The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Grandin Greg

Author:Grandin, Greg [Grandin, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

21

DECEPTION

The Tryal came down along the rough, windy side of Santa María Island hard around its southern head, rocking and pitching. Only by luck did Cerreño give a wide berth to a low ledge that ran about a mile out from the point, to land full stop in a quiet bay about half a league from the Perseverance, bow to stern.

Falling in with the Duxbury brig jolted the ship’s voyagers out of their trancelike state. For fifty-three days since the uprising, Cerreño had sailed undetected, avoiding the busy sea lanes between Valparaiso and Lima crowded with merchant vessels and naval ships. Two West African women, along with their two babies, had died of hunger and thirst, leaving a total of eighty-seven people on board: sixty-eight West Africans, their three allies—Joaquín, Francisco, and José—ten surviving sailors, four cabin boys, one passenger left from Alejandro de Aranda’s entourage, and Captain Cerreño. It had been a month since the rebels threw Aranda into the sea, and his murder had eased tensions. As did the pledge Cerreño signed to take the rebels to Senegal.

But the situation was dire. Food was short and water gone. There would have been dew in the evening, almost as dense as rain, though not enough to keep the travelers hydrated. After the deaths of the two women and their children, desperation had turned to stupor.1

The Tryal was broad-beamed, built like many of New Bedford’s oak whaling and trading ships for seaworthiness. The voyagers, though, had eaten their way through much of the food merchandise that had served as ballast, the casks of lard, bushels of wheat, boxes of biscuits, chickens, pigs, and cows that weighted the ship and helped keep it steady. And they had run into a bad storm shortly after Aranda’s murder. Waves tossed the ship like a log and water poured over the coamings into the hatches, more than the West Africans, pumping furiously, could kick back out. Cerreño had no choice but to jettison much of the rest of the ship’s heavy cargo, including a load of timber from southern Chile, overboard.

Because the ship was lighter and riding higher on the waves, less water breached the Tryal’s gunwales. But its pitch increased. The ship was already worn and leaky when Cerreño had taken possession of it in early 1803, and it had grown worse with over a year of hard use and poor care. Now it was nearly ruined, its sails threadbare and its rigging a tangle. Long braids of kelp draped the vessel’s bow and barnacles encrusted its hull. “A ship grows foul very fast in these seas,” a sailor wrote of the waters in which the Tryal traveled.2

* * *

The morning the Tryal rounded Santa María’s southern head, Amasa Delano was lying in his bunk thinking about the line that separated sport from insubordination. The Perseverance had dropped anchor four days earlier to wait for Samuel, who still hadn’t appeared, and soon thereafter Delano cast eight men he had discovered plotting against him off his ship, putting them on the island.

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