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Rethinking the Case of the Schooner Amistad. Contraband and Complicity after 1808/182
Michael Zeuske, University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln)[1]
Bringing the US-American History back into Caribbean History and the History of the Hidden Atlantic
Until around 2010, the Amistad case was primarily used in university courses in the United States as teaching material, often represented as a major victory of antebellum abolitionism in the United States.[2] In 2005, Orlando García Martínez (UNEAC Cienfuegos) and I found crucial Spanish-Cuban documents in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC, Havana) that make it possible to open up a new line of analysis encompassing Cuban, Caribbean, transcultural, and Atlantic dimensions.[3] Our subsequent Atlantic research - in Havana, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Seville, Arenys del Mar near Barcelona, Matanzas, Santiago in Cuba, Camagüey, La Guanaja, Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, and São Tomé -- took us in three new directions.
Firstly, the life history of a paradigmatic slave-contraband captain of the nineteenth century, Ramón Ferrer, a Catalan from Ibiza by birth, one of the many Spaniards who went to the pearl of Spanish colonialism, Cuba, in “pursuit of happiness”[4]. Ferrer presented himself as a minor figure – a petty, hard working private entrepreneur, captain of a small coastal schooner (the Amistad).”[5] However he was also part of a covert slaving network and, with his knowledge of the complicated northern coasts of Cuba, he helped other contraband-ships to land their illegal cargoes of captives. He may have been employed by the big merchant houses in Havana or Matanzas (perhaps the houses of Daniel Botefeur, Pedro Blanco, Pedro Martínez or Joaquín Zulueta) that were part of economic networks linking the hidden Atlantic with the interior landscapes of plantations and export production of the “Second slavery” (modern mass slavery after 1800).[6] With the profits of these activities, Ferrer himself, or captains employed by him, undertook private and illegal voyages to Africa. He was thus a negrero, a private employer of workers in human trafficking, a slaver and a pirate (plundering other contraband ships). If he had survived, instead of being killed by the captives who seized the Amistad, he might eventually have acquired a significant social status, becoming one of the entrepreneurs who invested in the great Spanish transport flotillas of the 1860s-1890s.[7]
If one takes the lowest estimates of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database as a basis, then between 1801 and 1866 the Spanish (and Cubans) took 784,639 people from Africa to the Americas, while some 2.5 million were shipped to Brazil.[8] Estimates for total slave “imports” to Cuba range from 700,000 to 1.3 million.[9] In sum, from roughly 12.5 million victims of the Atlantic slave trade between 1440 and 1878, a quarter were taken in the nineteenth century (i.e., over 3 million)[10].
The degree of slave smuggling from Africa to Cuba (after 1820), and from there to the United States (after 1808), is disputed with estimates ranging from 52,000 (David Eltis) to 250,000 (W.E.B. Du Bois).[11] There is no doubting the close connections -- structural, technological, personal, financial and spatial -- between North American and Cuban slave traders. These connections are, however, concerned with individually recognizable slave traders, captains, staff, assistants, personnel and “workers” as well as with ships.[12]
Ferrer was also a slaveowner: in 1834, he bought two young slaves, in a sale notarized in the Escribanía de Manuel Martínez Valdés in Puerto del Príncipe (Camagüey). On September 26: “un mulatico [...] nombrado Celestino, natural de Puerto Rico y como de veinte y cinco años de edad [...] en cantidad de doscientos cincuenta pesos [...] moneda de plata corriente”.[13] In 1839, Celestino was the slave ship’s cook of the Amistad, and was killed by the captives in the uprising. Three days after his purchase of Celestino, on September 29, Ferrer bought for 300 pesos: “una mulata nombrada María del Carmen”, said to be 14 years old and a native of Puerto Cabello (Venezuela).[14]
Our second set of findings bear on the importance and the historical role of slave contraband ships and their crews, as well as the “personnel of slaving”— administrators/ scribes, surgeons, healers, translators, cooks, guides, grumetes (ship and cabin boys), oarsmen, guards – all of them in direct eye-to-eye-contact with the captives[15]. Many of these workers were themselves African, creole slaves or former slaves.[16] Together with the seamen categorized as Americans, British, Irish, Portuguese/Brazilians, Spaniards/ Cubans, Dutch and even Germans, these men were specialists in the slave trade and in human trafficking.[17]
