The Amistad Rebellion (11 page)

After five days the captives were moved to a new set of barracoons, named La Misericordia, located “nearly in front of the governor’s country house, situated outside the walls of Havana, on the Paseo Militar, or public promenade.” They took their place alongside sheep, oxen, and cattle for sale. According to Madden, who made it a point to find and visit these barracoons in order to learn more about the experience of the
Amistad
Africans while they were in Cuba, the keeper was the same Riera who had worked for Pedro Blanco/Pedro Martinez in Gallinas. When told of the revolt and the escape to freedom,
Riera said to Madden, “Que lástima” (“What a pity”). He referred to “the loss of so many valuable Bozals, or newly imported Africans.” He regretted “that so much property should be lost to the owners.”
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Cinqué and Grabeau recalled the time at La Misericordia and the moment of their purchase by José Ruiz. Cinqué saw Ruiz (nicknamed “Pepe”) for the first time at the place he recollected as the “prison house.” His future “owner” was conferring with the “man that brought us from Lomboko,” the captain of the
Teçora
. Cinqué specifically remembered the humiliating medical examination: “Pepe feel of me—said ‘Fine’ ‘fine.’” Grabeau went into more detail: Ruiz picked a number of them from the larger mass of the enslaved in the barracoon and “made them stand in a row.” He then went up and down the row and “felt each of them in every part of the body; made them open their mouths to see if their teeth were sound.” Abolitionist George Day, who took down Grabeau’s account, added that Ruiz “carried the examination to a degree of minuteness of which only a slave dealer would be guilty.”
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After Ruiz had selected the “prime slaves” he wanted, he prepared to remove them to another barracoon. This occasioned great turmoil, as the deep, painfully acquired social and emotional bonds of shipmates were now being torn apart. As “they were separated from their companions who had come with them from Africa,” many wept, Grabeau recalled, especially women and children. Cinqué joined in, shedding tears of his own, but Grabeau did not, “because he is a man,” he explained. Kimbo noted that at that moment “he thought of his home in Africa, and of friends left there whom he should never see again.”
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Ruiz, on the other hand, recalled a routine business transaction when he testified about the purchase. He told a correspondent of the
New York Morning Herald
that “he first met these negroes in the fields close to Havana.” He took his time in deciding who to buy: “He saw them and examined them for two or three days before he made his purchases.” He was not concerned about their ethnicity or nationality. He did not bother to “inquire whether they were Congo negroes, or Mandangoes, or where they came from.” He simply saw that “they were stout bodied men and he bought them.” Ruiz purchased the
forty-nine men “on account of his uncle, Don Saturnino Carrias, a merchant of Puerto Príncipe, not for any property of his [own] but for sale at that place.” Pedro Montes bought the four children separately, in a different place, “the house of a tobacconist in Machandas street, in Havana,” from petty traders named Xiques and Azpilaca. Ruiz and Montes stressed that the buying and selling of slaves was a normal part of life in Havana in 1839.
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It is impossible to appreciate the full experience of the
Amistad
Africans while they were held in the barracoons of Cuba’s major city, but evidence suggests that it was a profound one, in which old bonds were broken and new ones formed amid dreadful uncertainty. The Africans would have been incarcerated along with large numbers of others who came from a much broader expanse of West Africa, from not only the Gallinas Coast, but also, moving from west to east, from Senegambia; the Gold Coast; Lagos and Onim in the Bight of Benin; Bonny in the Bight of Biafra; Princes and São Tomé in the Guinea Islands; Cabinda, Loango, and the Congo River in West Central Africa; even Mozambique in southeast Africa. They also would have interacted with some enslaved Africans already present, acculturated, and working in Havana. What kinds of discussions took place in the barracoons of Havana about urgent matters of common interest, and through what means of communication? Where are we? What kind of place is Havana? Where are we going? What will happen to us after we get there? Is there a place to which we might escape?
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Something happened in Havana to create terror among the
Amistad
Africans. Clues may be found in commentary by Madden, who lived in Havana and was roundly despised there for his abolitionist principles. He said repeatedly after the rebellion that

The Spanish ambassador to the United States, Angel Calderón de la Barca, had stated in his first letter about the case, dated September 6, 1839, that the “internal tranquility” of Cuba depended on proper punishment “to prevent the commission of similar offenses” on the island. The
Amistad
rebels themselves shared the view that they would be executed if they were returned to Havana. The most likely speculation is that sometime during their stay in Havana, while they awaited sale and transport to another part of the island, they witnessed the execution of rebellious slaves, perhaps their very own shipmates from the
Teçora
, at “El Horcón” (place of the gallows), near the harbor. The
Amistad
Africans would tremble at the very mention of the city’s name ever after.
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N
ight had fallen, and Havana’s streetlamps cast a golden glow on the prisoners, now dressed as sailors, as they trudged toward the waterfront. None of them had a clear idea about where they were going nor why they were clothed in mariners’ slops. Their captors herded them along, speaking quietly, even furtively, to them in the Spanish language not a single one of them could understand. After ten days in the city’s infamous barracoons, they were, on this Friday evening, June 28, 1839, entering a new phase in their transatlantic ordeal.
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The white men guiding their way were nervous. The prisoners did not know why. Later they would learn that their captors feared the British vessel
Romney
, a large fourth-rate man-of-war (1,227 tons) anchored in the harbor and to be avoided at all costs, lest its soldiers and sailors seize the enslaved and liberate them, which a recent treaty between Britain and Spain had allowed them to do. The Afro-Cuban sailor Antonio recalled, “There were Spanish and Yankee men of war in the port, and English too. There were many vessels there in pursuit of slavers.” This is why they were boarded in disguise and under cover of darkness.
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When they arrived at the dock they could barely make out their intended vessel, which was anchored several hundred yards off shore, “about a musket shot” away. José Ruiz helped to load his recently purchased adult male prisoners into lighters to carry them to a vessel with a rather cruel name:
La Amistad
, Spanish for “Friendship.” Sailors
rowed one boatload of disoriented captives after another out to the schooner, driving them up a rope ladder and over the rail to the main deck. Fifteen minutes after the last group of men came aboard, the sailors brought aboard three little girls and a boy, who arrived with their master, fifty-eight year-old Don Pedro Montes.

