The Empire of Necessity (6 page)

But they were in a bad state, emaciated, their blue smocks having fallen off in tatters. “They were completely naked,” Mordeille told del Pino. He didn’t have the money to clothe or feed the captives and in fact was hoping to sell them so he could pay his crew, make repairs to his ships, and stock provisions. Nor could he count on Dr. Wallace, who had jumped ship and escaped. Mordeille told del Pino that he dreaded heading into the open sea without the surgeon.

“In the name of humanity,” Mordeille implored, in language the viceroy later said he thought exaggerated, “I ask permission to sell the slaves.”

*   *   *

The viceroy stalled on the request. With his drooping eyes and aquiline nose, the only angular feature on flesh otherwise plump and bald, the seventy-five-year-old del Pino didn’t look like a crusader. But he was committed to holding America for Spain. When he had taken office three years earlier, he had launched a campaign to stop contraband, which continued to flow in and out, untaxed. One of the reasons he was reluctant to let Mordeille’s slaves come ashore was because he knew that the corsair worked with some of Río de la Plata’s most powerful merchant-smugglers, exactly the people whom his antismuggling efforts were targeting. They had made the viceroy their enemy and he didn’t want to do anything that might make them more money.

And everybody was complaining about how black the two cities had become, troubled that “slaves of all ages and sexes were living together in close quarters” in dens of “lasciviousness and vice.” True, everybody wanted slaves. Most well-off women wouldn’t attend mass without a black slave in tow and most wouldn’t give birth without a black or mulatta nursemaid. Even poor families owned slaves.

But there was no shortage of them. There were about ten big sailing ships moored in the bay around the time Mordeille made his request. Many, maybe most, held slaves. The frigate
Venus
had recently come in, sent by French colonists on the British-besieged Île de France in the Indian Ocean who hoped to trade the 198 Africans on board for desperately needed wheat. The French naval ship
L’Egypte
was about to appear with two more Liverpool prizes in tow, the
Active
and the
Mercury
, carrying 441 Africans. And just last December, Mordeille had brought in another prize, the
Ariadne
, a 130-ton snow-rigged British brig, with its hold full of Africans, gunpowder, and bullets. (All told, within a few months of either side of Mordeille’s arrival, thousands of Africans were disembarked in Montevideo, likely including most of all the rest of the
Tryal
rebels.)
²

Del Pino also had to consider the rising violence, including incidents of slaves murdering their masters. The crime was called parricide, or
parricidio
, in Spanish, since killing one’s master was considered the moral and legal equivalent of killing one’s father or killing the king. The offense was still rare. But not as rare as it once had been. In 1799, the gardener Joaquín José de Muxica was stabbed in the back by his slave, Pedro, who was subsequently hung for his crime. In early 1803, two slaves, Simón and Joaquín, were hung for executing an infantry captain, Manuel Correa, in his home outside of Montevideo, along with six others, including the officer’s wife and son. In response to these and other crimes, Montevideo’s city council erected a permanent gallows in its plaza, a warning against the “pride and audacity,” the “insubordinate spirit,” and the “excessive hubris that blacks” were increasingly displaying.
³

In the minds of many local Spaniards, these little parricides all stemmed from one source: the parricide of parricides, Louis XVI’s execution in Paris. A few years earlier, a rumor had spread through Buenos Aires that slaves, Frenchmen, and seditious Spaniards were plotting an uprising. An investigation, led by a zealous slaver who presided over excruciatingly painful torture sessions, failed to find anything other than general discontent. The inquiry did reveal, however, snippets of conversations suggesting that slaves were paying close attention to events in revolutionary France:
The viceroy will be beheaded because he is a thieving dog
.
The French had good reason to execute their king
. And fueling the fear that the guillotining had a start date:
On Good Friday, we will all be French
.
⁴

This was in 1795, when Spain was allied with monarchical Great Britain against revolutionary France, so discontent was easy to quash. But by 1804, Madrid had broken with London and sided with Paris. Now, the city’s poor could casually mention the guillotine and still sound royalist.

