Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature)

Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Recent years have seen a shift within both American...

Author: Gesa Mackenthun

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Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature

Recent years have seen a shift within both American literary criticism and American literature toward a multicultural, transnational, and postcolonial engagement with the history of the colonial Atlantic past. This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and ‘oceanic’ framework. The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and imperial ‘unconscious’ in American foundational writing. Designed as a reply to Toni Morrison’s demand to examine the ‘ornate absence’ of the themes of race and slavery in classic American literature, the book analyzes the writings of canonized authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville alongside those of lesser known writers like Olaudah Equiano, Royall Tyler, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Maxwell Philip, and situates them within the colonial, and ‘postcolonial,’ context of the slave-based economic system of the Black Atlantic. While placing the transatlantic slave trade on the map of American Studies and viewing it in conjunction with American imperial ambitions in the Pacific, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature also adds a historical dimension to present discussions about the ‘ambivalence’ of postcoloniality. Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her books include an analysis of early modern colonial discourse, Metaphors of Dispossession (1997), and a forthcoming collection of essays, co-edited with Bernhard Klein, on the history of oceans, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Her main work is in the fields of American Studies, colonial discourse, and postcolonial theory.

Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo, University of Glasgow In an age of globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders. As a result, Americanists in recent years have begun to reconceptualize and reconfigure the discipline of American literary studies, theorizing the ways in which American literature emerges from complex interrelationships between different national traditions, languages and cultural practices. This new series, Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature, will focus on American literary figures as part of a wider international community of writers and intellectuals. 1 New Woman Hybridities Femininity, feminism, and international consumer culture, 1880–1930 Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham 2 Don DeLillo The possibility of fiction Peter Boxall 3 Toni Morrison’s Beloved Possible worlds Justine Tally 4 Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Gesa Mackenthun

Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Gesa Mackenthun

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2004 Gesa Mackenthun All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-41264-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67169-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-33302-4 (Print Edition)

To the memory of Siegfried the Eternal Mariner:

Let’s meet up again some time and swap stories in the Happy Isles Beyond the Wind

Contents

Preface

viii

Acknowledgments

x

1

Chartless narratives: ambivalent postcoloniality and oceanic memory in early American writing

1

2

The emergence of the ‘postcolonial’ Atlantic: Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Tyler’s Algerine Captive

25

3

Textual and geographical displacement in Arthur Mervyn and The Red Rover

53

4

Ambivalent Atlantic: slave ship memories in antebellum writing

94

5

Metaphorical Atlantic: antebellum fictions of the Pacific

163

Epilogue

195

Notes

199

Bibliography

221

Index

236

Imperialism’s culture was not invisible, nor did it conceal its worldly affiliations and interests. There is a sufficient clarity in the culture’s major lines for us to remark the often scrupulous notations recorded there, and also to remark how they have not been paid much attention. Why they are now of such interest… derives less from a kind of retrospective vindictiveness than from a fortified need for links and connections. One of imperialism’s achievements was to bring the world closer together and, although in the process the separation between Europeans and natives was an insidious and fundamentally unjust one, most of us should now regard the historical experience of empire as a common one. The task then is to describe it as pertaining to Indians and Britishers, Algerians and French, Westerners and Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Australians despite the horrors, the bloodshed, and the vengeful bitterness. Edward W.Said, Culture and Imperialism

Preface

Fictions of the Black Atlantic explores the transnational and transoceanic conditions of the emergence of early American literature. As such, it has been conceived as part of a collective effort, conducted by historians, literary historians, and historical geographers, to transgress the scholarly logic of both nationalism and continentalism and to rehabilitate the oceans not merely as symbolic spaces but as real historical sites that have shaped many people’s lives and witnessed the destruction of the lives of many others. My own point of ‘exile’ toward the American nationalist project as a ‘post-68’ German has certainly contributed to developing such a view, as has my current geographical location on the Baltic Sea, which is presently being reinvented as a multicultural and economic contact zone bridging the former ideological divisions of the Cold War era. Naturally, such a historical perspective includes an assessment of the United States as a colonial and an imperial nation. In the light of recent geopolitical developments I find it necessary to emphasize that the main text of this book was written and completed before the attacks of 9/11—an event that will continue to shape and to sharpen academic discussions about the history and the anatomy of empire, colonialism, and postcoloniality. In revising the text for publication, I decided not to make any changes or additions under the impression of recent events. The historical period I am dealing with stretches from the 1790s to the 1850s, and the critical perspective has been informed by scholarly discussions about colonial discourse and postcolonial theory in the 1990s. As a result, Fictions of the Black Atlantic may now possess a nostalgic quality— speaking in a way ‘innocently’ from a period when it was easier to address the dark chapters of American history without incurring the accusation of anti-Americanism. The narrative voice of this book is a voice from ‘old Europe,’ whose dreams of human rights and social justice were once believed to find their fulfillment across the Atlantic Ocean. The dreams are still adrift, in search of a friendly harbor, fighting back the attacks of the black ships of geopolitical pirates. Those black ships, with all their masks and disguises, will hopefully remain subject to critical vigilance.

ix

Smaller sections of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were previously published in Fritz Fleischmann and Klaus Schmidt (eds.) Anything But Well Explored: New Essays on Early American Culture, Frankfurt/New York: Lang, 2000, and Horst Pietschmann (ed.) Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Several friends and colleagues have offered their counsel and advice at different stages of writing. I owe my greatest debt to my colleague and ‘boss’ Hartmut Lutz at Greifswald University, both for allowing me the time necessary for writing by lifting departmental duties from my shoulders, and for his respect for a project quite different in kind from his own work. I hope to have demonstrated to him that the critical analysis of dominant discourses can be congenial with the sympathetic study of ‘subaltern’ literature. In its initial phase this book has greatly benefited from discussions with Amy Kaplan and Mike Rogin, who freely offered their time and hospitality without expecting any returns. Mike will never see the results of our conversations; as many others, I deeply miss his cheerful critical voice. As the project zigzagged across at times tempestuous seas, the following people proved to be reliable friends and critics: Sabine Bröck, Maria Diedrich, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Catrin Gersdorf, Markus Heide, Bernhard Klein, Anne Koenen, Günter Lenz, Rolf Meyn, Heike Paul, Rüdiger Schreyer, Frank Schulze-Engler, and Mark Stein in Germany; Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Elaine Jordan, Alasdair Pettinger, and Tim Youngs in Britain; as well as David Blight, Greg Dening, Rhys Isaac, Steve Nissenbaum, Marcus Rediker, and John Carlos Rowe across the seas. My sincere thanks to you all. Netzeband, August 2003

Acknowledgments

The publisher and author would like to thank the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for permission to include the following illustration: Joseph Mallord William Turner, English 1775–1851, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 90.8× 122.6cm (353/4×481/4 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 99.22.

