The Amistad Rebellion (13 page)

The rebels had even more recent and relevant experience in warfare: they had engaged in an uprising aboard the slave ship
Teçora
. Their reputation had followed them ashore into the barracoons of Havana, where Captain Ferrer of the
Amistad
was “warned, previous to sailing, to keep a look out for the negroes, as they had attempted to rise and take the vessel in which they were brought from Africa.” That rebellion failed. Some of its makers may have been executed at El Horcón; others would get another chance to seize a vessel and free themselves. They studied the ship and whispered their findings to each other in the hold. They wanted to know how the vessel worked (some had probably worked on the
Teçora
), how many were the crew, what were their habits, what were their arms. (The crew was small; they kept no regular watch; they had muskets, pistols, and whips.) The warriors saw that the prospects for rebellion aboard the
Amistad
were much greater than they had been on the
Teçora
.
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Their hearts aflame over Celestino’s threat, the Africans met as a kind of displaced but reconstituted floating Poro Society, far from its normal meeting places inland in West Africa, to “consider” the situation. United by the “fictive kinship” that grew ever stronger out of their common ordeal at Lomboko, on the
Teçora
, in the Havana barracoons, and now on the
Amistad
, they made a fateful collective life-and-death decision: together they would rise up, throw off their slavery, regain
their freedom, seize the vessel, and try to sail it home to Sierra Leone. At the end of the palaver, everyone had “one word WAR!! and war immediately.” The Poro had created
ngo yela
—“one word” or “unity”.
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The decision made, the Africans now faced a literally iron dilemma. How would they get out of the manacles, shackles, neck-rings, chains, and padlocks that rendered them unable to move about the ship? Cinqué later remarked that “the chain which connected the iron collars about their necks, was fastened at the end by a padlock, and that this was first broken and afterwards the other irons.” Kinna also stated, “We break off our chains,” but he added a second, somewhat different description of what they did: Cinqué found a loose nail on deck and used it to pick the central padlock. Whether the locks were broken or picked, it was significant that two of the forty-nine enslaved men were blacksmiths, who knew the properties of iron intimately from their work. Sessi was described as “a blacksmith, having learnt that trade of his brother; he made axes, hoes, and knives from iron obtained in the Mendi country.” When speed was crucial to avoiding detection, getting so many people out of irons was necessarily a communal undertaking. Soon a substantial number of men were free of their chains and ready to fly into action, awaiting Cinqué’s “signal for them to rise upon their vile masters and the crew.”
²⁶

Facing the prospect of a horrific death at the hands of the white flesh-eaters, they would risk a different kind of death to escape their captors’ bloody clutches. At four a.m. the ship was in almost total darkness. Everyone was asleep except the sailor at the helm. Cinqué, Faquorna, Moru, and Kimbo climbed up from the hold through the hatchway and onto the main deck. It is not clear whether they had to break open the grating or whether it had been left unlocked by mistake. They snuck quietly toward Celestino—not Captain Ferrer—as the first and primary object of their wrath. He was sleeping in the ship’s longboat, which lay in the waist, on the larboard side, near the cabin. Along the way Cinqué picked up a belaying pin, or handspike, used to turn the ship’s windlass, and his mates did likewise, quietly gathering weapons from the main deck. They surrounded Celestino and clubbed him repeatedly with hard, crushing blows. Fuli later
recalled, “The cook was killed first—was killed by Jingua [Cinqué] with a stick, while lying in the boat.” Burna agreed: “He saw Cinguez strike the cook with a club, probably a handspike.” During the beating, Celestino did not cry out, did not groan, did not make any sound at all, according to Antonio. The only sounds to be heard in the damp night air above the rolling of the sea and the creaking of the ship were the thuds of wood on flesh and bone.
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Now began “the whooh,” as Burna called the chaos of open rebellion that engulfed the small main deck. The commotion woke up the captain, who was sleeping on a mattress not far away, as well as the rest of the crew and the two passengers, Ruiz and Montes, who were in the cabin. Ferrer called out, “Attack them, for they have killed the cook.” Amid the “confusion and uproar,” as Ruiz remembered it, they scrambled frantically in the dark for arms, grabbing whatever was close at hand; there was no time to load pistols or muskets. Captain Ferrer seized a dagger and a club and fought furiously to defend his vessel from capture. The two sailors, Manuel and Jacinto, who were supposed to be the armed guard to prevent what was now happening before their very eyes, threw themselves into the battle, one with a club, the other with no weapon at all. Montes armed himself with a knife and a pump handle, screaming all the while at the Africans to stop, to be still. The unarmed sailor yelled to Montes to get the dead cook’s knife and give it to him. Ruiz grabbed an oar as he scrambled from his passenger’s quarters, shouting “No! No!” as he came on deck. Ruiz then “stood before the caboose and halloed to the slaves to be quiet and to go down into the hold.” They ignored the command of the (now former) master; indeed, more Africans escaped their chains and joined the fray, wielding fearsome machetes that had been found by the little girls, who had had free range of the vessel. Seeing that the situation was far beyond exhortation, Ruiz called to Montes to kill some of the rebels in order to frighten the rest and to restore order. He believed, wrongly, that the Africans were all “great cowards.”
²⁸

