The Empire of Necessity (12 page)

When the sleek ship was finished it was eighty-four feet long, twenty-four wide, and twelve deep. It had two decks, two raked masts inclined slightly aft, and a proud bowspirit. Amasa named it the
Perseverance
.
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As Delano was building his ship and thinking about ways he could redeem himself, both economically and emotionally, from his disastrous last voyage, his options were limited. There was one industry he probably could have done well in, a trade so vital and dynamic that in a way it made all other trades possible: slavery.

Slavery, as the historian Lorenzo Greene wrote half a century ago and many scholars, such as Harvard’s Sven Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman, are today confirming, “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England: about it revolved, and on it depended, most of her other industries.” The expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West was still years away, but slavery as it then existed in the southern states was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it. Covering slave voyages helped start Rhode Island’s insurance industry, while in Connecticut some of the first policies written by Aetna were on slaves’ lives. In turn, profits made from loans and insurance policies were plowed into other northern businesses. Fathers who “made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages” left their money to sons who “built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments” and donated to build libraries, lecture halls, universities, and botanical gardens.
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The use of slave labor in the North was ending by the time Amasa was building his
Perseverance
, but throughout New England there were merchant families and port towns—Salem, Newport, Providence, Portsmouth, and New London among them—that thrived on the trade. Many of the millions of gallons of rum distilled annually in Massachusetts and Rhode Island were used to obtain slaves, who were then brought to the West Indies and traded for sugar and molasses, which were boiled to make more rum to be used to acquire more slaves. Other New Englanders benefited indirectly, building the slave ships, weaving the “negro cloth” and cobbling the shoes to dress slaves, or catching and salting the fish used to feed them in the southern states and Caribbean islands. Haiti’s plantations purchased 63 percent of their dried fish and 80 percent of their pickled fish from New England. In Massachusetts alone, David Brion Davis writes, the “West Indian trade employed some ten thousand seamen, to say nothing of the workers who built, outfitted, and supplied the ships.”
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If slavery was economically indispensable, it was also, for many, morally reprehensible and indefensible. There were fewer and fewer actual slaves in New England by the end of the 1700s, but many of its sons, as they went out to learn the “story of the world,” encountered the horrors of the trade abroad. In 1787, for instance, a childhood friend of Amasa Delano’s, Gamaliel Bradford, had an opportunity, while serving as an officer on a ship purchasing salt from the Cape Verde Islands, to board a French slave ship just north of the Gambia River. He recorded in his diary the impression the visit left on him and his companion
:

We were now to behold a scene new to both of us. The ship had on board three hundred of those miserable wretches, who form the chief branch of trade carried on at this coast. It has ever been painful to me to behold a fellow mortal in chains, even when they had been riveted by the hands of justice, for crimes committed, or were thrown on by the fortune of war for a season. But here the sight was doubly shocking. Those we now saw before us were poor innocent creatures, who had been snatched from their peaceful habitations by the rapacious hands of their fellow men, brought to market and sold like beasts to the highest bidder, now loaded with chains they are thrown into this floating prison in which, terrified with the thoughts of they know not what, they are to be transported from their country, parents, and friends to a distant region, where hunger, grief, inhuman usage with the incessant toil, must hang upon their latter days, and close their scene of ills. The women and children were disposed of upon the quarter deck, where you might see the smiling infant playing upon the breast of its anxious mother, who with looks the most expressive of grief, dropped the tear of tenderness upon her baby. Pitiable wretch thus thou shalt soon, perhaps, be deprived of this thy fond care. My heart bleeds for thee now, how then could I behold thee arrived at the place of thy destination thy child plucked struggling from thy bosom and sold to a severe master, who perhaps lives remote from him who has just made a purchase of thee. Thy tears then are all in vain—In vain shalt thou wish to be slave to the same tyrant—thy master wants thee, but wants not thy child—thus deprived of this only solace in all thy afflictions, thou are delivered over to thy merciless keeper, chilled with horror & stupefied with grief, thou art motionless untill the lash of thy barbarous driver arrouses thee again to the sense of thy misfortunes—but to compensate for this variety of ills, mayst thou hereafter be happy, and mayst thou see thy babe happy also.
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As the historian Bernard Bailyn writes, “slavery” was a “central concept” for men of Bradford’s and Delano’s generation. “As the absolute political evil, it appears in every statement of political principle, in every discussion of constitutionalism or legal rights, in every exhortation to resistance.” British colonists and then American republicans didn’t actually think that they were in danger of being seized from their homes, taken to a foreign country in chains, and sold as property to labor in plantations and mines. They understood the concept as signifying many different conditions, including a lack of personal or political self-control, economic dependence, or absence of fair representation in a larger political collective. Delano himself compared the plunder of privateers to the depredations of slavers. And as a young boy, he heard Duxbury’s pastor, Charles Turner, make frequent references to slavery from the pulpit. “How distressing the thought of being slaves,” said Turner in the 1773 sermon he preached before the British governor in Boston, “how charming that of being free.”
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After independence, though, the use of the word
slavery
as a political concept, and the problem it signaled, shifted. It was still an allegory for all sorts of enthrallment, yet when New England sailors like Bradford returned to towns like Duxbury describing such “new scenes,” they had an increasingly clear sense of who was a slave and who wasn’t.