1 Chartless narratives Ambivalent postcoloniality and oceanic memory in early American writing

On the last day of November, 1620, on the confines of the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, lo! we behold one little solitary tempest-tost and weather-beaten ship…. This ship had the embryo elements of all that is useful, great, and grand in Northern institutions; it was the great type of goodness and wisdom, illustrated in two and a quarter centuries gone by; it was the good genius of America. But look far in the South-east, and you behold on the same day, in 1620, a low rakish ship hastening from the tropics, solitary and alone, to the New World. What is she? She is freighted with the elements of unmixed evil. Hark! hear those rattling chains, hear that cry of despair and wail of anguish, as they die away in the unpitying distance. Listen to those shocking oaths, the crack of that fleshcutting whip. Ah! it is the first cargo of slaves on their way to Jamestown, Virginia. Behold the May-flower anchored at Plymouth Rock, the slave-ship in James River. Each a parent, one of the prosperous, labourhonouring, lawsustaining institutions of the North; the other the mother of slavery, idleness, lynch-law, ignorance, unpaid labour, poverty, and duelling, despotism, the ceaseless swing of the whip, and the peculiar institutions of the South. These ships are the representation of good and evil in the New World, even to our day. When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end? William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) This study was inspired by a recent shift within both American literary criticism and American literature toward a multicultural, transnational, and postcolonial engagement with the history of the colonial Atlantic past —a past whose dialectic William Wells Brown so effectively sketches with his image of the arrival of the two ships on America’s shores. Since the

2 POSTCOLONIALITY IN EARLY AMERICAN WRITING

early 1990s, the book market has been enriched by a number of fictional texts, many written by writers of color, which rediscover and redefine a formerly underrepresented chapter of the American past: the history, and historicization in early American fiction, of the slave trade and the slavebased Atlantic economy. It is the task of this study to uncover the impact of this history on American literature between the founding of the nation and the outbreak of the Civil War. The book was originally conceived as a critical dialogue between the ‘foundational’ writings of the United States and recent postcolonial historical fictions about the world of Atlantic slavery which significantly alter our view of early American history. As it turned out, the latter part of the story remains to be written. But I want at least to name those postcolonial texts which have occasioned me to plunge into my project of revisionary literary history. John Edgar Wideman, in his short story ‘Fever’ (1989) and The Cattle Killing (1996), explores the history of black solidarity and sacrifice in yellow fever-ridden Philadelphia, turning the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 into an allegory of America’s troubled relationship toward its African population. Wideman’s stories, in part written from the perspective of the members of the African American community, Jones and Allen, center around the dissection of the body of a fever victim. They combine the theme of ethnicity with the theme of the infected body —both as an object of anatomic scrutiny within the emerging discourse of modern medicine and as the body politic, the new nation of the United States besieged by infection introduced from the ‘savage’ fringes of the Atlantic Ocean. While Wideman’s fictions can be seen as postmodern rewritings of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Arthur Mervyn, Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage (1990) involves well-known classic texts like Benito Cereno, MobyDick, Blake, and the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano in a parodistic intertextual play which reimagines the American slave trade to Africa from the perspective of an African American pícaro. Both Wideman and Johnson can thus be seen to contribute to the postmodern genre of historiographical metafiction (see Hutcheon 1989: chapter 3; Engler and Müller 1994). The same applies to Caryl Phillips, who in Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993) draws on the experiences of various historical figures, Equiano among them, in his postcolonial mimicry of colonial accounts of a slave plantation in the Caribbean, a slaver’s log written off the coast of Africa, or the report on an African American missionary to Liberia who ‘goes native’ and disappears in the wilderness. Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992), more traditional in style, exhausts the narrative possibilities of realism in writing the history of the transatlantic slave trade with uncommon psychological insight and documentary detail, while Michelle Cliff, in Free Enterprise (1993), adds an otherwise missing female perspective with her rendering of the

POSTCOLONIALITY IN EARLY AMERICAN WRITING 3

multiethnic, transnational, and diasporic resistance to the system of slavery, represented in the figures of two women actively engaged in the struggles for abolition and women’s suffrage. David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994) and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), finally, are dedicated to reimagining the historical event of the British slave ship Zong whose captain ordered 131 slaves to be thrown overboard and whose owners later went to court demanding that the insurance company pay for the lost ‘cargo.’ What combines these texts is their preoccupation with slavery and the slave trade and their attempt to represent this history from a subaltern perspective— the perspective of slaves, sailors, women, radicals, and free blacks who somehow managed to play the game of the colonial world. Written in the light of Toni Morrison’s pathbreaking novel Beloved (1987), these fictions are part of a larger process of redefining cultural identity from a postnational and postcolonial position. As any other cultural identity, a postcolonial identity needs, as Stuart Hall points out, a sense of a past in order to face the challenges of the present. Postcolonial cultural identity, Hall writes, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialist past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (Hall 1990:225) The postcolonial fictional revisions of colonial history alerted me to a part of the American past that is strangely absent from, or visibly suppressed by, the literary and historiographical canon of the United States. No one voices this precarious absence better than Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved may be seen to have initiated this new interest in the history of Atlantic slavery by aggravating the fact of its absence in the crucial scene of Beloved’s delirious monologue (Morrison 1987:210–13). Speaking of the silence in literary criticism and classical American ‘romances’ about this history, Morrison writes: Invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-there’; …a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so


ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves…. Where, I wonder, in these romances is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled? Where does it heighten, where does it dislocate, where does it necessitate novelistic invention…? … The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances. (Morrison 1989:11–14) Morrison’s thesis that the formative role of African Americans and the practice of slavery are conspicuously absent from most nineteenth-century American literature but make their unsuspected and ‘ghostly’ return in America’s ‘dark romances’ of the antebellum period has been inspired by Michael Rogin’s reading of Moby-Dick, which uncompromisingly historicizes that text in terms of the legislation of the Fugitive Slave Law, American imperial aspirations, and the social consequences of capitalist economy (Morrison 1989:14–18; Rogin 1983). My study is indebted as much to Rogin’s work as to Morrison’s. Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic (1993), published concurrently with the new postcolonial historical fictions I mentioned, has further sharpened my perspective, alerting me to the fact that the absence of the topic of the transatlantic slave trade from early American literature—both as historical theme and as current practice—is connected with the historiographical discourse of American national identity, a discourse that extends into the present and includes the discourse of American Studies. Obviously the absence of the Black Atlantic is in part the result of the absence of the Atlantic as such from a discourse that still seeks to accommodate the ideological demands for national myth-making. The important task of Gilroy’s book is to reconstitute the Black Atlantic—the historical facts of the middle passage and the subsequent spread of African cultures to many different places in Europe and the Americas—as a counter-history to the familiar history of the development of national cultures. For him, the colonial culture of the Atlantic is a rhizomorphic and transnational formation that unites diverse local black cultures by their common historical experience of the middle passage (Gilroy 1993:4). In emphasizing the hybrid state of the various black cultures of the Atlantic system, Gilroy aims at ‘reevaluat[ing] the significance of the modern nation state as a political, economic, and cultural unit’ In the first chapter of his book, which is the one that interests me here (all later chapters deal with more recent examples of the Black Atlantic cultural diaspora), Gilroy chooses the image of the ship, ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion,’ as a fitting metaphor for ‘the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black


Atlantic’ (4). He further refers to the experiences of black sailors like Robert Wedderburn and Olaudah Equiano to illustrate the impact of the Black Atlantic on the fashioning of transcultural personalities (15), concluding that [t]he history of the black Atlantic…continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship— provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory. (16) Referring back to the history of the middle passage, ‘the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation,’ Gilroy wants the image of the ship to force us ‘to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere’ (17). This book is an attempt to carry Gilroy’s thesis into the scholarship on the formative years of American literature by making visible the aesthetic processes by which early American literature remembers, and in part disremembers, the history Gilroy speaks of. The questions I ask of postrevolutionary and antebellum texts derive from the knowledge that each year until 1831 more Africans came to America than Europeans and that in demographic terms, ‘America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century’ (David Eltis, quoted in Dayan 1991:92). My inquiry is furthermore guided by the knowledge that, as Robert Gross writes, the region of the Black Atlantic was ‘the crucible of modernity, where the capitalist world-system was forged through the bondage of African slaves’ (Gross 2000:382). In answering Morrison’s demand for a reevaluation of early American literature, the present study examines how the history of the Black Atlantic manifests itself in texts ranging from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano and the post-revolutionary novels of Royall Tyler and Charles Brockden Brown to the Pacific fictions of Melville, which have more in common with the Black Atlantic than we may expect. The title of this chapter announces an investigation of the ‘ambivalent postcoloniality’ of the United States. The feeling of puzzlement that may be created by applying the terminology of postcolonial theory to a study of the early United States may be related to the fact that the narrative of national origins perpetuated by American historiography usually signals a clean break with the colonial past. What, the reader may ask, is ambivalent about the history of the early United States as a history of continental expansion, Western settlement, and manifest destiny, a history that is unique in its way and absolutely dissociated from the history of Europe?


The present study wants to challenge a view of early American history and literature as a process that begins with a Puritanic and Atlantic-oriented prehistory which culminates in the gaining of political independence, and then turns its gaze westward in order to exclusively concentrate on the process of continental expansion.1 To illustrate what I mean by the ambivalence of American postcoloniality, I want to recall what I regard as the primal scene of America’s self-invention as a postcolonial nation, Thomas Jefferson’s treatise A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). Jefferson here employs the rhetorical strategy of historical analogy in construing a traditional right of American colonists, first, to the possession of the land, and, second, to rebel against the King of England. He compares the American colonists to the ancient Saxons of England who, as he writes, rightfully moved south from their native wilds and woods in the North of Europe…possessed themselves of the island of Britain then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country, the Anglo-Saxon common law. (Jefferson 1975:4) As the ancient Saxons, Jefferson argues, the British ‘conquered’ America, and as the Saxons, who rightfully tried to shake off the foreign rule of the Norman conquerors, the colonial Americans now sought to emancipate themselves from the unjust rules of the British king. He furthermore justifies rebellion with the argument that, just as the ancient Saxons, American settlers held their land in ‘absolute dominion’ and ‘in absolute right’ and thus legitimately rejected the imposition of feudal tenures (17– 18). The analogy between the situation in colonial British America and that of Britain under Norman rule is crude enough: obviously, the British king is no foreign conqueror having invaded the British colonies. But in casting an internal conflict between motherland and colony in terms of a conflict between ‘native’ Americans and foreign feudal lords, Jefferson rhetorically indigenizes the British colonists, who now appear as the original tenants of the American soil. For the actual Native Americans who the settlers, being the vanguard of English colonization, were actively displacing, there is no room left in his comparison; their presence is at best acknowledged indirectly in Jefferson’s remarks that ‘America was conquered’ and that the settlers spilt their own blood ‘in acquiring lands’ (4). By the same token, Jefferson mentions the lawfulness of a people to leave their ancestral lands (as the Saxons did) but has nothing to say about the right to arrive and settle in foreign lands separated from the point of origin by a vast ocean.


