The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Page B

another occasion, in jail, he “got down on the floor, to show us [visitors] how they were stowed on board, then moved about on his knees, and as he rose put his hand of the top of his head, to indicate how low the deck was.” Grabeau and Kinna did likewise: they “lay down upon the floor, to show the painful position in which they were obliged to sleep” aboard the slaver. 92
    Throughout these demonstrations, Cinqué emphasized the common experience of the Middle Passage. Speaking of the forty-nine men aboard the
Amistad
, he recalled, “We all came to Havana in same vessel.” They were, in short, shipmates, or “ship-friends” as the relationship was sometimes called in Freetown in the 1830s: theirs were “the bonds of fellowship, bound in days of misery.” The Mende word was
ndehun
, which means brotherhood. Fellow inductees of the Poro called each other “mates.” It was noted of Burna that he “manifests much feeling when reference is made to his companions who have died,” those people of many nations aboard both the
Teçora
and the
Amistad
. The social bonding—what anthropologists call “fictive kinship”—began in Lomboko, continued aboard the
Teçora
and in the barracoons of Havana, and reached a kind of apotheosis in action aboard the
Amistad
. It would continue in the New Haven jail and emerge finally as ethnogenesis, the formation of a new group called “the Mendi People.”
    Conquering warriors had been assimilating people from other cultures for centuries. As Arthur Abraham has noted, to this day Mendepeople “with no degree of consanguinity” routinely call each other father, mother, brother, and sister. Indeed, this seems to have been a regional phenomenon in Sierra Leone. Surgeon Robert Clarke noted that the multiethnic Liberated Africans in Freetown commonly used the terms “mammy,” “daddee,” “broder,” and “sissa” as forms of address. The “additive” nature of Mende and other West African cultures served the
Amistad
Africans well when they were far from home. Life itself depended on
ndehun
. 93
    The Barracoons of Havana
    In the middle of June 1839, after an eight-week voyage from Pedro Blanco’s factory, the
Teçora
encountered another British antislave frigate as it neared Havana. Foone and Kimbo testified that they were landed “by night.” Slavery was legal in Cuba, but the slave trade was not, for Spain had signed a treaty outlawing the trade, and the British meant to enforce it. Security was tight during disembarkation and afterward: Cinqué and Bau recalled that they were “ironed hand and foot.” In addition, “every two were chained together at the waist and by the neck.” The vessel was one of many slave ships arriving in the dynamic slave society of Cuba at the time: British Superintendent of Liberated Africans Richard Robert Madden claimed in November 1839 that some eighty vessels, bearing twenty-five thousand enslaved Africans, had already arrived in Havana during the year. It was customary for the slavers to allow a couple of weeks for their human cargo to recover their health before final sale. 94
    After five days the captives were moved to a new set of barracoons, named La Misericordia, located “nearly in front of the governor’s country house, situated outside the walls of Havana, on the Paseo Militar, or public promenade.” They took their place alongside sheep, oxen, and cattle for sale. According to Madden, who made it a point to find and visit these barracoons in order to learn more about the experience of the
Amistad
Africans while they were in Cuba, the keeper was the same Riera who had worked for Pedro Blanco/Pedro Martinez in Gallinas. When told of the revolt and the escape to freedom,Riera said to Madden, “Que lástima” (“What a pity”). He referred to “the loss of so many valuable Bozals, or newly imported Africans.” He regretted “that so much property should be lost to the owners.” 95
    Cinqué and Grabeau recalled the