The Lionkeeper of Algiers by Des Ekin

Author:Des Ekin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2022-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

III

• 19 •

Scipio

In the fall of 1793, an African American seaman named Scipio Jackson stood on the deck of the brig Minerva and watched the familiar wharves of New York recede into the sea mist. He was on his way to Leghorn in Italy and hoped to return to America within a couple of months. However, fate had decreed that he was never to see Manhattan, Long Island, or the Hudson River again.

Scipio was a Black freeman in a city that still practiced race-dependent chattel slavery. We know little about his background, but it is almost certain that Scipio himself was formerly an enslaved person. One modern historian has put forward evidence to that effect, and it seems more likely than not. “Scipio” is a typical slave name. White owners often named their enslaved males after classical Roman figures such as Brutus, Augustus, Caesar, and the military general Scipio Africanus. (Thomas Jefferson, for instance, owned a slave named Jupiter.) But assuming he had been enslaved, how could Scipio have gained his freedom?

There is a convincing explanation. During the Revolutionary War, the British who occupied New York offered freedom to enslaved people from other areas, provided, of course, they were able to escape and make it across the line. Thousands of fugitives took up the offer (including, as it happened, two owned by George Washington); Jackson was most likely among them.

After independence, the position of these Black freemen in New York became so precarious that thousands left for Nova Scotia, but even then, the public mood in the city was gradually shifting toward abolition. By the time of our story, a third of the Black population in New York State was free. Scipio Jackson was among them, and by 1793 he had signed up as a mariner on the Minerva and was headed across the Atlantic.

The Minerva was a small workhorse of a vessel with a minimal crew of just five mariners (including Scipio himself) serving under a captain named Joseph Ingraham and a mate named Edward Smith, both from New York. The journey across the Atlantic and through the strait passed without incident, and by early November, the brig had unloaded in Leghorn and taken on a new cargo of mixed goods, or “sundries,” for the voyage back to New York. Despite the offhand description, it was actually quite a rich cargo: wine, oil, fruit, and Italian marble.

Leghorn was a nerve center of international trade, so Captain Ingraham was bound to have picked up the news buzzing around port: that the Barbary wolf packs had been unleashed a few weeks before and were scouring the Mediterranean and the Atlantic for American ships. It’s possible that Ingraham thought he was safe at this time of year: after all, the corsairs didn’t like braving the unpredictable winters and traditionally laid up their ships in November. What he didn’t realize was that the dey had decided to milk this year’s American vulnerability for all it was worth and had approved an extra-late foray into the Mediterranean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.