Jefferson’s romantic Anglo-Saxonism, which helps him to reinvent the American settlers as noble savages ruled by a superior legal code but unjustly suffering from the Norman yoke,2 allows him to analogize away the rights of indigenous claimants to the land. It also allows him to disclaim any American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. American attempts to suppress that traffic by prohibition and the imposition of duties, writes Jefferson, ‘have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice’ (14–15). Himself a slaveholder, Jefferson puts the slave trade down to a few English pirates while a large part of the actual traffic to America in the eighteenth century was conducted by merchant houses in Rhode Island and other port towns along the Atlantic seashore. Not unexpectedly, Jefferson’s text registers its own contradictions. Toward the end of his argument, Jefferson, pressed by the need to explain why the American Saxons did not protest their rights much earlier, laconically states that ‘America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him or any of his successors…. Our ancestors, however, who migrated hither, were laborers, not lawyers’ and thus unaware of the fictitiousness of the king’s claim to possession (18). In fact, one may argue, against the gist of Jefferson’s tract, that the American settlers had much more in common with the Norman conquerors than with the noble and peaceful Saxons, while the latter, holders of a natural right to the land, share certain key features with the noble Indians evoked by Jefferson in his famous eulogy to the Cayuga chief Logan. But the point here is not to deconstruct the crude rhetoric of the Summary View, which already does the job all by itself. I rather want to use this text as an example of how one of the founding fathers produces a foundational historical narrative of national origins and of national legitimacy. Jefferson’s laconic remark that America was not conquered by Normans or their successors encapsulates the ideological dilemma of an emerging nation that identified itself as postcolonial, due to its rebellion against colonial rule, while simultaneously having to admit its function as an offshoot of the parent tree and an heir to the policy of British imperialism. It is this ambivalence that the present study seeks to trace in early republican and antebellum texts. The Summary View voices a concern that will return in many of the texts discussed: a concern with the legitimacy of political action. The key trope in the legal discourse of the United States, once the analogy with Saxon history was abolished, was of course the philosophy of the right of nature, on which the new nation based its moral and juridical identity. Jefferson and other politicians readily used the doctrine of natural rights in order to legitimize imperial action. As we shall see, antebellum fictional texts


are likewise saturated with the transnational discourse of natural rights, and they frequently associate it with the ocean as an extrajuridical space. While the topic of higher law is evident in almost all of Melville’s works, it undergoes significant alterations in the work of the African American writers Equiano, Douglass, Delany, and Philip, who turn the doctrine of natural rights into a justification for their rebellion against slavery. Jefferson’s invention of a tradition describes the rough outlines of a narrative of early American history that would be followed by both American historiography and American literary criticism until quite recently. The metaphorical indigenization of Euro-America in the new continent, accompanied by the reduction of the African slave trade to a few British pirates, also laid the foundation for the fictionalization of American history, notably in the work of Cooper and other frontier novelists, as a master narrative of continental expansion that simultaneously marginalizes the continuing importance of the Atlantic economic system. Yet, Cooper, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is also widely regarded as the ‘inventor’ of the sea novel and received great international acclaim for his nationalistic pirate romance The Red Rover. But at a closer look, the seeming exception proves the rule because Cooper’s high-seas romance, a ‘foundational fiction’ par excellence, can already be seen to enact a domestication of the pirate, representative of the American revolution, and a decline of the Atlantic as a symbolic site of political action.3 The protean identity of Cooper’s protagonist, a pirate who masquerades as a slaver, reiterates Jefferson’s denial of Americans’ participation in the odious commerce and removes the American involvement in the African slave trade, notably that of Rhode Island, to the pre-revolutionary past. This discursive denial was unwittingly reinforced by literary criticism which excluded The Red Rover from the American literary canon while retaining many of Cooper’s weaker works, presumably because they take the ideologically more potent frontier as a setting. The example of The Red Rover may be seen as representative of a general state of what Victor Turner has called ‘structural invisibility’ (Turner 1967:95–106): a conspicuous neglect of the Atlantic Ocean and its fictionalizations from American literary criticism. The present work attempts to help mend that gap, both in rereading canonized literary texts of the early republican and antebellum periods as negotiations of American Atlantic history and in introducing lesser known texts which slipped from the canon, I want to argue, not for purely aesthetic reasons but also because the political and ideological concerns which they articulate disrupted the dominant image of American culture and history. My study is limited by two dates: 1789, the publication date of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and 1861, that of Martin Delany’s novel Blake. As the dates suggest, the texts discussed in this book look back to the decisive event of the French Revolution and intensely reflect on the


meanings of slavery, freedom, human rights, rebellion, and national legitimacy. At the same time they also— especially the later ones—look forward to the crisis about slavery that was building up within American society ever since the failure to solve the problem in the founding period. Written between the storming of the Bastille and the outbreak of the Civil War, all of the texts are significantly shaped by the ideas that these two events stand for. The absence of the Atlantic Ocean from studies of American (literary) history is inseparable from the absence of empire and colonialism from traditional American historiography. As other critical studies of colonialism, empire, and their attending discourses, the present text questions the still predominant view that discounts the imperial ambitions of the early United States and dates its emergence as an imperial power to the period of high imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century and its overseas engagement in the Pacific and the Caribbean.4 These studies, as well as many general studies of colonialism, consistently ignore the fact of the perpetual engagement of the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific before the 1890s which they regard as merely domestic affairs—a view that unwittingly reiterates the imperial rhetoric of American politicians themselves. Departing from the view of American imperialism as a late nineteenthcentury ‘aberration,’ scholars like Albert Weinberg, R.W.van Alstyne, Wolfgang Reinhard, and Hartmut Keil claim that American continental expansion was a colonizing process that followed a similar trajectory as other colonizing schemes, and that it was accompanied by an imperialist rhetoric which emulates the imperial rhetoric of European powers just as it anticipates the actual realization of an American empire in the 1890s. As early as 1960 van Alstyne introduced the then rather unfashionable argument that the United States was ‘a member of the competitive system of national states with a behavior pattern characteristic of an ambitious and dynamic national state.’ But as this approach ‘gives precedence to foreign affairs over domestic affairs,’ it did not enter dominant historiography until much later (van Alstyne 1960:9). As Weinberg, van Alstyne, Keil, and others show at some length, the ideologues of an American continental— and at times hemispheric—empire, like Jefferson, Jedidiah Morse, and John Quincy Adams, had no reservations about using the language of empire. Confident that Providence had chosen the Anglo-Americans to rule over the western hemisphere—either by settlement or by trade—they used its secular version, the myth of the westward course of empire, as well as the argument of geography, to stake their imperial claim. Thus Morse wrote in American Geography in 1789 that it is ‘well known that empire has been traveling from east to west,’ that America would probably be ‘her last and broadest seat,’ that Americans ‘cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of


