The Amistad Rebellion (15 page)

As they neared the American coast after seven weeks of sailing, they encountered more vessels, many of which they would now ask their main question: were they near Africa? On several other occasions, as approaching captains eyed the
Amistad
with the intention of taking it into port and claiming it—and its people—as salvaged property, the Africans grew suspicious, armed themselves, and drove their would-be captors away. Sailing up the coast off Fire Island and Long Island, they spotted Montauk Point Lighthouse, the oldest in North America. Some of the Africans, according to Montes, initially mistook this for the coast of Africa. They told Montes to steer towards it, which he did. They anchored that evening about a mile offshore and sent four or five men in the boat to search for water, which they found. Had they arrived in a place that was not “slavery country”? Montes had suggested that “the slaves friends lived there.”
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They spent the entire next day loading water and in the end delegated a man named Fa, who probably had the skills of a warrior and scout, to explore what lay beyond the beach. Fa ended up staying out overnight, which worried his shipmates, who berated Ruiz and Montes, saying with sarcasm that the “country must be very free indeed” to have captured and “bound their comrade.” When they went ashore early the next morning, they found a piece of rope, which they thought had been used to capture their brother. Their worst fears were confirmed.
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Later that morning, around ten a.m., after the rebels had returned to the
Amistad
, they saw a white man standing with Fa on the shore. The body language and other signals of their comrade indicated that
all was well. They rejoiced and dispatched a small group to meet them. In half an hour they returned with “a bottle of gin and some sweet potatoes.” Around two o’ clock several more white men appeared on the beach, on horseback, with wagons. Captain Henry Green, Captain Peletiah Fordham, Schuyler Conklin, and Seymour G. Sherman had been out hunting with their muskets and dogs when they encountered Fa and the other white man. They made “a great noise” and summoned the Africans on the vessel to come ashore to meet them. Two boatloads, about twenty in all, rowed over to Culloden Point.
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When the Africans disembarked, they approached the white men, Burna stepping forward to ask fateful questions: “What country is this?” he asked. Green replied, this is America. Burna continued, with urgency, “Is this slavery country?” No, came the answer, there is no slavery here; and indeed there was not: New York had abolished slavery in 1827. “Any Spanish here?” No: “It is a free country.” As soon as Cinqué understood the answers, he let loose with a joyous whistle and yell, signaling the rest of the Africans, who “all ran from the sand and shouted.” They burst into rapture, whooping and hollering, dancing and celebrating. Their exuberant actions surprised and scared the white men. Green explained, “We were alarmed and ran to our waggons for our guns.” The fear could not compromise the victory. After a journey that began in West Africa four and half months earlier, and a storm-filled, deadly voyage of 1,400 miles over the previous eight weeks, the
Amistad
Africans had at long last arrived in a place that was not “slavery country.”
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Danger and Deception

Having found in a free land white men who were apparently willing to help them, the
Amistad
Africans tried to make the most of a big opportunity. Yet they proceeded cautiously, understanding the divergence of interests in the encounter at Culloden Point. They desperately wanted to sail to Sierra Leone and needed the help of the white men to do so. But could the white men actually help them? Somehow the
Amistad
Africans figured out that Green and Fordham were ship captains who had maritime knowledge and experience. Burna cleverly chose two places the white men were most likely to have heard of—Sierra Leone and Gambia—to describe where they wanted to go. He pointed east and said, “Make sail and go.”
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The white men, however, did not want to go to West Africa, and the last thing they wanted to do was actually to help the rebels. They wanted to get their hands on any money the Africans might have on board the
Amistad
, and to get possession of the ship itself. They already had some understanding of the situation, for they had read about the mysterious “long, low black schooner,” said to be flush with gold, in the newspapers.
