free laborers, with freedom guaranteed at the end of the period. But the system left room for abuse. English officials in Havana realized that the captains general were often selling the emancipados to planters, who then treated the blacks like slaves. Indeed, firsthand observers argued that the emancipado worked harder than the slave. Knowing the emancipado was available for only a specific period, many planters worked him into such poor health that he was incapable of taking a place in Cuban society. Furthermore, the emancipado system became a thriving business for planters seeking to replace slaves who had died or disappeared. It actually provided another source of slaves on the island.12
When the British protested the misuse of the emancipado system, the Spanish lamely responded with a hopeful statement that it would eventually work as intended by the treaty. The government in Madrid encouraged the enforcement of the treaty provision by directing Cuban planters to upgrade the treatment of emancipados and maintain a register of those freed from slavers. But charges soon spread of falsified information in the register. Planters found it lucrative to sell the emancipados as slaves after their service time had expired. British insistence on immediate freedom for those blacks who were released from captured slavers aroused no support from Cuban planters, who argued that an increase in free blacks on the island could set an example conducive to slave uprisings. British proposals to send emancipados to Africa likewise met opposition. The process would cost too much, the Cuban government declared, and it would be unchristian to return them to their pagan world. The real reason for wanting to maintain the emancipado system was simple: it was enormously profitable to the slaveholders and to Cuban officials who sold the blacks to planters.13
During the 1830s a reform movement arose in Cuba that included a call for an end to the slave trade. Primarily influential sugar and coffee planters, the reformers foresaw that the introduction of steam power to the sugar industry in 1819 would soon force a replacement of the African slave with a new kind of laborer: a literate wage earner capable of operating the sugar-processing machines. The addition of more African slaves therefore seemed shortsighted. Moreover, these same Cuban planters suspected the Spanish government of seeking to prolong the slave trade in an effort to promote the increase of blacks on the island and force the planters’ continued reliance on leaders in Madrid. Though these Cuban planters by no means composed the majority of the slaveholding groups, they were chiefly from the old class of planters, whose estates had sufficient slaves and who now wanted to end the slave trade and thereby raise the value of slaves in their possession. More important, they feared that the continuation of the slave trade could lead to a larger majority of blacks and eventually cause a general slave insurrection in Cuba similar to the one in Santo Domingo during the 1790s.14
Thus several factors obstructed a suppression of the slave trade in Cuba. Spanish officials and merchants had combined with the great majority of Cuban planters who needed a cheap labor force to dampen the reformers’ hopes. The government in Madrid profited heavily from Cuban sugar and did not wish to hurt this business by cutting off its source of labor. One reformer highlighted the central problem in the attempt to effect change when he wrote that no one wanted a revolution in Cuba unless its success was certain, In the present situation, he declared, “the political revolution is necessarily accompanied by a social revolution and the social revolution is the complete ruin of the Cuban race.”15
Despite Spain’s anti-slave-trade arrangement with England, the illicit business remained widespread. During the 1820s Spain at times had no more than two ships to patrol two thousand miles of heavily indented African coast. About fifteen hundred ships entered Havana every year, making it easy for slavers to hide among them. Furthermore, there were no laws prohibiting the shipment of slaves from one Spanish colony to another; this again allowed one form of business to blend with another. In 1831 the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, demanded that the Spanish government enforce its laws, but the captain general in Havana warned that such a move would add to the growing proportion of free blacks on the island and lead to serious social and political problems. The result was that the government in Madrid issued public orders to obey treaties yet seemed to connive in the continuation of the slave trade. Ironically, a major impetus to the Cuban trade was Britain’s decision in 1833 to abolish slavery in its own West Indies possessions. This move made the Cuban traffic more important.16
A renewal of the Anglo-Spanish agreement in 1835 did not slow the business, although it led slave merchants to devise new policies to circumvent the law. The new treaty authorized naval vessels to act on the basis of prima facie evidence in visiting a suspected slaver. Slave traders realized that the treaties between England and Spain applied only to slaves purchased outside Cuba—not to those bought on the island—and they turned even more to importing human cargo under the cover of night, using deserted coves as landing sites. Furthermore, they no longer openly fitted vessels in Cuban ports. Other alterations in the trade became apparent. Newspapers stopped announcing the arrival and departure times of ships. Names of slave captains ceased appearing in registers of the slave exchange in Havana. Slavers replaced Spanish flags with Portuguese and American colors. The British had little chance of stopping the trade, because they never had enough ships to patrol all of Cuba’s coastline and because they had no authority on land. Once the slave merchant made it ashore, his product became legal and he could ship it anywhere in Spanish territory. The queen of Spain tried to remedy the situation in November 1838, when she issued a royal decree urging the captain general on the island to enforce prohibitions against the traffic and to impose the strictest penalties allowed by law. This also failed. British abolitionists became frustrated with the situation in Cuba. According to Sir Thomas F. Buxton in 1840, Spanish officials were guilty of “artifice, violence, intimidation, popular countenance, and official connivance.”17
