Chesapeake (95 page)

When officers came aboard, it took them only a few minutes to realize that they were on a ship which had suffered mutiny; belowdecks they uncovered the seventeen prisoners, and a tale of horror began to unfold.

‘We were sailing peacefully westward.’

‘Where to?’

‘Cuba.’

‘A hold full of slaves?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Acquired where?’

‘Arab slavers had marched them into Luanda.’

‘I think you sent shore parties into Africa to capture them.’

‘Oh no, sir! On my honor. The Portuguese sold them to us. You know, the bishop on the red chair who blesses them before we take them aboard.’

‘How many?’

‘Five hundred and seventeen.’

‘Good God! We find only four hundred and thirty-one.’

‘You know niggers. They do die fearfully.’ The spokesman saw that when this was interpreted, it created an unfavorable impression, so he quickly added, ‘And don’t forget, many were killed in the mutiny.’

Yes, a major ship had been taken on the high seas, and all its officers slain. This was a matter of the gravest import; its ramifications could be evaluated only by a court of law. So the captain of the
Bordeaux
placed a cadre of men aboard the
Ariel
to trail along until both ships could reach a French port, but only two days’ progress had been made when the British cruiser
Bristol
hove into sight, identified the
Ariel
as a slave ship the British had been trying for many years to arrest, and demanded of the French that she be turned over to them.

An international incident threatened, but the two captains who had faced each other in distant wars realized that this was an impasse which must be handled by compromise, and a sensible one was worked out over port and pudding in the
Bristol:
the French had captured the ship and it was clearly their prize, and if the court dealing with mutiny awarded it to them, the sleek clipper would become part of the French war fleet. The mutinous slaves, who had murdered not less than nineteen American seamen, including four officers, would be turned over to the British, who had a traditional interest in suppressing the slave trade and who could be trusted to handle this complicated case intelligently. The seventeen American survivors would, of course, be set free by the French, but they would be retained by the English as witnesses in the trial of the rebellious slaves, and later as defendants themselves against the charge of slaving.

The
Ariel
did enter the French navy, where her high degree of speed and austerity of design captivated all who served in her. The infamous ’tween-deck was removed, and the main deck was raised slightly to accommodate eight carronades. She sailed the Atlantic for years, often on station to interdict the slave trade, and in due course made a return journey to the very town in which she had been built.

The slaves were returned to their chains and transported by the
Bristol
to Plymouth, where on June 13, 1833, an extraordinary court delivered an extraordinary verdict:

This harsh decision raised, as might have been expected, an outcry in both England and France, but the objections came from only a limited
number of critics. In the former country the year 1832 was one of vigorous political reform, always opposed by the grand Duke of Wellington, and also one in which the anti-slavery movement gained the momentum which would within the year prohibit the ownership of slaves throughout the British Empire. The citizenry was so preoccupied with doing good for blacks in general that it had no energy left to protect the rights of specific blacks.

In France, the nation was bending every effort to digest the peculiar behavior of their new king, Louis Philippe; nominated by the radicals because he was a revolutionary, he quickly became the darling of the conservatives because he had always been at heart a reactionary. Alternately confused and elated, the citizens of France could not care what happened to a gang of slaves, especially since their aborted action enabled France to gain a fine warship.

On June 15, 1833, Cudjo and four hundred and eleven other blacks were marched out of Plymouth jail and loaded onto a British ship bound for Cuba, where in a large shed at dockside they were put up for sale.

Word had circulated, of course, that these were the mutineers who had murdered the crew of the
Ariel
so an ugly fascination attended their sale, and more buyers than usual pressed in upon the auctioneer, but they had come to gawk, not bid. Plantation owners were loath to bring onto their land slaves known to cause trouble, and speculators feared that none could be smuggled into America, where an uprising of slaves led by the preacher Nat Turner had ended in the slaughter of fifty-five Virginians. American slaveholders were terrified.