Ferrer was not only the owner and captain of the Amistad. A deposition by his widow contains traces of another ship, the Bella Antonia. In the words of Juana González: “that in addition to the schooner Amistad her husband owned another called the Bella Antonia that was seized by the English about three years ago on a trip it was making to the coast of Africa, and which was captained by a young man of the Portuguese nation, who as best she can recall was named Alberto or Roberto, a man named Bascó who is now in the hospital San Juan de Dios as a sailor”. [18] Ferrer thus also owned two other ships, the Bella Antonia and the Nueva Antonia[19], as well as a 20 percent interest in the modern steamer, Vapor Principeño.[20] His brother, Damian Ferrer, was the patrón (captain and owner) of the Isabel II.[21] The two brothers therefore owned four ships (Amistad, Bella Antonia, Nueva Antonia, and Isabel II) and part of a modern steamer (Ramón Ferrer was the captain).[22]
Researching the life of Ramón Ferrer uncovers a dimension of the Hidden Atlantic of contraband trade of human bodies. This Hidden Atlantic (1808/20-1880) became clandestine after the formal abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain/ United States (1808), Netherlands (1815), France (1818), Spain/ Cuba (1820/ 1845), Brazil (1831/ 1850) and Portugal and its colonies (1836). The capital in human bodies and important amounts of capital (in other forms) won through slaving of human bodies and captives in Atlantic and national networks of illegal trafficking were directly invested in the most modern agricultural colony of the nineteenth century, Cuba, particularly the part of the island scholars sometimes describe as Cuba grande.
In the course of our research, we also uncovered important details about the Amistad case. Contrary to previous assumptions, the schooner Amistad itself turns out to have been constructed not in Baltimore but in Cuba: Ferrer “built it in the port of Bajas, in Nuevitas, with the permission of the General Commandant of the Navy of the Port of Havana, and he sailed her as owner.”[23] Bajas was a harbor with naval construction facilities near the coastal base of Ferrer, the port of La Guanaja, on the north coast of Puerto del Príncipe (present-day Camagüey).
Even more startling is our new hypothesis about the “Portuguese slave ship Teçora”, said to have transported the captives from Lomboko in Africa to Cuba, and mentioned in all traditional publications and representations of the Amistad case. By analyzing the papers of Pedro Blanco, the “Rothschild of the illegal slave contraband trade”, we discovered that the only ship arriving in Havana from the Gallinas-region (whence the Amistad captives came) in June of 1839 was the slave ship Hugh Boyle, sailing under the American captain J. R. Brown and under the American flag.[24] First we found a short notice in the harbor entry book of Havana: “Dia 26 [de junio de 1839] ... 405/0 Yd. en Yd. doscientos cincuenta y cuatro ps. cuatro rl. q.e a d.n Blanco y Carballo como Consig.s de la Goleta Am.a [Americana] Hud boy [Hugh Boyle] q.e procedente de Gallinas entro en id. L[ista] N 925 [26 [of June, 1839] ... 405/0 Id. en Id.“ (26 June fifty-four pesos and four reales [on account of] Blanco and Carballo as the consignees of the American schooner Hugh Boyle arriving from Gallinas which entered on this day, list 925 of 26 June 1839.) [25] Then we found in the Consular Dispatches of the United States in Cuba the notice: “Schoon. Hugh Boyle, 98 [tons], [capitain] J.R. Brown, [from] Gallinas”, dated June 26, 1839.[26]
This last notice, moreover, with its acknowledgment of the arrival of a ship under the U.S. flag from a slave-trading region of West Africa, changes dramatically our perception of the active American participation as slavers and contraband traffickers in the Amistad case. But it seems to be more. If this U.S. involvement with the initial Atlantic crossing of those who would later be known as the 'Amistad captives' can be confirmed (i.e. if the fabled “Portuguese” ship, the Teçora, is really the Hugh Boyle, under a U.S. captain and U.S. flag), it opens up two interesting lines of interpretation, linked to the slave trade out of Baltimore. The first issue relates to the activities of U.S. consul, Nicholas P. Trist. Trist was also consul of Portugal in Havana at this time. He could easily have falsified the ship’s papers.