Turnbull was convinced that “political necessity” prevented public officials on the island from enforcing the law. If recently imported slaves had access to the judicial process, they could prove their alleged owners’ inability to produce a legal title. Spanish law prohibited ownership of recently imported Africans, he declared; “if the captain-general had not been prevented by secret counter orders from carrying these laws into effect, the trade would long ago have been effectually suppressed.” But leaders in Madrid feared that they would lose Cuba if the enforcement of anti-slave-trade laws created a free black class and encouraged slave rebellions on the island. “Conceal it as they may,” Turnbull wrote, “the true and simple key to the whole policy of the Spanish government” was that the captain general and others in Cuba had the “official sanction” of the mother country in ignoring the law.18
In truth, the Spanish government faced a dilemma. A clamp-down on island authorities would satisfy the British, but strong measures would alienate Cuban plantation owners—the richest, most powerful group on the island. Madrid’s officials repeatedly assured the British that they were doing their best to halt the slave trade, whereas in reality they turned the other way, allowing regular violations of law and treaty. America’s consul in Havana, Nicholas Trist, believed that the slave trade was “a pursuit denounced in every way by the Law, and upheld by an overwhelming Public Opinion.”19
Another business had developed from Spain’s haphazard enforcement of the law: Cuban authorities accepted illegal payments for ignoring importations of slaves from Africa. From the captain general down to customs officers at the ports, bribes in the form of “fees” became a standard practice. Since Spanish law forbade such assessments, officials referred to them as voluntary. According to Turnbull, these officials were “sharers in a common enterprise.” In Havana the money was “paid from habit, as a matter of course.” So many public officials were involved that slave importers found the payment difficult to evade. Yet the tax did not appear to result either from an act of the Spanish legislature or from royal decree. As evidence for this statement, Turnbull noted that “the parties who pay it have never yet succeeded in obtaining anything in the nature of a receipt or other written acknowledgment for the money.”20
Once the slaves were sold in the barracoons, the captain general signed the trespassos, or passports, which permitted the purchaser to transport his human property to another spot on the island. Spanish law referred to those slaves who had lived on the island long enough to be Spanish subjects and to speak the Spanish language as ladinos. Blacks brought illegally onto the island as slaves were bozales, for they had never been domiciled and were unable to speak Spanish. Over the captain general’s signature, and for a small fee, slave buyers were able to secure passports that classified their slaves as ladinos, regardless of their age or language.21
In late 1840 Charles Butler, a longtime resident of Cuba who had studied Spanish law and was a barrister, explained the system to Congressman John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Abuses of the law started a few years ago, Butler pointed out, when the captain of a British man-of-war in Havana found a large number of freshly imported slaves leaving in a steamboat. He had to let them go when the captain of the steamer produced a passport from the captain general giving the names of the blacks and the estates they came from, along with their destination. Since that time, Butler explained, slaveowners carried passports from the proper authorities. He had seen these documents countersigned by a naval officer or a justice of the peace, even though there was no doubt that the slaver had unloaded a fresh African cargo. And yet the passport always stated that the slaves had come from some “contiguous estate.” The government refused to suppress this business, he lamented to Adams.22
The government in Spain was particularly concerned about England. Several officials suspected the British of trying to enhance the value of their Asiatic dominions by disrupting the trade of the West Indies. By the late 1830s the Spanish feared that British efforts to expand the powers of the mixed commission were part of an abolitionist attempt to end the slave trade and divert the blacks’ allegiance to the British themselves. A further complication was that England might take advantage of Spain’s perennial political problems, exacerbated by revolts and counterrevolts that swept the country for four decades following the mid-1830s. The slavery issue in Cuba thus provided a pretext for British interference in the Caribbean.23
This was the confused situation, one that had become a well- oiled system, by the time Cinqué and his fellow Africans arrived in Cuba in 1839.
