Abolishing the Norm - Episode 1: Slavery's Tryal
Over 300 years, the transatlantic slave trade caused the abuse, suffering and enslavement of an estimated 10-12 million people. This episode takes a look at what some of that experience would have meant for these groups and individuals forcibly removed from their homelands. Specifically, we look at the slave uprising on the Spanish ship Tryal, in 1805, and ask some questions that set us on the path of this series about the abolition of one of the oldest human institutions. What were the social, political and economic conditions that led to the uprising on the Tryal? How did it go down and what were the repercussions? Furthermore, how did American author Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame) write about the Tryal uprising, some 50 years after it had occurred, and during a period where his country was at that moment tearing itself apart over the very question of slavery? All this and more, in Slavery's Tryal.
Spanish American Slavery of Natives and Africans
The largest amount of Africans taken into slavery ended up in Spanish American colonies; an imperial colonial structure that depended on the free labour that the enslaved provided. Here they joined the millions of natives who were already being exploited and put into forced servitude, very often leading directly to their deaths.
In 1780, Tupac Amaru II (after whom Tupac Amaru Shakur was named) led an uprising against Spanish colonisation and exploitation. Regarding his name, he was actually born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, but this is a seriously Spanish sounding name. Tupac Amaru I had been the last indigenous monarch of the Neo-Incan state, and had been executed by the Spanish in 1572. It's a good name change if you are becoming a leader of indigenous revolt. We are probably going to do an episode on him one day so won't go into it, but suffice to say Native Americans suffered tremendously under the labour needs of European commercial and imperial globalism.
Besides the devastation of small-pox and other diseases, and of course conquest and colonisation in general, many natives suffered from working in the silver mines - forced into it through Spain's exploitation of the Incan system of indentured labour, mita, and which now upheld the costs of Spain's imperial output.
In their article (of which here is an abstract) titled Mercury Production and Use in Colonial Andean Silver Production: Emissions and Health Implication (2011), Nicholas A. Robins and Nicole A. Hagan write:
“The mita system played a central role in the destruction of indigenous communities - not only through death and morbidity as a result of working in the mines and mills but also through the migration of people away from their home towns to evade the levy, which many considered a death sentence”
Although the exact nature of mercury's ill effects remains unknown in the 1600s, there was no question that they existed. A priest in Potosi, which Robins and Hagan suggest to have been the largest city in the world in the 1650s (population 160,000), wrote in 1629 that:
“(the Spaniards) well know and have seen...how terrible are the effects of mercury, as only in smelting...and treading...many are poisoned y mercury and we see those effect among those to whom we give last rights.”
Benito Cereño was first published in 1855 in Putnam's Monthly. A year later, a revised edition appeared in his collection of short stories, Piazza Tales. Contemporary reviews were not of great acclaim, but neither disparaging or dismissive.
In 1856 the United States, chronologically speaking, was on the brink of Civil War; a violent collision that resulted directly from a schism that wrought peoples' consciences and drew on their fears around economic stability and physical security. It was a troubling time, and Melville's telling of the Tryal uprising, if analysed deeply, shows an understanding of the elements at the root of the rift.
In that year one outlet, The Knickerbocker, said of Benito Cereño that it was:
"...most painfully interesting, and in reading it we become nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves."
There are some differences between the fictional account of Melville and the non-fictional account of Delano's memoirs, that are worth pointing out. In Benito Cereño, the ship on which the mutiny is taking place is not called the Tryal, but the San Dominck - an explicit reference to Haiti and the revolution that had so drastically changed the world. Delano's ship is not the Perseverance, but Bachelor's Delight. It is also set, not in 1805, as in reality, but in 1799. It has been suggested that this places it more within the timeframe of the Haitian Revolution, showing that Melville believed this story to truly represent the great conflict of the age, in which Haiti played such a massive role.
Reading List
Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity, London, Oneworld Publications, 2014
Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands, Boston, E.G House, 1817
Herman Melville, Benito Cereño, Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn, 2006
Jeanine Marie DeLombard and Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012
Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause, Yale, Yale University Press, 2017