The Empire of Necessity Read Online Free PDF

liberty, torn from his home, his friends, his parents, wife or children, hurried to the rendezvous-house, examined, passed, and sent on board the tender, like a negro to a slave-ship.” 11
    Once at sea sailors were subject to rule as feudal as the ancien régime and as brutal as the plantation. They could be flogged, tarred, feathered, keelhauled—dunked in the ocean and dragged under the hull, barnacles doing to backs in a minute what it took the whip fifteen lashes—or executed, made to walk the plank or hung by the yardarm. Even on ships like the Hope , which sailed with an insurgent élan and did away with rank, the authority of Mordeille, whether he be called citizen or captain, was absolute. 12
    The African slave trade, however, was a different kind of bondage. It not only survived the dawn of the Age of Liberty but was expanding and becoming even more lucrative. And so back on the Neptune , after it had been secured, its dead heaved overboard, its British prisoners shackled, and its African cargo counted, Mordeille did the math and guessed that the ship’s slaves were worth, wholesale, at least 80,000 silver pesos (it’s nearly impossible to do a straight conversion into today’s currency, but this princely sum was roughly equal to the annual salaries of the viceroys of Mexico and Peru, the highest Spanish officials in the Americas).
    It doesn’t seem that Mordeille gave much thought to the contradiction, the fact that he was a Jacobin believer in the rights of man and the liberties of the world who made his living seizing British slaves and selling them to Spanish American merchants. After all, he swore allegiance not to ideals but to the French nation, which had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794 only to restore it eight years later. Napoleon’s 1802 announcement of its restoration was terse: “Slavery shall be maintained”; the slave trade “shall take place.” In any case, the revolution’s to-ing and fro-ing when it came to slavery and freedom mattered little to the privateer or, apparently, to his men.
    When everything was ready on board the Neptune , the inventory complete, the rudder repaired, the damaged sails replaced, and the rigging redone, the two ships, the victor and its vanquished prize, set sail for Montevideo. The British, including the officers, had been placed in a hold, not the one that contained the Africans but a smaller one, below the Neptune ’s quarterdeck.
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    Until about the 1770s, most Africans who made the Middle Passage to America didn’t travel much farther once they crossed the Atlantic. The main slave harbors of the Americas—New Orleans, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Alexandria, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, Baltimore, and Charleston—were portals to coastal, river, and island plantations, haciendas, and cities where most of the captives who survived the voyage would spend the rest of their lives.
    But the West Africans brought into Montevideo by Mordeille on the Neptune were arriving as part of slavery’s new extreme, the motor of a market revolution that was remaking Spanish America. They had already traveled more than five thousand miles from Bonny to Río de la Plata. They were about to be thrust into the wheels of mercantile corruption, though for them there would be no difference between what was called crime and what passed for commerce. And for those captives who would be driven on toward the Pacific, including those who would find themselves on the Tryal , their journey was not even half over.

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    A LION WITHOUT A CROWN
    “The actions I have been compelled to take as a corsair have hardened my heart,” Mordeille wrote in his letter to the viceroy, in French-laced Spanish. The voyage across the Atlantic was rough, his men were hungry, and his ships were badly in need of repair. “But what brings me the most sadness and melancholy,” he continued, “is that my work has not benefited the blacks.”
    The management of a slave ship took