In late June two Spaniards, José Ruiz (known as Pepe) and Pedro Montes, joined the crowd of slave patrons at the barracoons in Havana, bartering for slaves to take to plantations in Puerto Príncipe, located about two days’ sailing distance on the northwest coast of the island. Ruiz was only twenty-four years old and Montes fifty-eight, but both men were seasoned businessmen who knew their trade. Ruiz, accompanied by the Portuguese captain of the Teçora, carefully narrowed his choices and called for the blacks to stand in a row so that he might examine their bodies and teeth. Satisfied, he paid $450 apiece for forty-nine adult males, including Cinqué. At the same time, in another part of the yard, Montes bought four young children, three of them female. On June 22 Montes secured a passport from the captain general that authorized him to transport his “black Ladinos” to Puerto Príncipe by sea; four days later Ruiz did the same. Cinqué and his companions had been in the barracoons for ten days.24
Two nights later, on June 28, Ruiz and Montes accompanied the newly purchased Africans on foot through Havana, headed for a vessel they had chartered—the Amistad, a small and sleek black schooner, built and fitted in Baltimore for the coastal slave trade. At eight o’clock that evening, with only the faint glow of the harbor lamps lighting the dock, Ruiz and Montes ordered the fifty-three blacks to come aboard. Though the Amistad had for three years operated legally in the coastal slave traffic, the two Spaniards knew that the vessel was subject to British search procedures anywhere in the Caribbean. Hence they had taken the precaution of loading at night. Despite their passports, duly signed by the captain general, they did not want to take a chance. Their captives were not ladinos: none knew Spanish; all spoke only native African tongues; and the four children were too young to have been slaves in Cuba before the anti-slave-trade law went into effect in 1820. Nonetheless, the passports contained descriptions of each black, along with false Spanish names assigned to them by their purchasers. Under the command of Ramón Ferrer, the vessel’s captain and owner, the Amistad departed at midnight for Puerto Príncipe, carrying Ruiz and Montes, their fifty-three blacks unchained but in the hold, two sailors as crew members, the captain’s sixteen-year-old cabin boy, Antonio, a mulatto cook named Celestino, $250 in cash; and cargo and provisions worth about $40,000.25
Captain Ferrer and his two Spanish companions prepared for a routine trip. The weather was hot and humid. Once clear of the harbor Ferrer followed his usual practice of dragging his mattress up the stairs and onto the deck. A few moments later, one of the sailors heard some of the blacks noisily coming up the hold to the forecastle. After a reprimand, he ordered them back below. The following day the winds shifted, lengthening the voyage and leading to a decision to forgo any trips ashore for more provisions. Thus each black was allotted only one banana, two potatoes, and a small cup of water per day. Tempers shortened in the tropical heat. Ruiz and Montes had allowed a few of the blacks at a time to gain relief on deck. When one of the captives, Burnah, attempted to take more water than allotted, Ruiz had him flogged by a crew member.26
Cinqué became increasingly restless in his concern over the Spaniards’ intentions. On one occasion while on deck, he used sign language to ask the cook what would happen to them. In cruel jest, Celestino grinned and pointed to barrels of beef across the room and then to an empty one behind him. Upon arrival in Puerto Príncipe, he indicated with his fingers, the Spaniards planned to slit all of the slaves’ throats, chop their bodies into pieces, salt them down, and eat them as dried meat. Cinqué stumbled out of the kitchen, stunned by Celestino’s crude revelation and yet furious with himself and with the cook’s arrogant manner. Cinqué should have known better than to talk to him; Celestino had once struck him for no apparent reason. Finding a nail, Cinqué hid it under his arm, determined at the first opportunity to pick the lock on the iron collar around his neck and make a strike for freedom.27