Some Spanish officials blamed the cities’ problems on French privateers, whose crews combined the worst of sailor boisterousness and revolutionary insolence. “Their arrival isn’t appreciated,” wrote one administrator; they “come from a nation governed by principles opposed to ours in matters of religion and politics.” Not long after these remarks and just a few months prior to Mordeille’s most recent arrival, scores of enslaved and free Montevidean blacks, apparently after having spoken with black Haitian sailors working on a French ship anchored in the harbor, fled to a river island north of the city, where they proclaimed an independent republic. They named it “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” and decreed that it would be governed by the “Law of the French.” The island republic was quickly suppressed. But slaves continued to run away.
⁵

The subversion wasn’t just political. For centuries, starting with the Conquest, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church restricted not just production and trade but consumption as well. Clothing, for instance, was understood to be a reflection of the grandeur of God’s earthly estate, in all its Baroque hierarchal glory. As such, dress was regulated according to rank and race: gold, pearls, velvet, and silk for the better born of purer blood, cotton and simple wool for the king’s coarser subjects. Spain policed the “outrageous excess of the clothes worn by blacks, mulattos, Indians, and mestizos of both sexes,” as one Spanish administrator wrote, complaining about the “frequent thefts committed in order to be able to afford such expensive attires.”
*
But as society became more commercialized, as Mordeille and other privateers brought in their handkerchiefs, lace skirts, fans, mirrors, perfume, combs, and rosaries, what one wore increasingly became a matter not of heavenly assigned status but of personal taste. Slaves, who were sold as commodities and put to work as laborers, were also customers. In Buenos Aires and Montevideo, as throughout the colonies, they, along with others in the poorer classes, began to sew velvet fringes onto their dresses, drape themselves in silk, and put on pearls and gold earrings and “dress like the Spaniards and great men of the country.” The line between appearance and substance continued to blur.
⁶

Del Pino took all these considerations in mind. The last thing he wanted was hundreds of starving slaves dumped onto Montevideo’s beach, especially starving slaves who had just spent sixty or so days listening to pirates singing the “Marseillaise.” What del Pino did want was Mordeille out of the harbor as soon as possible. And for that to happen, his ships needed to be restocked and repaired. That cost money, which Mordeille claimed he didn’t have. So the viceroy told the Frenchman he could sell seventy slaves but he had to leave with the rest.

*   *   *

Mordeille had a fallback plan, which he had already worked out with local confederates, in case his request for permission to sell all the
Neptune
’s slaves wasn’t approved. The scheme, as one of del Pino’s subordinates would put it, was part of the standard “repertoire of lies and tricks” the privateer and his allies “used to pursue their sordid personal interests.”

The plot was simple. Mordeille would legally sell the seventy slaves to Andrés Nicolás Orgera, a Lima-based merchant who was at the moment in Montevideo. They would be boarded on the
Santa Eulalia
, a frigate then in transit from Cádiz, Spain, bound for Lima. Port taxes would be paid and customs forms filled out. Then the
Eulalia
and the
Neptune
would depart Montevideo within a day of each other, rendezvous at a beach on one of Río de la Plata’s islands, and secretly transfer all the rest of the Africans save for forty young men.

The
Neptune
would get a makeover. Its privateer crew would be switched for Portuguese merchant sailors, its sails barque rigged in the Spanish style to make it look less British. Its hull and figurehead—its lion without a crown—would be painted black. Renamed the
Aguila
, the
Eagle
, it would sail to a small cove town forty miles east of Buenos Aires. There the Liverpool slaver would be sold, along with its remaining forty Africans, to a new owner, Don Benito Olazábal, one of Buenos Aires’s leading merchants.