At the sale, Brazilian traders bought the lot except for six of the strongest young men. After the most careful inspection, these were picked off by a thin American who wore a white linen suit buttoned almost to the chin. He sucked constantly upon a silver toothpick and spoke softly in the manner of a gentleman: ‘Name’s T.T. Arbigost, Savannah, Georgia, and I pay cash.’ When the auctioneer asked, after the sale, why he had purchased the six men who promised to be most difficult, Arbigost said, ‘I have ways of training them. What I figure is, I can smuggle them into Georgia, then slip them into the market, one at a time … different parts of the country … nobody need ever know they were mutineers.’ He paid over his money, marched his six slaves, including Cudjo, to his sloop, dragged them belowdecks and ordered his carpenter to secure them. This man was a powerful fellow from the interior of Georgia who hoped one day to run his own plantation and had specific theories about handling blacks. With the aid of four stout sailors he spread-eagled Cudjo on the lowest deck of the ship, where the headroom was only eighteen inches. He ordered his men to strap down each ankle, extending the legs as far as possible. He did the same with Cudjo’s wrists. Then, about his neck he fastened a heavy iron
collar from which led two small chains. These he bolted to the deck. And when the powerful slave was thus secured, the carpenter began to kick him, cursing the while and daring him to try mutiny aboard this ship. And he continued doing this until Cudjo fainted. With a farewell series of kicks, the carpenter growled to the remaining five, whom he pinioned in similar fashion, ‘Now let’s see you mutiny.’

It was in this posture that Cudjo, twenty-five years old, slipped into America.

MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH
condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in conformance with its national customs.

The most practical was that in Brazil. Since Portuguese women were discouraged by their Catholic faith from emigrating to a savage new country, Portuguese men found their wives in the slave population, and a curious, strong and viable society developed. Slaves were slaves and were treated as such until they produced beautiful daughters; then suddenly they became the parents of the bride. At fourteen the master’s son was given his own slave, the prettiest black woman of eighteen on the plantation, and it became her pleasurable task to introduce the lad into an essential meaning of slavery.

The most reasonable system was the English. Since many of the best young men had to find their destiny in a life overseas, it became traditional for many of the best young women to follow them; although marriage with slaves was unthinkable, reasonably decent treatment was obligatory, and it was not surprising that England became the first great power to outlaw slavery at home and discipline it abroad.

The French were perhaps the best administrators of their slave system; it was a cross between the total assimilation of Brazil and the rigid exclusionism of England, and resulted in a kind of amiable non-rigid
society in Guadaloupe and Martinique, where a family of some distinction might have a cousin married to a former slave. In fact, there were persistent rumors that Joséphine de Beauharnais, the exquisite Martinique girl who married Napoleon to become empress of France, had slave blood in her distant background. The lot of the French slave was by no means pleasant, and there were insurrections in these islands too, but they were handled with compromise and concession.

The most stolid, unrelieved system was that of the Dutch. They treated their slaves no worse than others, but they did so with such relentless pressure and lack of grace that slave rebellions in their colonies became frequent. To be a slave on a Dutch island was to live without hope; day after relentless day the sugar mills revolved, grinding the blacks into sullen submission until they could bear no more. Then the fiery insurrection, the savage reprisals, and the continued grinding of the mill.

The Spanish were an anomaly. In Mexico and Peru their primary slaves were Indians, whom they baptized and annihilated. Blacks fared comparatively well in some of the Spanish possessions, where they often served as teachers, minor administrators and family friends. In the Spanish islands their life in the sugar fields was horrible and brief. Many who had known servitude in islands like Cuba thanked their forgotten gods when fate moved them to the United States.

By all standards, and in the opinion of all, the one island which represented human slavery at its absolute nadir was Haiti. Here, under a remote French administration, accountable to no one, a band of cruel exploiters accepted those fractious slaves whom no one else could handle, worked them sixteen hours a day like animals, fed them little, beat them constantly, and buried them after four or five years. For a slave to be assigned to Haiti was a sentence of lingering death.

American slavery covered such a vast area that no generalizations could be easily made. In the northern tobacco states with temperate climates, like Virginia, it duplicated the best aspects of the English pattern; in the more remote lower states, like Mississippi and Louisiana with their steaming sugar and indigo fields, the worst features of the Dutch and Haitian systems flourished. And the cotton states, like Georgia and Alabama, offered some of the best, some of the worst.

Maryland was in a category by itself. Indeed, it encompassed two categories: the western shore, whose plantations were much modified by anti-slavery pressures from Pennsylvania; and the Eastern Shore, which remained insulated from outside pressures and resembled a fiefdom of the Carolinas. In 1833 the apex of Eastern Shore slavery occurred on the vast Steed holdings.

There were four major plantations: the great one on Devon Island, with its satellite operations north of the Choptank, and the three fine
establishments at the Refuge, with their outlying fields reaching to the Miles River. Together they covered a vast extent of land, well over thirty thousand acres, which were worked by six hundred and ninety-three slaves. And these slaves, who soon would total more than eight hundred, were kept under control by eighteen white men.