On the third night at sea, July 1, Cinqué worked closely with a fellow captive named Grabeau in making preparations for an insurrection. After freeing themselves and then the others from the irons, they found boxes below that contained weapons: sugar cane knives with handles consisting of square pieces of steel an inch thick, and attached to blades two feet long that gradually widened to three inches at the end. Stealing up the hatchway, they prepared to storm the captain where he slept on deck.28
Captain Ferrer had retired at a little past 11:00 P.M., just as the moon was rising. A storm soon hit, blackening the night and forcing the crew to lower the sails for hours until it passed over. Around 4:00 A.M., with the sky still rainy and darkened by heavy clouds, Ruiz and Montes were suddenly awakened by loud noises and the scuffle of many feet on the deck, followed by screams of “Murder!” Jumping from their bunks, they rushed outside to join the two sailors who were running toward the sound of trouble. At first they were barely able to discern the figures moving only a few feet before them, but the four men finally distinguished Cinqué and other blacks near the captain, armed with cane knives and closing in on him and his slave Antonio. “Throw some bread at them!” the captain yelled in desperation while wielding his dagger. But Cinqué ignored the basket at his feet and with his heavy steel blade struck the captain to the floor, leaving the others to strangle him to death. Through the misty darkness, Ruiz and Montes could see that the captain had perhaps killed one of his assailants and wounded two others; to the right they saw a ring of blacks surrounding the boat where Celestino regularly slept and angrily thudding hatchet blows onto his crumpled and already lifeless body.29
Ruiz and Montes frantically tried to regain control. Montes drew his knife and joined one of the sailors swinging a stick to drive some of the blacks behind the foresail, while Ruiz stood before the galley, ordering others back into the hold. The second sailor yelled at Montes to throw him the cook’s knife. “Kill them all!” the sailor screamed as he groped for the weapon now at his feet. Montes slashed a few of the blacks, trying to frighten them and break the mutiny. But the sight of their own blood drove the blacks into a frenzy. As they advanced toward him, Montes swung at the blacks with knife in one hand and pump handle in the other, forcing them to retreat behind the foresail, but not before they had wounded him with sticks and cane knives. Seeing one of the blacks reaching for an oar under the foresail, Montes grabbed the flat end and pulled desperately against the man now tugging the handle. But two other blacks also grabbed the oar while others whacked Montes repeatedly on the legs and body with another oar, causing one of the sailors to exhort him to let go before they killed him. Montes dropped his knife in the struggle, and as he bent down to find it he took a hard blow on the head with a cane knife, which drove a deep gash above his ear and knocked him senseless to the deck. Barely able to rise, he staggered below to the hold, his bloody frame falling headlong to the floor. He had to hide. Crawling through the darkness, he squeezed behind a food barrel and pulled an old sail over him.30
Cinqué , along with Grabeau and Burnah, had taken command of the Amistad. The captain and cook were dead. Ruiz had surrendered after sustaining several mild wounds. Antonio had begged for mercy and remained alive, tied to the anchor. The two sailors had disappeared, probably drowned after jumping overboard and trying to swim the long distance to shore.31 The only one unaccounted for was Montes; but he could wait the short time until daybreak. In minutes the mutiny had succeeded.