It wasn’t too long after Bradford’s return that slavery became a contentious issue in Duxbury itself. “Ought it not to diminish our relish,” asked the town’s minister, John Allyn, in an 1805 sermon, for items that “are the produce of slavery”? King David, he said, would not drink water brought to him by slaves.
*
Duxbury was one of those towns that derived secondhand profits from slavery, so Allyn’s remarks were pointed. The Bostonian Mungo Mackay, who grew wealthy on the Middle Passage, purchased at least one ship from King Caesar Weston. On the River Walk in Savannah, Georgia, there’s a plaque that today reads, “The schooner
Gustavus
of Duxbury, Mass., disembarked 26 Africans at the Port of Savannah on October 6, 1821. The men, women and children ranged from two months to thirty-six years.” The
Gustavus
was owned by Nathaniel Winsor Jr., another prosperous Duxbury shipbuilder and merchant. And Weston’s large fleet, which provided jobs for Duxbury sailors, also ran fish to plantations in Haiti, Cuba, and Virginia and brought sugar and cotton, picked and cut by slaves, to northern and European ports.
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Reverend Allyn, though, wouldn’t follow his premise to its radical end. “We, Christians, advocates for liberty and the rights of men,” he said, “stimulate our appetites and feast our palates, daily, and without remorse, upon luxuries produced—” Suddenly, there, in midsentence, he interrupted himself. Before changing the topic, he admitted that to continue would prove too provocative: “I stop, lest something unwelcome should obtrude itself in regard to the social condition of some of our sister states.” “The sea of popular liberty” is “tempestuous,” he warned, “the rich and the poor, the north and the south, form into parties to injure and destroy each other; and under the specious cover of preserving liberty, liberty is at length annihilated.”

Allyn was beginning to get a sense of the dilemma the next generation of northern Americans, including in Duxbury itself, would confront head-on: make war to end slavery, which might end America’s experiment in liberty, or leave southern states alone and admit that liberty for some meant slavery for others. Most good opinion in Duxbury, a community well-versed in natural law, a town that was unanimous in its support for revolution, opposed slavery. But in the years to come, the argument would be over how to end it, or even if ending it was worth the cost of endangering the union. Duxbury’s Christian congregations would split and then split again over slavery.
*

These schisms were still well in the future as Delano thought about what to do with his
Perseverance
. It wasn’t built to be a slaver but he could have used it to trade with Caribbean slave islands. That is how as a young man he served his seafaring apprentice, on ships carrying salted cod to Haiti. Then as a young officer and captain, he traveled enough times to other slave islands in the Caribbean, including Trinidad, Tobago, Puerto Rico, as well as Guiana on the mainland, that a good part of the experience that made him a master mariner was owed to slave hunger (Haitian slaves, writes Amy Wilentz, “often could not consume enough calories to allow for normal rates of reproduction; what children they did have might easily starve”). But like his friend Gamaliel Bradford, he found slavery abhorrent.
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*   *   *

Delano might have tried his hand as a whaler. Whaling was still on the upswing, and though Atlantic whales by this time were mostly gone, Delano could have outfitted his ship as a whaler and tried to tap the Pacific’s “living sea of oil.” Duxbury was just a daylong dog’s leg sail around Cape Cod to Nantucket and a bit farther to New Bedford, the twin capitals of American whaling. But few Duxbury men got into the business, either as common sailors or as captains.
¹⁰

Once, when he was in the harbor at Valparaiso, in Chile, Amasa had tried to harpoon a whale. A large one had fallen asleep not far from the harbor’s clutch of anchored ships. Delano had his men row him softly out to within twenty feet of the animal. He threw his lance and hit his mark but “on feeling the hurt” the whale raised its enormous tail and brought it down with frightening force, throwing up enough water to half fill Delano’s boat. “Had it hit the boat it would have been staved to atoms, and probably some of us been killed.” The whale swam away bellowing and spouting blood till out of sight. “Thus ended our first and last enterprise in killing whales,” wrote Delano. The outing convinced him that “it was a difficult and dangerous business, and ought never to be attempted by any, except those who have been bred up to and perfectly skilled in the art.”

Even had he been able to master the kill, the business of whale hunting was a complex, hierarchical affair, with many interests and skills at play. By the late 1700s, most whaling expeditions were organized by heavily capitalized firms or groups of investors, underwritten by established insurance companies, and supplied by makers of specialized equipment, including barbed harpoons, cutting knives, and hooks. Windlasses had to be fortified and blocks and tackle calibrated to counterpoise the buoyancy of the ship with the deadweight of the whale as it was hauled out of the water and its blubber peeled off. Ships also needed to be outfitted with a large number of casks and pots and their decks reinforced to hold the heavy brick stoves that rendered the blubber into oil and that turned whalers into floating furnace-factories.

Herman Melville provided a famous description of these tryworks, set in motion by the “unconscious skill” of men from many nations who gracefully kept their footing so that the raging furnace didn’t set their windswept, wave-tossed, night-enveloped ship ablaze: with “huge pronged poles” the men “pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.” The men laughed and talked and spit “as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived.”
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It wasn’t just that Amasa Delano didn’t have the capital and contacts to organize such a collective, synchronized enterprise. He also didn’t have the sentiment.

In a section of
Moby-Dick
describing the labor involved in squeezing the jellylike spermaceti oil taken from a whale’s head into liquid, Melville conveys a sense of intense human interconnectivity, the way self-abandonment can produce ecstatic solidarity:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
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