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The most immediate task of the
Amistad
Africans was now to calm the fears aroused by their boisterous celebration of freedom. They initiated a ritual of peacemaking, what they would have called a “peace palaver.” They gathered around the white men in as friendly and unthreatening a way as they could, shaking their hands and offering gifts, a hat and a handkerchief at first, then more importantly, their weapons: they handed over a loaded musket and, crucially for the Mende warriors, a cane knife. As Cinqué explained, at this moment the “black men gave up the knife.” He referred to the ritual of symbolic surrender among the Mende, when warriors acknowledged defeat and placed their fates in the hands of a stronger force. Thus they surrendered themselves, their weapons, and their vessel, but all with a condition attached: the white men must help them sail over the “great waters” to get home.
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The
Amistad
Africans knew that surrender might not be enough and that the white men wanted money. They too were capable of deception, and having little money to offer, they contrived a ruse. First they showed that they had some money by buying two hunting dogs from the white men for a doubloon each. Then they returned to the vessel and filled two chests with the metal parts of plantation sugar machinery, locked them, and rowed ashore with them. They hoisted the heavy chests and shook them to suggest to the white men the
reward for taking them to Sierra Leone. Burna said to them, “money,” held up four fingers and added, “400 doubloons.” Of the “two trunks [that] were brought on shore by the blacks,” Fordham recalled that he and Cinqué “lifted one trunk, and I heard the money rattle. Me and another nigger lifted the other trunk, and then I heard some more money.” At that point, Fordham explained, “we determined to have the vessel at all hazards—forcibly if we can, peaceably if we must.” Green also heard the clanking of what he thought was coin and asked if he could go on board the
Amistad
. He admitted, “It was my object to take possession of the vessel.” The answer, however, was no, not yet. Tomorrow the
Amistad
Africans would take the white men on board, probably after a meeting of the collective, perhaps with the intention of kidnapping them if they could not otherwise persuade them to sail the vessel to Africa. Fordham worried that they might encounter trouble if they went on board.
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The excitement of the
Amistad
Africans in discovering a “free country” was tempered by disorientation and fear. Their lack of geographical knowledge continued to plague them. Having spent much time on the “trackless ocean,” with no landmarks in sight, and finding themselves now in a strange land, they had little idea how far they were from Africa. They had some notion that it was still distant, as they later stated they had not been able to get as much water as they wanted for the long voyage home. They also knew, of course, that their dealings with the white men might not work out. So they developed a secondary strategy to guarantee their hard-won freedom. Having sailed for many miles along uninhabited parts of Fire Island and Long Island on their way to Culloden Point, they saw land they might have considered suitable for building a runaway community (marronage), which was a well-known practice of resistance against slavery in Sierra Leone, Cuba, and the southern United States. Indeed, they had probably anchored and rowed a small boat ashore several times along the way and would have found resources, from fresh water to edible plant life to wild game, especially deer. Hence they bought the hunting dogs in case they should need to settle in a remote, uninhabited
area. Pie would use the dogs and his skills as a hunter to provide food for the group.
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A disturbingly familiar vessel suddenly appeared on the horizon. Looking out to sea, everyone on shore “saw a brig standing to the eastward.” Burna asked, “Where that came from?” It was the United States brig
Washington
, a navy survey vessel, and it was sailing directly for the
Amistad
, anchored a few hundred yards offshore. The Africans instantly grew agitated. It was, after all, a brig, the same kind of ship as the
Teçora
, on which they had made the Middle Passage from the Gallinas Coast to Havana. In short, it looked like a slave ship. They urgently turned to the white men to ask if that vessel “made slaves.” Green and his colleagues, wanting the
Amistad
Africans to stay on shore, said yes, it did, but their answer had the opposite effect of what they had hoped for, causing the Africans to jump into their boats and row hard toward the
Amistad
.
