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