As dawn lighted the skyline, Montes dazedly heard what sounded like two people running down the steps leading below, crashing into objects, angrily searching in the pale light for him. Montes attempted to lie still, but he was breathing heavily and shaking uncontrollably. Suddenly his cover was thrown off, and Cinqué was revealed standing over him with raised cane knife, ready to bury it in Montes’s body. Montes screamed and begged for his life while trying to escape the rain of blows. But before Cinqué could inflict a mortal wound, Burnah grabbed his arms and after a heated exchange persuaded him not to take the Spaniard’s life.32
Only dimly conscious, Montes was dragged on deck, where he realized that his life had been spared for one purpose: to sail the vessel to Africa. He saw Ruiz, also bleeding and now sitting on the deck with hands tied. Cinqué and his companion tied one of Ruiz’s arms to one of Montes’s, threatening to kill them if they tried to escape. After some time they loosened the two men’s bonds, took off their blood-covered clothes, and used the key to their trunks to find clean ones. Cinqué, the acknowledged leader of the mutineers, had communicated his aim by signs. Though lacking navigational skills, he recalled that the slave ship he and others had been on during the passage from Africa to Cuba had sailed away from the rising sun. To return home, Cinqué ordered Montes, who had once been a sea captain, to sail the Amistad into the sun. But the two Spaniards, talking in Spanish, which none of the blacks could understand, devised a plan whereby Montes would during the day steer the vessel in the proper direction but at night turn northward. Surely, they thought, a British cruiser on anti-slave-trade patrol would rescue them.33
Now at the helm, Montes gazed around him at the remains of the mutiny: Cinqué issuing orders to drag the bodies of the captain and cook to the side and throw them overboard; other blacks washing down the deck, stained red with blood; the ghostly silence that always seems to accompany death now prevailing over the eerie sounds of mast creaking and sails rustling in the breeze; the two sailors not in sight; only himself, Ruiz, and Antonio alive. As the Amistad cut through the warm, azure waters, Montes wondered how long he might fool Cinqué into believing that the vessel was sailing toward Africa.34
The next two months were tumultuous for the Amistad voyage. For days Montes kept the vessel near the Bahamas before beginning an erratic north and northeast course toward the United States. To further obstruct the voyage, Montes kept the sails flapping in the wind, causing the vessel to make little headway during the day. As the moon rose during the first night following the insurrection, a violent storm blew from land, forcing Montes to have all sails lowered except the foretopsail. By this time the blacks were terrified at the thought of dying at sea. But when the squall passed and daybreak came, Cinqué began to suspect that the vessel was heading back toward Havana. Calling a hurried council in the cabin below, he and others apparently decided to kill the two Spaniards. As Cinqué approached Montes with a dagger, the Spaniard immediately fell to his knees, pleading for mercy. Cinqué again spared his life but kept one of the blacks with him at the masthead for the remainder of the voyage.35
Conditions steadily worsened aboard ship. At one anchor in the Caribbean, a small fishing boat approached, its owner thinking that the schooner needed a pilot to steer it ashore. But when the boat got within hailing distance, the blacks raised their cane knives and frightened their visitors away. For the next seven days, Montes sailed back and forth through those waters, vainly hoping that the fishermen would report the incident and prompt an investigation. Though the Amistad passed merchantmen and other vessels, Montes was unable to signal distress. Meanwhile, supplies were about gone, rough winds had nearly destroyed the sails, and some of the blacks, delirious from thirst, had consumed the liquid contents of bottles found below, only to sicken and die from the medicines stored in some of the containers. Gloom and despair cast a heavy pall over the Amistad as the total of blacks who had died reached ten.36
Several sea captains had sighted the Amistad, but they hastily departed upon seeing a large number of blacks, armed with long knives, dressed in alien costumes, and obviously desperate. In one instance, the captain of an American merchant vessel had come sufficiently close to exchange a few words with Burnah, who knew enough English to make the blacks’ needs known. The captain gave them a keg of water and some apples, but when he prepared to take the Amistad in tow, Cinqué became suspicious and seemed ready to board the vessel, causing its captain to cut the line and flee from what appeared to be pirates.37 By late August the Amistad had caused considerable stir along the North American coast as the vessel approached waters off the state of New York.38 Indeed, commanding officers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard had ordered two vessels to search for the mysterious ship.39
Finally, as the situation aboard ship worsened, Cinqué had no choice but to order the Amistad close to shore; he would go with Grabeau, Burnah, and others to find food and water.40 Cinqué anchored the badly weather-beaten schooner off Long Island, joined eight of his comrades in a small boat, and headed ashore for provisions. On that day, August 25, they wandered from one isolated dwelling to another, frightening most residents but managing to purchase two dogs, a bottle of gin, and some sweet potatoes with the Spanish gold doubloons they had found on the Amistad.41
By late afternoon five white men who had seen the schooner offshore arrived in wagons and approached Cinqué and his companions on the beach. Henry Green and his friends, all seamen from the immediate area, confirmed by sign language that the blacks had come from the schooner lying nearly a mile out. Were there Spaniards in this land? the blacks wanted to know. After Green shook his head no, they asked if there were slaves. Again told no, the blacks immediately jumped up and down with delight—so much that they scared Green and the others into running to their wagons for weapons. But Cinqué quickly assured them that he meant no harm, and as proof he gave them two guns, a knife, a hat, and a handkerchief. Green wondered what the blacks wanted. Burnah indicated that they would pay the whites in gold doubloons for taking them to Sierra Leone. Surprised by the offer, Green suspected that the vessel contained something of value and tried to lure all of the blacks ashore so that he could seize it as a prize. Might he and his friends board the schooner? Cinqué, however, had become suspicious of their motives and tried to put them off until the following day. In the meantime he would show them two trunks from the vessel. Cinqué had planned to get the Amistad under way the next morning, a decision reinforced by the actions of these white men.42
But early the following day Green spotted an American naval vessel on the horizon and feared that it would seize the schooner and deny him the salvage he thought was his. When the blacks prepared to leave, he warned that two men-of-war nearby would capture them and make them slaves.43 At this point Lieutenant Meade on board the USS Washington saw the activity ashore and at Lieutenant Gedney’s orders seized the schooner, the cargo, and the blacks.44 Perhaps because New York had abolished slavery, Gedney took his prize to New London, Connecticut, where slavery was legal. There he would seek salvage on the Amistad and its cargo, including the blacks.