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If the Africans thought the
Washington
was a slave ship, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney aboard the naval vessel thought the
Amistad
was a pirate, or a smuggler, as suggested by the “men and carts” involved in trade ashore. Gedney dispatched a boat with Lieutenant Richard Meade and several armed sailors to board the
Amistad
. As Meade later testified, they arrived at the vessel, “jumped on deck, and drove the Africans below.” As they took charge of the
Amistad
they encountered the grateful Pedro Montes and José Ruiz, who tearfully proclaimed the sailors their saviors, as indeed they were. Montes hugged Meade so hard the officer had to threaten to shoot him to make him relax his grip. Meade then offered Montes and Ruiz the tender embrace of white-skin privilege. He freed them as he locked the Africans in the hold, the very place where they had originally hatched their plot for freedom.
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Meade and company encountered only fifteen Africans on the vessel, four of them children, and most of the rest probably sick, emaciated, and otherwise weak, as the strongest and fittest would have been rowing to shore, filling water casks, and negotiating with the white men. It is impossible to be sure what would have happened if the full body of healthier warriors had made it back to the
Amistad
before the
naval detachment arrived, but it seems likely that they would have fought back and attempted to escape. Gedney certainly thought so. Cinqué had apparently long maintained that, if attacked, they would kill Montes and Ruiz, and that they would themselves consider it better to die fighting than to be enslaved again.
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Meantime the
Amistad
Africans in the boat witnessed the capture of their vessel. They reversed course and now rowed with all their might back toward shore. With the
Amistad
under control, Meade dispatched a group of sailors to follow the remaining Africans. When they caught up to them, Midshipman David Porter “fired a pistol with a ball over their heads, and took a musket and pointed at them with it and made motions to them to go on board the Schooner.” They submitted, rowed back, and went aboard.
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Cinqué made one last bid for freedom. Trusting his skill as a swimmer and diver, he “jumped up the hatch way—and sprang over board” into the water. Meade sent yet another boat after him, and the chase was on. An eyewitness noted that at one point Cinqué stayed under water for “at least five minutes.” Whenever and wherever he came up for air, the sailors rowed after him in hot pursuit, only to watch him go under and pop up somewhere else a little later. This aquatic game of hide and seek went on for forty exhausting minutes until Porter pointed a gun at Cinqué again, then commanded the sailors to bring him aboard the boat by slipping a boat hook under his wet clothes. Pulled up into the boat, Cinqué “smiled and putting his hands to his throat, intimated that he was going to be hanged.”
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Events off Long Island had not gone unnoticed, as newspapers published lurid accounts of the mysterious “long, low black schooner.” On August 31, 1839, the
New York Sun
reported, in a widely circulated and influential account, that Cinqué gave two speeches on the
Amistad
after he and his comrades had been captured by Meade and his crew. In the first, which was said to have been remembered and translated by Antonio, Cinqué told his countrymen,

The rhetoric sounds artificial and stilted, more like an academic exercise for the sons of Harvard and Yale than the actual speech of an African warrior, but the use of “moons” to reckon time is realistic, as is the language of “brethren,” fictive kinship. Moreover, the speech sounds similar to others made by Cinqué and memorized by his comrades as part of their own account of their adventure. In the second speech, the
Sun
reported, the leader tried to rally his mates to resist the American occupation of their vessel:

The warrior was essentially proposing a collective suicide pact to resist reenslavement—not uncommon among warriors in southern Sierra Leone when they realized that their military situation was hopeless, since captured warriors were frequently executed anyway.
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A week later, Lt. Meade vehemently denied that Cinqué ever gave the speeches, but he himself provided evidence of them in an article he wrote about the capture of the
Amistad
, published in the
New London Gazette
on September 4, 1839: “Cinquez had declared that in case they were likely to be taken, he should kill the passengers, and that he would die rather than be taken, and he enjoined upon his comrades to take his knife and avenge his death—that they had better die in self-defense than be hung, as they would be if taken.” It seems likely that the writer for the
New York Sun
had heard this story, perhaps from Meade or Antonio, and rendered it in a sensational way for the penny-press newspaper; and it is also likely that the sentiment and the actual event behind it were real. Cinqué had perhaps unwittingly echoed the
words of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death,” or, more appropriately, those of the enslaved rebel Gabriel, whose conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 had been guided by the phrase “Death or Liberty.”
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