souls, west of the Mississippi,’ and that the islands of the West Indies were ‘the natural legacy of this continent, and will doubtless be claimed as such when America shall have arrived at an age which will enable her to maintain her right’ (quoted in van Alstyne 1960:69–70). To Jefferson, similarly, the United States was the ‘nest, from which all America, North and South’ was to be peopled (87). The concept of ‘geographical predestination’ that underwrites Morse’s and Jefferson’s imperial plans would be renewed in the 1840s and 1850s when Southern politicians increasingly urged the annexation of Cuba (Weinberg 1963:43; Keil 1991: 77, 80).5 It is for this reason that Wolfgang Reinhard and Hartmut Keil insist on using the term ‘imperialism’ even for the foundational period of American history (Reinhard 1985; Keil 1991).6 It likewise cannot be denied that the westward expansion was a classical case of settlement colonialism which would only mutate into a form of internal colonialism with the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century.7 The founding fathers found justification for their imperial ambition not only in the quasi-religious discourse of God’s providence and in the scientific discourse of geography but also in their recent independence from England, which necessitated (so the argument went) their control of the continent as a means of securing themselves against foreign intervention (Weinberg 1963: 21–3). As a postcolonial empire, then, the United States established its national and imperial legitimacy with reference to the classical doctrine of the natural right to self-preservation. But apart from that rhetoric of self-defense, van Alstyne argues, the American concept of empire, which was practically complete by 1800, very much resembled the British one which it inherited. Nor was the expansionism of postcolonial America limited to the continent: Actually American expansion, like British, was global. As a coastal country of the eighteenth century, the United States looked seaward as well as land-ward, and the paths of its growing empire in the nineteenth century stretched out to sea as well as across the continent. The United States was a commercial and seafaring state, as well as an agrarian state; and its mercantile and seafaring population was busily active in extending and developing long-distance sea routes even while the physical handicaps to transcontinental migration remained unsolved. (van Alstyne 1960:100) Van Alstyne accordingly views the rising American Empire in the Pacific Ocean, whose history did not begin in 1898 but in the 1780s, as correlative to the expanding continental empire (see also Keil 1991:82). This simultaneity is duly reflected in American literary texts. Both Thomas Philbrick and Haskell Springer have dedicated book-length studies to the


topic of American sea fiction, emphasizing the importance of the Atlantic Ocean in the literature of the period before 1850 and the rise in importance of the Pacific since the early decades of the nineteenth century (Philbrick 1961; Springer 1995).8 As other European settler colonies, the United States emerged as a postcolonial nation while carrying on the colonial policy of the former mother country. Its ambivalent political status as a nation that was postcolonial and colonizing at the same time is duly reflected in the ideological contradictions of the fictional texts to be explored in this book. But rather than center on the process of continental expansion and the contradictions it produced I will concentrate on the transoceanic aspect of America’s ambivalent postcoloniality. The continental orientation of that branch of American historiography which reiterates the nationalist and imperial rhetoric of the founding fathers gains an ironical twist from the fact that the ‘postcolonial’ United States owed the doubling of its territory in 1803 to the first proper postcolonial revolution in Saint Domingue, as a result of which Napoleonic France lost its interest in its American possessions and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15, 000,000. The struggle for independence under Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines in the Caribbean island, which was a rebellion against both a colonial mother country and against the colonial institution of slavery, indeed deserves historical precedence if American history was strictly measured by late twentieth-century definitions of postcoloniality. Haiti’s imaginative impact on antebellum literature can hardly be overestimated. In taking in historical ironies like this (that the anticolonial struggle of one colony facilitates the imperial expansion of another), the present study relies on an extended definition of colonialism not merely as a bilateral relationship between mother country and colony but as a whole system of economic, political, and cultural relations based on the subjugation, exploitation, and displacement of ‘primitive’ peoples. While the idea of colonialism as a world system has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, and others, recent research on the transatlantic slave trade suggests that the United States not only doubled its territory as a result of a revolution against slavery in the Caribbean but also was considerably involved in the slave-based Atlantic economic system (Reinhard 1985:152; DuBois 1986; Bailey 1992; Thomas 1998:760–70). The ideologically formative absence of a transnational perspective from classic American historiography has been instrumental in precluding a view of the United States as a partner in the Atlantic economy. While Southern plantation slavery has received extensive scholarly attention in the past few decades, the Atlantic slave trade largely continues to be regarded as a European phenomenon which ended in the English-speaking world with its official abolition in 1807–8.9 And yet, as many as 1.1 million slaves were transported from Africa to Brazil in the nineteenth century and about 600,