At first the crew and passengers were able to drive the rebels from amidships beyond the foremast, and at this point Captain Ferrer, who desperately hoped that this was a rebellion of the belly, commanded
Antonio to fetch some sea biscuit and throw it among the rebels in the hope of distracting them. He knew they were hungry—hunger had been a complaint since the voyage began. Antonio did as his master commanded, but the insurgents, he explained, “would not touch it.” Antonio himself opted for neutrality: he climbed up the mainstays, where he would watch the struggle unfold, safely from above.
²⁹

Several of the Africans were reluctant to attack the captain until Cinqué exhorted them to do so. A small group formed a “phalanx” to surround him, machetes in hand. As the battle raged, Captain Ferrer killed a man named Duevi and mortally wounded a second, unnamed rebel, which infuriated the other Africans and made them fight harder. He also wounded others, as Kale recalled: “Then captain kill one man with knife and cut Mendi people plenty.” Two of the rebels attacked Montes with an oar, which he grabbed and used to hold them off. Montes wrestled with the men until one of the sailors cried out that he should let it go or they would kill him. At this point, a blow to his arm caused Montes to drop his knife. He groped desperately around the deck in an effort to find it. Ruiz continued to scream at the rebels to stop fighting and go below, but they ignored him, soon disarming him of his own makeshift weapon.
³⁰

Suddenly the tide of battle turned—red. An insurgent wielding one of the machetes slashed one of the sailors, who cried out “Murder!” He and his crewmate saw not only defeat but certain death in the ever-larger mob, now armed with machetes, so they threw a canoe overboard—they would not have had time to lower the longboat, which was in any case heavy with the battered corpse of Celestino. They jumped into the water, leaving the remaining five to battle ten times their number. Of one of the sailors, Kinna recalled: “He swim—swim long time—may be swim more—we not know.” The two sailors, cut and bleeding, eventually crawled into the canoe and began paddling for land. They had about eighteen miles to cover and it was by no means certain they would make it.
³¹

Someone now gave Montes “a powerful blow on the head with a cane knife, and he fell senseless on the deck.” Stunned, with another deep wound on his arm and “faint from the loss of blood,” he roused
himself, staggered from the battle scene, and fell headlong down the hatchway. Once below, he remained conscious enough to crawl into a space between two barrels and hide beneath a canvas sail. It was a frail hope against death.
³²

On the main deck, Cinqué and the other leaders of the rebellion now surrounded Captain Ferrer in a fury of flashing blades. Faquorna apparently struck the first two blows; Cinqué struck the last one. Antonio testified, “Sinqua killed Capt with cane knife—see it with my eyes.”
³³
When the time for the death blow came, one of the brave combatants, Kimbo, proved to be squeamish: “When the Captain of the schooner was killed, he could not see it done, but looked another way.” Slashed several times on his face and body, the captain collapsed on the deck, bloody, crumpled, and lifeless. The warriors danced, yelled, and beheaded the captain in their customary rituals of war called
kootoo
.
³⁴