Mordeille would have to wait a month or so until the
Santa Eulalia
arrived from Cádiz before the plan could be put into motion. In the meantime, he occupied himself with supervising repairs on his vessels. The
Hope
had been about fifteen years in service, the last three the hard life of a privateer. The hull creaked badly and leaked constantly, and the ship’s pumps needed to be worked without rest to keep it afloat. The
Neptune
too was showing signs of wear from its many trips from Liverpool to West Africa to the Caribbean and back again.

One of the advantages of Montevideo’s sheltered bay, with its marked high and low tides, was that his two vessels could be careened there. That is, they could be towed close to the shore and left to fall gently into the bay’s soft mud bottom as the water went out with the tide and then tilted to one side. Short of having access to a dry dock, this was the best way Modeille’s men could scrape the barnacles off the
Hope
and
Neptune
, hull, recaulk their seams, and paint their hull boards with a mixture of tallow, tar, and sulfur to protect the wood against worms. The operation required some skill to carry out, but Mordeille could count on Montevideo’s experienced corps of carpenters and shipwrights. They first would remove the sails, yards, and riggings from the masts of the two ships and brace the heels of their decks and inner hulls with props. Then they would ready supports to catch the masts as the ships were let down, using heavy rope threaded through portholes as pulleys.

Before any of this work could begin, the vessels had to be emptied. Anything that couldn’t be lashed down had to be removed, including their cannons, cargo, and captives. The British prisoners were transported to a nearby French brig, where they were kept for a time before being released. The slaves were sent in lighters, about forty at a time, to shore.

4

BODY AND SOUL

The West Africans were taken to a place called
el caserío de los negros
—“the Negro village”—where slaves waiting to be sold or transferred to Buenos Aires were housed. It was on the western flank of the bay, just behind the beach and upwind from well-kept Montevideo, with its roof gardens. It was squalid, consisting of a large compound made of thick adobe walls and not much else, though when city officials had dedicated it a few decades earlier they did so to the “pious mind of the sovereign, who does nothing but shower his subjects with tender love.” An open pit was used as a latrine and rat-infested garbage was piled high. Under the old monopoly or licensing system, Spanish officials could occasionally compel the companies who ran the slave trade to clean up their pens.
*
But with slavery now liberalized, it was difficult to hold any one slaver responsible for the filth, and it fell to the city to maintain the “village,” and about the only thing it did on a timely basis was to bury corpses, in a patch of land just outside the walls.
¹

For Mordeille and the merchants he served, Montevideo was a central hub in an expanding Atlantic economy. For untold numbers of African slaves, however, it was their terminus. Over the course of the next few weeks, while they waited in the
caserío
to see what the next step of their ordeal would be, fourteen more of the West Africans put on the
Neptune
at Bonny would die, adding to the fifty-one who didn’t survive the Atlantic crossing. Death was everywhere around them.

*   *   *

Just a few days after the
Neptune
showed up, a Portuguese brig named
Belisario
dropped anchor. Of the 257 Africans boarded in Mozambique, ninety-one had died and most of those still alive were dying. Then came
La Luisa
, another Portuguese ship from Mozambique. Nearly a third of its original consignment of three hundred Africans had perished during the crossing. By this point, more and more slaves were arriving from the other side of Africa, from its eastern coast on the Indian Ocean. It took almost four months to make the trip, around the Cape of Good Hope and then running against the South Atlantic’s westerlies, an agonizingly long and often lethal voyage.
²

Along the way, Africans died from contagious diseases or from the miseries of crossing the ocean in a claustrophobically small space. Some went blind. Others lost their minds. Even when the circus followed the best practices of the early nineteenth century, the holds were never cleaned fast enough to counter the accumulating strata of excrement, vomit, blood, and pus. With poor ventilation, baking under the equatorial sun, cargo bays festered and putrefied. Slave ships could be smelled from miles away. “The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies, and by being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes, which generally carries off great numbers of them,” observed a British slave ship surgeon in the 1780s. When bad weather forced the portholes and hatches to be closed for a long period of time, the floors of the holds would become so covered with “blood and mucus” that they “resembled a slaughter-house.” “It is not,” said the surgeon, “in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”
³