000 to Cuba (Klein 1999:197).10 What makes the illegal slave trade important in our context is the circumstance that a large part of it was carried out on American ships, under the American flag, and with the participation and to the economic benefit of United States citizens. Slave trade historians hesitatingly begin to confirm the fact, pointed out more than a hundred years ago by W.E.B.DuBois, that North American merchants, shipyards, and industries were directly or indirectly involved in the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil—besides the direct dependency of New England industries on Southern plantation slavery which ensured that the cotton exports to England amounted to half of the total value of domestic exports in the period between 1815 and 1860.11 Especially after the ending of the slave trade to Brazil in the early 1850s, New York became a favorite harbor for outfitting slavers to bring slaves from Africa to Cuba, as well as the seat of several Portuguese and Brazilian slave-trading companies (Thomas 1998:761). As Ronald Bailey demonstrates, shipbuilding was the leading New England industrial branch that directly benefited from the slave trade, with other industries profiting indirectly by producing merchandise for the African trade, such as rum, textiles, and—interestingly — spermaceti candles (Bailey 1992). Bailey aptly concludes that One of the great travesties in the study of U.S. history is the suggestion that only the South benefited directly and substantially from slavery. The benefits from what we are calling the slave(ry) trade to the North and to the U.S. as a whole were far from indirect. (Bailey 1992:219) The complex connections between Yankee entrepreneurs and the Cuban slave trade, which are usually bypassed by American slave trade historians,12 are fascinatingly described in thinly disguised fictional form by Martin Delany in his novel Blake, to be analyzed in Chapter 4. But apart from these direct and indirect material benefits of Yankee entrepreneurs and New England industries from the illegal slave trade, the United States was increasingly chosen by slave traders of other nations as a protective power against the encroachments of British cruisers. As DuBois reports, the illegal trade, which reached a new peak in the 1840s and 1850s, depended for its success on a strategy of national masquerade, flying Spanish colors until Spain abolished the trade in 1820, and thereafter favoring the Stars and Stripes as protection. Quoting from official United States government papers, DuBois writes that ‘by 1845, a large part of the trade was under the stars and stripes; by 1850 fully onehalf the trade, and in the decade, 1850–1860 nearly all the trade, found this flag its best protection’ (DuBois 1986:144). Slavers felt safe under the American flag because the English abolitionist police would not dare to violate the official politics of non-intervention between Britain and the


United States, and because they knew that the Americans never seriously put into practice their official condemnation of the trade in sending a recognizable naval force to the West African coast. DuBois describes the consequences of the United States government’s obstinacy: If a fully equipped slaver sailed from New York, Havana, Rio Janeiro, or Liverpool, she had only to hoist the stars and stripes in order to proceed unmolested on her piratical voyage; for there was seldom a United States cruiser to be met with, and there were, on the other hand, diplomats at Washington so jealous of the honor of the flag that they would prostitute it to crime rather than allow an English or French cruiser in any way to interfere. (DuBois 1986:145–6) As a particularly striking case he refers to the ship Illinois of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was boarded by a British officer in 1842 while lying off the coast of Whydah, Africa, but remained unmolested because of its American papers. ‘Three days later she hoisted Spanish colors and sailed away with a cargo of slaves. Next morning she fell in with another British vessel and hoisted American colors; the British ship had then no right to molest her.’ Another vessel ‘which had been boarded by British officers and found with American flag and papers was, a little later, captured under the Spanish flag with four hundred and thirty slaves’ (DuBois 1986:149). DuBois concludes that by the 1850s, the slave trade was practically reopened (182)—a fact made possible by the official policy of the United States of consolidating its independence from Britain, which included the refusal of Britain’s right to search American merchant ships, or any ship traveling under the American flag. In other words, the revival of the illegal transatlantic slave trade was facilitated, if not encouraged, by the ‘postcolonial’ politics of the United States government: another of many ironies to be relished by examining the history of the early United States under the rubric of its postcoloniality. The postcolonial study of early American history and literature as it is suggested here, then, aims to fill a gap in our understanding of the United States, by suggesting the transcendence of the geographical limitations of the predominant historiographical model and a view of early American culture as part of an Atlantic system whose conditio sine qua non was, as Wolfgang Reinhard reminds us, African slavery (Reinhard 1985:152). To the extent that my textual readings also want to be a contribution to historical studies, they are congenial with recent developments in the historiography of the Atlantic, notably that of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, whose recent book, The Many-Headed Hydra, ties the history of the early United States together with the history of a transatlantic and multicultural revolutionary movement against class oppression and slavery


(Linebaugh and Rediker 2000).13 The hopeful international spirit of resistance which, as Linebaugh and Rediker show, was brutally suppressed in the 1790s by various government measures against radicals and ‘aliens,’ lives on in the work of those nineteenth-century American writers who imaginatively transcended national boundaries in recreating the oceans as sites of universal justice and human equality. The writers most representative of this tradition—Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Herman Melville, and the recently rediscovered Trinidadian writer Maxwell Philip—may appear as a ‘motley crowd’ and, with the exception of Melville, little representative of classic American literature. I introduce them here in order to challenge the selectivity of the American literary canon which, although increasingly striving toward a state of color-blindness, has yet to emancipate itself from the normative pressures of nationalist discourse. I am more particularly thinking of the ‘pattern of denial’ which, as Amy Kaplan wrote a decade ago, can be observed across several disciplines and which she summarizes as ‘the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism’ (Kaplan 1993:11). Kaplan’s detection of the three absences grows out of her critical reading of the ambivalent function of Africa in one of the founding acts of American Studies criticism: Perry Miller’s inauguration of a white, male, and protestant American literary canon (his ‘massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America’) which Miller ‘conceived’ during his stay as a soldier in the Congo. Noting the formative absence of Africa in Miller’s version of America, Kaplan extends her assessment of the shortcomings of American Studies criticism in stating that not only has the role of empire been ignored in the study of American culture but even many of the liberal defenders of a multicultural canon have yet to tackle the difficult question of national boundaries: the new pluralistic model of diversity runs the risk of being bound by the old paradigm of unity if it concentrates its gaze only narrowly on the internal lineaments of American culture and leaves national borders intact instead of interrogating their formation. That is, American nationality can still be taken for granted as a monolithic and self-contained whole, no matter how diverse and conflicted, if it remains implicitly defined by its internal social relations, and not in political struggles for power with other cultures and nations, struggles which make America’s conceptual and geographic borders fluid, contested, and historically changing. (Kaplan 1993:15)