[27] The British Parliamentary Papers also confirm the close relationship between the ship, Hugh Boyle, its captain, John Brown, and Pedro Blanco. The Hugh Boyle under the name Galianna appears in this document with the following notice: “The Galianna is said to have been formerly called the “Hugh Boyle,” under which name, furnished with American flag and papers, and commanded by one Joseph R. Brown, a citizen of the United States, she appeared on this coast in 1839, engaged ostensibly in lawful trade, and on the 12th of April of that year [1839], cleared out at Sierra Leone for the Gallinas, whence she is said to have shortly afterwards to have returned to America, taking as a passenger, the notorious slave dealer, Pedro Blanco. There was nothing to show, however, that Pedro Blanco had any interest in the "Galianna," which was employed, if not in fact owned, by Francisco Felix de Souza [the famous Chacha of Ouidah – M.Z.], or his almost equally infamous son-in-law, Joaquim Telles de Menezes, who were stated to have been passengers on board at the time of seizure.”[28]
The second issue is the bigger question of what pro-slavery advocates, lawyers, politicians and merchants knew about slaving voyages out of U.S. ports -- and did not say -- during the Amistad trial. The construction of a Teçora myth by U.S. writers, merchants and lawyers in the days of the Amistad trials should be explored, as it could show the way in which the crime of enslavement and contraband trade from Africa was shifted in the Amistad trials to the Spaniards and to a never-located “Portuguese” ship and captain. For obvious and well-known reasons, a decision favorable to the captives required a narrow basis, so that attention was turned away from American contraband trade and from slavery in the South. But what has perhaps been less obvious is that attention may have been deflected from slaving and other activities proper to the hidden Atlantic that were taking place out of U.S. ports -- activities that were going unpunished in the 1830s and 1840s, and up until 1861-63. So the “complicity” theme can be developed not only in the complicity between Brazilian/Portuguese, American and Spanish/Cuban captains in Africa (and captains and factors from other nations as well), on the hidden Atlantic and in Cuba, but also in the complicity of U.S. merchants, captains, writers, and factors, and the older, but by no means resolved problems of slaving out from U.S. ports after 1808 and the question of the contraband trade in human bodies from Cuba (and the Caribbean) to the South of the United States[29]. Our findings connected to the Amistad case suggest that key information remains to be uncovered in Spain, particularly in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, and in the Cuban National Archives in Havana and in other Cuban repositories. With the collaboration of U.S. colleagues, we can perhaps then knit together the threads of the hidden Atlantic.
[1] Paper presented at the panel “Slavery against the Law”, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, UM Law School, October 6, 2011.
[2] Davis, David Brion. “The Amistad Test of Law and Justice.” In: Davis, Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 12-26. I have published in German some results of the research on the hidden Atlantic and the contraband trade in the 19th century after 1808/1820, see: Zeuske, Michael. Die Geschichte der Amistad: Sklavenhandel und Menschenschmuggel auf dem Atlantik im 19. Jahrhundert [The History of Amistad: Slave Trade and human trafficking on the Atlantic in the 19th Century]. Stuttgart: Reclam 2012; see also: Rediker, Marcus, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. New York: Viking, 2012.
[3] The main corpus of the new archival material about the Amistad case is in the Cuban archives: I would like to thank Orlando García Martínez (Cienfuegos), Rebecca J. Scott (University of Michigan), and Bárbara Danzie, archivera por excelencia del Archivo Nacional de Cuba, for their collaboration. See: Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC, Havana), Gobierno Superior Civil (GSC), legajo (leg.). 1272, número (no.) 49909 (Julio de 1839): “El C.S. Comandante Gral. de Marina sobre la sublevacion ejecutada por los negros que conducia la Goleta costera nombrada la Amistad”; ANC, Escribanía de Marina, leg. 39, no. 385 (1839): “Ferrer, Ramón. Intestado de D. Ramon Ferrer”; ANC, Fondo Miscelanea (FM), leg. 2344, no. Aa (1836): “Entrada de la Goleta Española Cos.[ter]a Amistad su patron D.n Damian Ferrer procedente de la Habana con diez y seis permisos. Anclada en Guanaja el 18 de Feb.o”; ANC, FM, leg. 2462, no. F (1836): “Entrada de la Goleta Española Cos.tera Amistad. su patron D. Ramon Ferrer; proced.te de la Habana con 24: permisos. Anclada en Guanaja el 8. de Diciembre”; Archivo Histórico Provincial de Camagüey (AHPCam), Protocolos Notariales Manuel Martínez Valdés, fondo 155, tomo 1834-1835.