The rebels now went in search of Montes, whose ragged, heavy breathing gave away his hiding place below deck. An enraged Cinqué found him and swung at him twice with his cane knife, narrowly missing. Montes begged for his life, to no avail as Cinqué prepared to swing again, until Burna stayed his arm. Cinqué and Burna then carried Montes up to the main deck, where he saw Ruiz, “seated upon the hen coop with both hands tied.” He, too, was pleading for his life. The rebels laced the two Spaniards together, “making at the same time horrible gestures” and threatening to kill them. Someone dragged young Antonio down from the stays and tied him to the two other prisoners. After a little while, Ruiz recalled, the insurgents “made signs that they would not hurt me.” The new masters of the vessel then locked their prisoners below as they went through the captain’s cabin and also familiarized themselves with the cargo.
³⁵

With two dead, two overboard, and three disarmed, bound, and begging for their lives, an eerie silence came over the bloodstained deck. The rebellion was over. The Mende way of war had carried the day. Mende warriors always used knives—the cutlass at home, the very similar cane knife aboard the
Amistad
. They used typical Mende military tactics: encouraged by a moonless night they launched a surprise
guerilla attack, using war shouts and swinging their blades wildly in a successful effort to make their enemies abandon position. The goal of warfare was not death, but rather capture of people and place, and both were quickly achieved aboard the vessel. The social world of the
Amistad
had been turned upside down. The captain and cook had been killed, the sailors had been forced to jump overboard, and the slaveholders were now prisoners. Those who had once been slaves had won their freedom in a desperate armed gamble.

A New Order

Cinqué the warrior apparently remained in something of a rage for a time after the rebellion had formally ended. Antonio testified that Cinqúe threatened to kill him, Ruiz, and Montes. He even threatened to kill Burna for defending Ruiz and Montes, partly, it seems, because he feared Burna was conspiring with them to return the vessel to Havana. Ruiz noted that Antonio had a special skill that kept him alive: “They would have killed him, but he acted as interpreter between us, as he understood both languages.” It also helped that Antonio had become good friends with one of the teenage captives, the “stout built youth” Ndamma, who protected him. Montes was forced “to fall on his knees and kiss the feet of the ring leader before he would spare his life.”
³⁶

Burna gave his own account of the clash with Cinqué: “I say where whitey man? where old man? (meaning Montez) where sailor man? Cinguez say he will kill ’em; Cinguez want me tie old man; I say no—you cut off my head first—Cinguez give me money in cloth; I no take it; I tell him he no hurt young massa, (Ruiz) he say no, he kill old man; I say no, I take him off.” Burna won this heated debate, as Ruiz and Montes lived to tell the tale of the uprising. The warriors did not annihilate all of their enemies.
³⁷

The following morning, the rebels were in a state of jubilation. Montes recalled, “They were all glad, the next day, at what had happened.” Neither he nor Ruiz, however, were sure what had actually transpired amid the chaos. They saw that the captain, cook, and two
sailors were missing and they supposed all had been killed. Antonio, who had seen everything, told them that the first two had been killed, but the others had escaped in a canoe.
³⁸

The rebels, led by Cinqué, Grabeau, and Burna, locked Ruiz and Montes in irons, many unused sets of which they suddenly had at their disposal. When the slaveholders complained of their chains, Cinqué howled in righteous fury: “You say irons good enough for nigger slave; and if they good enough for slave, they are good enough for Spaniards, too.” Ruiz and Montes were likewise allowed little to drink, likely the same half teacupful of water twice a day that not long ago had been the portion of the Africans. Again they complained of their treatment and again Cinqué pointed out the contradictions: “You say water enough for nigger slave; so water enough for Spaniards.” The object lesson continued for two days, in order to give Ruiz and Montes “a taste of their own cruelty toward the slaves,” said Kinna. Thereafter the chains were removed and they were given food and water in the same proportions as everyone else. They were threatened many times, but never again beaten or harmed, as Ruiz and Montes themselves admitted.
³⁹

The morning after the rebellion Cinqué and Faquorna threw the headless body of Captain Ferrer overboard and washed the deck of his blood. The rebels released Ruiz and Montes from their irons, stripping the latter of his clothes, which were badly stained by the blood from his wounds. They then “took from him the key of his trunk and brought him clean clothes, which they made him put on.” A new phase of life aboard the
Amistad
had begun.
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