United States imperialism, in its manifestation of westward expansion, has been the object of critical research ever since the inauguration of the American Studies School in the 1960s, and particularly in the wake of the Vietnam War. The ‘internal colonialism’ and its fictionalization in the myth of the frontier,14 on the one hand, and the slave plantation, on the other, have received due attention in the work of Roy Harvey Pearce, Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, Michael Rogin, Jane Tompkins, Robert Levine, William Andrews, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Hazel Carby, Priscilla Wald, Jared Gardner, Dana Nelson, and Russ Castronovo, to name but a few.15 But, as Paul Bové complains, ‘‘American Studies’…has not yet reached the point of ‘exile’ in relation to itself and its nationalist projects’ (Bové 1992:63), and Günter Lenz joins in when he states that [r]aising the question of post-national narratives cannot mean only referring to a reconceptualization of the workings of national identity and counter-identities in the United States, but must also mean asking for a much more elaborated critical redefinition of the meaning of ‘America’ and of the transnational effects and entanglements of United States culture(s) on a global scale. (Lenz 1999:14) Scholars like Amy Kaplan, Eric Sundquist, John Carlos Rowe, Donald Pease, and William Spanos have set out to correct the shortcomings criticized by Bové and Lenz and to open the transnational floodgates of American Studies (if a maritime metaphor is allowed). As a result of its concern with the transoceanic aspect of early American literature, the present study has greatly benefited from Eric Sundquist’s invaluable contextualization of the antebellum literary discourse on slavery in a decidedly hemispheric context which treats the rebellious Caribbean as what it was, both a sphere of American ‘interest’ (including plans to annex Cuba) and a sphere of reciprocal influence—what Eric Sundquist calls a ‘prophetic simulacrum of fears arising from American slavery’ (Sundquist 1993:32). My text also shares many basic assumptions, and some textual readings, with John Carlos Rowe’s recent book-length study of American literary culture and imperialism, especially his emphasis on the impact of Pacific exploration on Melville’s work—a connection that received its most extensive readings to date in the work of Charles Anderson and Walter Herbert. The present study, then, seeks to reread classic American texts both in the light of the recent ‘transnational turn’ in American Studies,16 as well as extending the scope of the study of United States imperialism and New World slavery, by implicating it in an oceanic context. It is in this connection that I cannot but marvel at a significant absence in recent transnationalist conceptualizations and interpretations of classic American literature. Like William Spanos, I am amazed at the glaring


absence of transnational analyses of Moby-Dick. This foremost American sea novel and powerful indictment of American imperialism—both ‘internal’ and external— has so far largely escaped the attention of the New Americanists. As Spanos writes, ‘Moby-Dick, however large the space of its incarceration granted by the ‘New Americanists,’ remains a captive of the literary/cultural/political tradition that it was… Melville’s purpose in some fundamentally counterhegemonic way to call radically into question’ (Spanos 1995:25).17 Perhaps it is my outside perspective which has given me the courage to develop the arguments of Michael Rogin and Carolyn Karcher, both dating back to the 1980s, in reducing this ‘sacred text’ to the topics of Atlantic slavery and Pacific imperialism. In any case my short reading of Moby-Dick at the end of Chapter 5 should be seen as merely the beginning of a discussion that will have to be continued. To speak of the transnational turn by which American Studies metamorphosed into ‘New American Studies’ is also to evoke the theoretical legacy of postcolonial studies. The position of the United States within that critical context is remarkably ambivalent, and recent developments suggest that the term ‘postcolonial’ is increasingly being used as a surrogate for ‘contemporary.’18 On the other hand, early United States culture and literature have been termed ‘postcolonial’ in vague analogy to the postcoloniality of recently decolonized countries. Thus Lawrence Buell and Edward Watts define American postcoloniality in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century exclusively with regard to England. This tends to result in readings of early American writers as fighters for a unique national literature against the cultural imperialism of England and against the ideological demands of the print industry—a reading that tends to pour the wine of Emersonianism into postcolonial bottles (Buell 1992a; 1992b; Watts 1998). The application of the term ‘postcolonial’ to contemporary phenomena such as ethnic relations or the cultural effects of globalization on the one hand, and to a historical tête-à-tête with England on the other, strips the critical concept, as a concept that grew out of the physical and mental decolonization of ‘Third World countries,’ of its original political significance and intellectual rigor. To be sure, the misapplication is in part the result of the elevation of the United States to a postcolonial model country by the authors of The Empire Writes Back. Citing Edgar Huntly as an example for the development of a postcolonial national literature that necessarily ‘indigenize [s] British forms like the gothic and the sentimental novel,’ Ashcroft et al. arrive at the conclusion that ‘the American experience…can be seen to be the model for all later post-colonial writing’ (1989:16). But the authors also state that ‘because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played,’ the postcolonial nature of the United States ‘has not been generally recognized’ (2). The latter statement curiously relativizes the former one because, as subsequent commentators


have stressed, the United States, in continuing the British imperial project, can not serve as a model country for more recently decolonized countries in Africa, the Caribbean, or India. As Peter Hulme points out, the postcoloniality of the United States is marked by an important ambivalence, arising from the fact that ‘[as] a post-colonial nation the United States continued to colonise North America, completing the genocide of the native population begun by the Spanish and British’ (Hulme 1995:122). The United States, Hulme argues, should be included in the study of postcolonial relationships provided that we account for its particular historical genealogy as a country both ‘postcolonial and colonizing at the same time.’ Scholars who, like Lawrence Buell, cast the postcoloniality of the United States in purely bilateral terms, easily miss the paradox that the Early Republic combined an ‘anti-colonial temper’ with a similarly powerful ‘imperial desire’ (Rowe 2000:3)—that its post-revolutionary political consciousness went hand in hand with a heightened effort to continue the European project of imperial expansion. Buell’s analogy between the literature of the postcolonial United States and that of postcolonial Africa moreover reiterates Jefferson’s rhetorical strategy, discussed above, of indigenizing the European immigrants and leaving no room for America’s aboriginal population. His Emersonian reading of Melville’s writings—as rebellions against the cultural dominance of England— downplays their transnational anti-imperialist vision (Buell 1992b).19 And finally, his choice of contemporary African literature for constructing a transhistorical comparison with early America’s struggle for cultural independence effaces, as did Perry Miller’s errand thesis, the decisive contribution of Africa and African people to the constitution of American freedom and early American literature. The ornamental absence of Africa in Buell’s definition of antebellum literature as postcolonial raises the question to what extent that literature can be understood as being postcolonial at all. I agree with Hulme that it is important to apply the theoretical findings of postcolonial criticism to the study of the United States, for two reasons: first, emphasis on the ambivalent and double-stranded postcoloniality of the Early Republic (as a republic both post-revolutionary and imperial) redirects our critical attention to the colonial and imperial aspects of American life and culture. And second, a serious consideration of the period before the Civil War in terms of its postcoloniality allows us to see the transnational and interhemispheric complexity of the involvement of the United States in the Atlantic colonial system.20 It begs the question, for example, to what extent the official abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was merely a lonely act of ‘postcolonial’ good will in view of the fact that the illegal trade and plantation slavery continued to boom until the middle of the nineteenth century.


