The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Page A

the British, taken to Freetown, and condemned. A short time later, when the coast was again clear, another vessel appeared and everyone was reloaded. Once aboard, the hardware of bondage was attached, said Grabeau: “They were fastened together in couples by the wrists and legs, and kept in that situation day and night.” Women and children were not shackled; the latter had the free run of the ship except in bad weather when the hatches were battened down with everyone stowed beneath. It was common for the captain and crew to enlist the help of a few Africans to help control the others. The largest males were often made “head men” to oversee groups of ten to twenty. Once the voyage began, the captain spotted another British patrol vessel off the coast, hid the ship in a nearby inlet, and delayed the passage. 88
    The daily routine of the slave ship under sail was standard: two meals a day, taken on the main deck, with singing and dancing afterward, organized by the captain to preserve health and protect investment. Grabeau recalled that “they had rice enough to eat, but had very little to drink. If they left any of the rice that was given to them uneaten, either from sickness or any other cause, they were whipped. It was a common thing for them to be forced to eat so much as to vomit.” Kale confirmed the dismal picture: “When we eat rice white man no give us to drink.” Worse, he whipped “all who no eat fast.” Kinna added that he “was sick & was forced to eat.” He also recalled that “on their way to Cuba, they had scarcely any water & were sometimes brought upon deck to take the fresh air & chained down in the full blaze of a tropical sun, this was so intolerable that they often begged to go below again.” That they wished to return to a lower deck where they would face seasickness, disease, overcrowding, and the pungent “smell of bondage” among the prisoners—the stench for which slave ships were infamous—is remarkable. In Brazil, slavers were sometimes burned after the voyage because it was impossible to eradicate the odor. Perhaps this was the fate of the
Teçora.
89
    On the wide Atlantic, Cinqué exercised what may have been his first act of leadership: he “tried various ways to animate & keep up the depressed spirits of his countrymen.” He exhorted his comrades to get rid of the “sad faces” and to make the best of the situation. “Is not ours a bold warlike nation?” he demanded to know. He reminded all that they were freeborn and that “who knows but we may be freemen yet!” He had plans of rebellion already in mind. 90
    It is powerfully suggestive that the Mende way of describing death was “crossing the waters,” that is, crossing from the human to the spirit world. Whether the slave ship crossing the “great waters” was experienced as a kind of living death, one can only wonder. But actual, not merely metaphorical, death aboard the
Teçora
was certainly real and pervasive. All of the
Amistad
witnesses commented on the number who died. Bau explained in court that there were a “good many in the vessel, and many died.” Burna noted the many who “died on the passage from Africa to Havana—signifying by gestures that theywere thrown into the sea,” as indeed happened each morning, when dead bodies were brought up from the lower deck. Some may still have been alive when thrown overboard by the illegal slavers as they sought to lighten ship when being chased by British vessels: the captain cynically wagered that their pursuer would stop to rescue those thrown overboard rather than continue the chase. 91
    Several of the
Amistad
captives resorted to a kind of guerilla theater to represent their experience of the Middle Passage. In order to make real the horrors of life below deck for those in a federal courtroom in January 1840, Cinqué sat on the floor, acting out how they had been manacled and shackled, their heads stooped low because there was so little headroom. On