Black History Month: The Tryal Slave Ship Rebellion Of 1805
February 08, 2021 808
Share this:
As we celebrate Black History Month for 2021, we dispassionately tell our stories, both noble and the painful tales of our journey through time as Africans/Black people. This article is one of many that contributes to the large body of accounts of Black history. So please read, and share, to help our people learn of their history, and understand the importance of sharing these stories.
The American
conscience has always been troubled by its relationship to genocide and slavery,
with stories abound to tell of how men, without conscience, thought fellow men
equal to animals and treated them as such.
As Greg
Grandin points out in reference to the novella "Benito Cereno",
Melville throughout his writing life examined the anomalies by which people
lived, dependent on death to sustain life and on slavery to sustain freedom.
The American
revolution was financed in great part by slavery and the young American state
probably could not have continued without it. Of all the chief South and North
American nations, only Canada remained attached to the original colonial power,
and only Canada's economy did not depend on slavery.
On the peak
of slavery, and before the move to finally route out the Atlantic slave trade,
many enslaved people, in various forms, tried to attain freedom. While many tried
and failed, others were met with success. On rebellion against slavery, a story
is told of two Africans (father and son), who successfully rebelled against
slavery on board a ship. This story is about the the ‘Tryal Slave Ship
Rebellion’.
In the remote bay of an uninhabited island off the Chilean coast, on
20 February, 1805, the ‘Perseverance’,
a New England seal hunting vessel commanded by Captain Amaso Delano,
encountered the Tryal.
Captain Amasa Delano from Massachusetts, reduced to seal-hunting
for a bad living, had anchored his ship the ‘Perseverance’ to take on fresh
supplies of water and fish when suddenly, another ship—the Tryal, flying the
Spanish flag, lumbered out of the morning mist, joining it in a sheltered
harbor off the coast of Southern Chile.
The ship was in desperate condition, her rigging ragged, boats
missing, her complement reduced to a handful of half-starved sailors and with a
cargo of unchained west African slaves.
Noting that the Tryal’s
badly tattered sails signaled extreme distress, Delano boarded the
vessel where he found her half-mad captain, Benito Cerreno, supported on the
arms of his muslim body-slaves Babo and Mori. The Spaniard captain, who sobbed
out a fragmented story, spoke of losing hands, boats, passengers and cargo to
sickness and the elements, while appealing to Delano for help.
Astonished by the lack of discipline aboard, which he ascribed to
Cerreno's poor health and seamanship, Delano and his crew swiftly brought
supplies of fresh water and food. An abolitionist, Delano was nevertheless
impressed by the apparent devotion of the two slaves, who refused to be
separated for a moment from their master.
This led him to believe that the Africans on board were crew
members, not knowing that it was all an arrangement by the Slaves who had taken
over the ship: Somewhere along that route, Babo and Morit (father and son), two
leaders of the enslaved Muslims, had waged a successful rebellion on board the Tryal
in the December of 1804.
Taking command of the ship, they killed most of the Spanish crew
members, but held Captain Benito Cerreno hostage. Intent on returning to
Senegal, the freed Africans sailed the ship in the South Pacific for nearly
three months, in vain hopes. The Ship’s leaders, not trained sailors, but
with the knowledge of the Spanish language during their years of captivity and of
the stars, guided the ship southward along the Chilean coast.
Only as Delano left the ship did the charade collapse. Cerreno
broke free, whereupon stumbling to the rail, jumped recklessly on the deck of
the Perseverance, and exposing the deception. Returning to his own
ship, Delano and the Yankee immediately organized a pursuit of the rebels.
Ultimately, they were caught, and most of the Africans killed,
with the ringleaders horridly punished. Babo, the leader was decapitated,
his head impaled on a pike. The surviving Africans were either, as the
case may be, turned over to Spanish authorities, or as reported, the main cargo
of salvaged slaves was put up for sale, whereupon they and the ship became
subject to a prolonged legal battle between the two captains as to their
ownership.
The Tryal Rebellion became the inspiration for Herman Melville’s novella
“Benito Cereno” published in
Putnam's Magazine in 1855. Although most readers at the time assumed the
novella about a slave ship mutiny in the South Pacific to be a work of fiction,
Melville had in fact developed the plot and the names of the novella’s
principal characters from Delano's memoirs, published in 1817 after his return
to Boston and relative poverty.
Melville had taken Delano's account and increased its narrative
tensions, changing it only a little, but building up a dark, terrifying
atmosphere as Delano gradually begins to realise something is wrong, and yet is
unable, through his natural Yankee amiability, to determine what makes him so
uneasy as black mothers sing a sinister dirge and west African carpenters clash
axes they are apparently cleaning.
His questions are answered mysteriously by Captain Cereno, so that
the American suspects rudeness and social inadequacy in the Spaniard. Only
in the dramatically improved ending, with Cereno and his men risking their
lives in the sea and the enraged slaves pursuing them, does it dawn on him that
those "rude blacks" he believed incapable of such subterfuge were
actually the masters, and that his own prejudices allowed him to play into the
hands of Babo and his rebels.
Source of Authors Information:
Anderson., J. (2014, September 30). The Tryal
Slave Ship Rebellion, 1805. Retrieved December 10, 2019, from Black past: https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/tryal-slave-ship-rebellion-1805/
Moorcock, M. (2014, April 16). The Empire of Necessity: The Untold
History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty. Retrieved December 10,
2019, from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/16/empire-necessity-untold-history-slave-rebellion-review