to wake up, to shake up, to wake the sun

I'm reading W.E.B. du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America for alumni bookgroup, and he mentioned several successful slave revolts--two of which were shipboard mutinies, hurrah! Immediately that led me off on whatever the maritime equivalent of a rabbithole is. (Shipworm borehole?)

So here, have a special edition of Recent Reading, featuring the Amistad Mutiny of 1839 and the Creole Mutiny of 1841.

For historical context, both revolts took place after both Britain (1807) and the US (1808) had outlawed the Atlantic slave trade. In Britain, slavery was altogether abolished (1833-1840) by the time of these cases. In the US, there was a patchwork of state laws about slavery, and case-law about the status of slaves crossing state lines (either having escaped their enslavers or having been brought there by their enslavers) was unsettled.


Patricia C. McKissack, Amistad: The Story of a Slave Ship (2005)

A nicely clear and reasonably detailed* account of the Amistad Mutiny of 1839, written for readers who are mastering paragraphs but are not yet ready for chapters.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a Portuguese slaver (not La Amistad) kidnapped a number of Mende people in West Africa and sold them in Cuba; fifty-three of them were then bought by a Puerto Rican landowner, who hired La Amistad to bring them to another location in Cuba. On the journey, the enslaved Africans freed themselves and took over the ship, but were unable to compel the crew to sail back to Africa: while the crew would sail east toward Africa during the day, they sailed north at night, hoping to make landfall somewhere in the US, where US authorities might re-enslave the Africans and return the ship to its crew.

Initially, the crew's plan seemed to be successful: they were picked up by a US Navy ship outside New York, whereupon the crew falsely asserted all the Africans had been born in Cuba (and thus were legally enslaved) and caused them to be arrested for mutiny -- including the children. It was a good while before local abolitionists were able to discover what language the prisoners spoke, let alone find an interpreter, but eventually the Mende side of the story came out. The Africans were acquitted at trial, a judge ruling they had been illegally kidnapped and thus their mutiny was justified -- but then Spain jumped in, asserting that the Mende having once been sold in Cuba, they were now Spanish property and the US had no right to intervene. All the Africans were clapped back in prison again to await a hearing at the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled in the Mendes' favor -- but by that time, nearly two years had elapsed, and only thirty-eight of the original fifty-three enslaved on La Amistad were still alive, fifteen having died in prison. The survivors returned to their homeland -- although that story is considerably messier than the one page McKissack devotes to it.

I thought McKissack did a nice job putting the story into easy concepts while still maintaining some of its complexity. Necessary context about the slave trade is provided as needed, and the story is personalized via the historical figure of Sengbe Pieh (aka Joseph Cinqué), who led the shipboard revolt. I also thought McKissack had a nice eye for engaging details, thereby rendering the story less abstract: for example, Pieh affected his escape by managing to pick a nail out of the ship's woodwork, and using that to free everyone of their shackles.

( McKissack footnote )


Walter Dean Myers, Amistad: A Long Road to Freedom (1997)

Written for older children who can tackle chapters, this is a much more complex and nuanced account. Myers brings out the multi-party aspects of the case (not just the Mende versus their enslavers, but rival parties who claimed salvage rights, local people who claimed custody of the children, competing factions within abolitionists, different agendas of different parties within government, etc.). Myers also spends time talking about different legal theories (Natural Law vs. Positive Law), and the fine points of various legal strategies. (Apparently Sengbe was good-looking and highly charismatic, and this was a Very Important, because abolitionists were looking for high-profile cases with attractive, sympathetic defendants: if the defendants were sympathetic enough, even a loss in the court of law could be a win in the court of public opinion.) Also covered was the highly critical distinction of where the kidnapped Africans were being shipped to: circumstantial evidence suggested the original intent was to smuggle them into the US, but because no one could prove that in court, the captives, once freed, were left stranded in the US, instead of the Presidency paying for their return passage to Africa. Which led to a whole 'nother level of complications--and the probable suicide of one of the Mende men!--when it started to look like they'd never be able to get back to their homeland again, and their freedom in the US started to look more like another version of activity, as their allies tried to restrict their movements and travel, allegedly for their own good.

There was a lot of good detail in this volume that answered questions I had from other accounts. For example: I wondered how they found a translator who spoke the Mende language? They got a language specialist in who had the captives teach him how to count to ten in Mende, and then the specialist went down to the docks and counted at every Black man he saw until someone reacted with something other than "Get the hell out of my face, weirdo." (<- that last bit is my imagination about how these trials went.) Only after he found a sailor who recognized one-to-ten in Mende, were they able to figure out even what the language was, or where the captives were from.

In many ways this account was a tougher read than the previous one (literally, conceptually, emotionally), but there was a lot of good information in here, and I thought it really respected the level of complexity and nuance that older readers are capable of.


Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1853)

Novella based on the Creole Mutiny of 1841, in which nineteen slaves imprisoned on the coastwise slaver Creole, sailing from Richmond, Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana, escaped their fetters, overpowered the crew, and redirected the ship to British-owned Nassau, whereupon Bahamian authorities affirmed the freedom of all 128 slaves aboard.*

Douglass is particularly interested in the story of Madison Washington, the leader of the revolt, who had earlier escaped slavery in Virginia via the Underground Railroad. In 1841, however, he returned to Virginia to attempt to free his still-enslaved wife and was unfortunately recaptured. As punishment, he was sent to be sold in New Orleans, which is how he came to be aboard the Creole.

The entire novella is constructed to be abolitionist propaganda, which is not at all surprising, given Douglass' life and career. Madison Washington is strongly framed as a liberty-loving son of Virginia in the same tradition as Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson (a comparison that made me blink, as Jefferson is well-known today as an enslaver). The Spirit of 1776 is invoked, and other boldly patriotic rhetoric is applied liberally. More surprisingly to me, the story is told through two white men, Douglass apparently recognizing the old adage that if there isn't a white man at the center of the story, white men won't read it. (I would say something snarky here about the cultural need to center white audiences, except for the fact that US voters and politicians at the time were overwhelmingly white men: if abolitionists couldn't get white men on board en masse, they'd have a difficult time achieving their aims.)

The first of the two white point-of-view characters is a presumably fictional Ohio native who, inspired by the depth of Washington's humanity, first becomes an abolitionist and then is instrumental in both of Washington's escapes from slavery. (Improbably, the two keep meeting by chance across multiple states; the characters themselves observe that Fate seems to have them marked out for each other.**) The second white character is the first mate of the Creole and the senior surviving member of the crew, the captain having been killed in the mutiny. Both men continually wax rhapsodic about Washington's bravery, nobility, education, humanity, etc.; the first mate particularly puts up a spirited defense of Washington's courage and morality. (He also treats us to some bonus monkey imagery of the white sailors, who took refuge from the mutineers by climbing into the ship's cross-trees, which I gather is a true detail.)

By current tastes, Douglass' narrative is heavy-handed and didactic, but Douglass has solid prose and a nice touch for characterization, making this an enjoyable read. It's also an interesting read from a historical perspective, as an example of the construction and motifs of abolition propaganda.

( Douglass footnotes )