The Empire of Necessity Read Online Free PDF Page B

skill. Many alert men were needed to feed the captives, to distribute the victuals and stand watch, because every captain knew that revolts often took place at mealtime, to dole out water, rationing it so it lasted the journey, and to disinfect the slave hold. All this activity required patience and attentiveness. 1
    The Hope ’s crew had those virtues when it came to sailing and fighting, Mordeille told del Pino, but not to slaving. “Natural diligences”—defecation and urination—were problems, Mordeille said, particularly during the night. Slaves needing to relieve themselves were to inform the sailor on duty, who was supposed to accompany them to a makeshift latrine on deck. “But it terrified my men to go into the hold,” the privateer admitted. Guards had to maneuver past cramped bodies, fumbling with heavy keys in the fetid dark, and then guide shackled men and women up the hatch ladder. It was easier to ignore the calls and let the enslaved defecate on themselves, adding to the layers of already dried vomit and excrement that encrusted the hold’s floor. It was disgusting, Mordeille said.
    During the Atlantic crossing, the Neptune ’s surgeon, James Wallace, had supervised the handling of the slaves. But circumstances made the trip from Bonny to America worse than usual. The ship was adequately stocked for its scheduled run to Barbados but its provisions had to be stretched to cover Mordeille’s seventy-two sailors, who were short on supplies. Water had run low. (Wallace had tried to make the slaves’ water ration last by having the casks sealed, then cutting a small hole on top, through which was inserted a musket barrel, its breech broken off, to be used like a straw.) The mortality rate on this trip wasn’t exceptionally high. On the Neptune ’s previous voyage, in 1802, 395 Africans were boarded at Bonny; 355 disembarked in British Guiana. This time, 349 out of an original shipment of about 400 had survived.
    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.”
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    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