As they went aboard, the Africans would have noted how everything about the
Amistad
was smaller than the
Teçora
, on which they had made the Middle Passage. The vessel was modest in size—the schooner possessed a seventy-ton carrying capacity compared to one hundred fifty to two hundred tons for the brig. So too were their own numbers smaller: now only fifty-three compared to the five hundred to six hundred men, women, and children who had boarded the original slaver. The
Amistad
’s crew was tiny, too. Captain Ramón Ferrer commanded only four others, including the sailor and cook Celestino, a twenty-six-year-old mulatto from Puerto Rico, and the teenage Afro-Cuban sailor/cabin boy Antonio, both of whom Ferrer called his slaves. Two sailors, Manuel Padilla of Catalonia, Spain, and Jacinto Verdaque of Santo Domingo, would work the sails, steer the vessel, and keep an armed guard over the prisoners.

The well-educated young gentleman Ruiz and the older, less genteel Montes were not part of the crew, but they were unmistakably men of power in the larger scheme of things. Having bought the forty-nine adult male captives directly from the captain of the
Teçora
, Ruiz planned to take them to a burgeoning region called Puerto Príncipe and sell them to local sugar planters. Montes had purchased the children: Margru, Kagne, Teme, and Kale. Ruiz and Montes seemed so powerful, the captives could not easily tell who was actually in charge of the vessel.
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La Amistad

The
Amistad
was a long, low schooner, a popular type of two-masted craft the captives may have seen on the Gallinas Coast or indeed most anywhere around the Atlantic in the early nineteenth century. “La Amistad” was written on its square stern. The bottom was painted
green, above which was a white streak. The upper works were black. The vessel was sixty-four feet long, nineteen feet nine inches wide, with a golden eagle on its prow and gilt stars on both sides. Built in Cuba of high-quality “West Indian hard wood”—the deck and hull bottom were made of red Spanish cedar, the sides of mahogany—this “sharp clipper” also had copper sheathing, with iron fastenings, to protect the hull against the shipworms and mollusks that routinely destroyed sailing ships in tropical waters. Captain Ferrer had ordered an awning to be built over the deck to protect the crew and human cargo from the blazing sun until the time for sailing came.
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The
Amistad
was essentially a coastal trader, but it had made longer voyages to Jamaica, and the coppered hull suggests the possibility of a transatlantic slaving voyage or two, as such protection was expensive and not common among vessels built solely for local and regional commerce. Better known for speed than carrying capacity, the schooner could outrun most British ships policing the slave trade and hence became a preferred vessel after the commerce in bodies had been outlawed in 1807 in Great Britain and 1808 in the United States. As the sailor Antonio testified in U.S. District Court in January 1840, “The Sch. Amistad had carried slaves before—every two months made trip.” The temporary awning was common to slave ships.
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Because Captain Ferrer had run an advertisement in
Noticioso y Lucera
seeking passengers and cargo a week before the voyage, the hold of roughly 6,600 cubic feet contained a big, well-sorted cargo. Manufactured goods made up a large part, many of them destined for use on sugar plantations: “6 mill rollers, 8 cogg wheels, 6 piece of iron, one box of iron wedges,” as well as iron castings, and a “mill for grinding sugar cane.” Boxes and bales of fabrics and clothes were also abundant: silks, crepes, calicoes, ginghams, gauze, German and Silesian linens, muslins, and “50 pairs of shirts and pantaloons.” Other items were for everyday use: soap, glass knobs, crockery, toys, needles, iron pots, “48 rolls of wire,” and leather goods of several kinds: saddles, bridles, and holsters. The
Amistad
was a floating general store of plantation life. As on any vessel involved in nefarious activities, the captain made sure to have an assortment of national flags, “half a dozen”
of them, to be used as the occasion demanded. Another especially important part of the cargo was “1 box containing 4 percussion guns.” These weapons, probably produced in Britain, represented a new and recent improvement over previous models in that they allowed quick firing and were not damaged by water and dampness—two features that would have made them very useful on a vessel like the
Amistad
. The sailors carried muskets to overawe the enslaved.

The hold also held a huge amount of food: six hundred pounds of rice, the main staple of life to Mende people and others who lived on what was sometimes called the “Grain Coast” of West Africa, as well as substantial quantities of bread, fruit, olives, Spanish beans, sweet potatoes, sausages, and “fresh beef.” Ten barrels of biscuit, 480 bunches of bananas, five hundred pounds of jerked beef, and three dozen fowl stored in hen coops rounded out the extensive edible holdings. There was much less available on board to drink: fourteen demijohns of wine, not to be consumed on the voyage but rather sold at its end, and only six casks of water. As it happened, in the days leading up to the voyage, ship captains in Havana were having “great difficulty of finding a sufficient quantity of water casks,” as one of them put it, a shortage that would have consequences.
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