Popular excitement about the Amistad spread shortly after its arrival in New London the following day. The accuracy of the newspaper reports was doubtful at best. Some of the press spoke of the black pirates, who had murdered the captain and crew and, but for Gedney’s bravery, would have continued preying on American merchant vessels and coastal dwellers.45 Other newspapers, however, argued that since the slave trade was illegal under American law, the blacks had possessed a natural right to win freedom.46 Cinqué, some of them noted, struck an impressive figure: the “son of an African chief” who dealt in slaves and possessed “sagacity and courage” not often associated with his race.47 The United States marshal in New Haven, Norris Willcox, took Gedney’s report and immediately notified the federal district judge of Connecticut, Andrew T. Judson. Willcox and Judson left that day for the Washington.48
Judson at once conducted an inquiry on board the American brig in New London harbor. After hearing the testimony of Ruiz, Montes, and Antonio, the slave belonging to the slain captain and owner of the Amistad, Judson temporarily halted the proceedings as Cinqué was brought into the cabin. Manacled and with a cord around his neck holding a snuffbox, Cinqué wore a red flannel shirt and duck pantaloons, and seemed calm and in control. At first smiling and making hand motions showing that he expected to be hanged, he then turned and stared intensely at Montes and Ruiz. At that point Judson resumed the inquiry by examining the vessel’s papers and finding that they upheld the Spaniards’ story: the Amistad was a Spanish slaver, legally authorized to transport fifty- three ladinos as slaves belonging to Ruiz and Montes from Havana to Puerto Príncipe. The slaves had mutinied and were apparently guilty of piracy and murder. Ruiz and Montes asked the judge to sanction the delivery of the Amistad, its cargo, and the slaves to the Spanish consul in Boston; all items were their property, the two Spaniards argued. Judson, however, decided to hold the thirty-nine black adult males for the next meeting of the grand jury of the United States Circuit Court, scheduled in Hartford, Connecticut, for September 1839. At that time, he explained, the court would make a ruling on the property claims and decide whether the blacks should stand trial for mutiny and murder. Antonio and the four black children were not involved in the mutiny and would appear as witnesses. Since no one posted bond for the youths, Judson directed the marshal to transport all of the blacks to the New Haven jail.49
In carrying out his orders, Willcox noted with curiosity that none of the blacks answered to the Spanish names on the warrant, even though the clerk had carefully copied those names from the passports issued in Havana.50
More legal action followed. Gedney filed a libel suit in behalf of himself and others on board the Washington for salvage of the Amistad, its cargo, and the black passengers. On the basis of the “meritorious service” of Gedney and his men, the suit alleged, the court should award compensation for saving the Spaniards’ property from certain total loss.51
These immediate legal issues were important in themselves, but before the circuit court could convene, American abolitionists became interested in the case as a way to publicize the evils of the slave trade and perhaps of slavery itself, and they would soon raise questions involving human and property rights and the relationship of morality to law. The series of events about to unfold in Connecticut constituted a severe test of America’s ideals. The abolitionists would ask how one could reconcile the enslavement of human beings in a nation founded on natural rights and fundamental principles of personal liberty. Their intention was to challenge Americans to mesh positive with natural law in protecting individual freedom.