It should become clear from the preceding remarks that I regard the term ‘postcolonial’ less as a description of an actual historical situation—in which case it can only lead to misunderstandings because of the temporal component implicit in the prefix ‘post.’ As a purely historical marker, ‘postcolonial’ has in my view no significant analytical advantage over the older terms ‘post-revolutionary,’ ‘colonial,’ and ‘imperial.’ In the readings to follow I will rather use the term ‘postcolonial’—not exclusively but mostly—for a particular critical attitude of the texts toward the political reality of colonialism, a reality from which they seek to extricate themselves. This may apply to Cooper’s nationalistic critique of British domination as well as to Douglass’s critique of American slavery, or Melville’s critique of the American translatio imperii from an Atlantic to a Pacific context. As texts are often ideologically heterogeneous, one and the same text can show signs of a postcolonial mentality while remaining otherwise deeply locked in the discourse of colonialism: Poe’s novel Arthur Gordon Pym is perhaps the best example for this double-voicedness. As a critical attitude, the term ‘postcolonial’ ideally applies to my own study as well as part of what Jonathan White has called ‘a politics of ongoing creation of the reality it names, in the face of an ever-present counterreality. The name of that counterreality is imperialism, which, like the devil, has many guises’ (White 1993:1). The self-imposed continentalist limitations of the majority of American Studies criticism is not least a powerful reminder that history is written in terms of nations and continents and not in terms of oceans. The history of literary study, as Edward Said writes, ‘has been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism’ (Said 1993:382). But even postnationalist scholarship is too often guided by the geographically compelling notion of the unifying characteristics of continents. It is important in my view to supplement the critical study of nationalist discourses with the study of transnational and transoceanic relationships and to combine Said’s project of studying imperialism as the undercurrent of the development of modernity with Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic as a cultural-economic contact zone that has for more than 500 years formed what he calls the ‘counterculture of modernity’ (Gilroy 1993:4). The oceanic dimension which Gilroy evokes but which, as a physical reality, recedes in his individual readings, is further elaborated by William Cain. In his introduction to Maxwell Philip’s novel Emmanuel Appadocca, which combines an oceanic setting with an allegory on continental slavery, Cain proposes ‘that our new object of study should be not ‘American’ but ‘Atlantic’ literature—the literature of the Atlantic world as it has been shaped by the slave trade, slavery, race, and racism’ (Cain 1997:xvii). I emphatically embrace Cain’s notion of rereading antebellum literature as texts that have been significantly shaped by the historical reality of the Atlantic, just as I fully agree with his statement that Emmanuel Appadocca


is a ‘multicultural, polyphonic, ‘Atlantic’ book that challenges, even as it capitalizes upon, traditional notions of what a ‘national’ literature is and includes’ (xix). The readings that follow will be concerned with such key issues as America’s literary invention as a ‘postcolonial’ nation in the form of foundational fictions, with the concurrent contestation of that tradition, to be found in part within the very texts that seek to construct it and in part in the counterhegemonic representational strategies of narratives that are critical of the nationalist project. I will show how the Atlantic and the transatlantic world function as a critical mirror to reflect on American political values, how they are posed as a threat to the early American body politic, expressed in the imagery of infection, how they conversely symbolize a romantic realm of natural law that provides legitimation to various revolutionary movements, and how they function as imaginary sites of colonial memories that haunt America’s ‘postcolonial’ present on the eve of the Civil War. I will discuss a series of literary texts bound together by their common, if at times very different, reference to the Black Atlantic—texts that either directly or clandestinely reveal the Atlantic Ocean, and the colonial economy it represents, as a strong shaping force in American history My readings will include a number of non-literary texts (such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, the slaver’s logs in Chapter 4, and David Porter’s report on the Marquesas in Chapter 5), texts that can only be categorized as hybrid products occupying a site between fiction and fact. The Civil War marks the end of my study because it brought the end of slavery and the slave trade, as well as a strong decline of Atlantic commerce in the United States, and because it inaugurated a new phase in American (literary) history that is less shaped by the conflicts arising from the colonial past of the United States than by a different set of challenges, including industrialization, continental expansion, metropolitan growth, and mass immigration. A minor argument in the chapters to follow concerns what we might call the translation of (post) colonial discourse from one oceanic realm to another—a translation that follows the geographical movement of the proverbial translatio imperii et studii.21 This process of ideological translation—from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, from the Atlantic to the Pacific—can be seen at work in the next chapter, especially Royall Tyler’s strategic use of orientalist discourse, as well as in my discussion of Benito Cereno in Chapter 4 and in the last chapter, which discusses various methods of mixing the imaginary geographies of the two oceans and their respective discourses of cultural encounter. As I will argue more fully in Chapter 4, Melville’s strategy of mixing different geographies and historical moments has much in common with what Foucault has called the heterotope, a method, usually associated with postmodernist fiction, of juxtaposing different spatial orders (McHale 1987:44). There is an element


of chartlessness about Melville’s fiction, a seemingly disoriented, but at closer scrutiny very organized, wavering between different sites of colonial encounter and colonial violence which, once discovered, can be traced as well in many of the other texts. The crudest, but most illustrative, example for this method of creating imaginary geographical sites by mixing the elements of different actual geographies can be found in Melville’s novel Mardi. There are various possibilities to describe these flights of fancy: the most conventional one is to view these texts in terms of the American romance—a narrative mode that, according to Hawthorne and followed up by Richard Chase, Lionel Trilling, and others, wants to create a ‘neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet’ (Hawthorne 1970:66). As Hawthorne goes on to write in The Scarlet Letter, this neutral territory may allow ‘ghosts’ to enter and relate forgotten stories from the past.22 The labeling of classic American literature as ‘romances’ by various post-war generations of critics has for a long time precluded historicizing readings of these fictions. Elevated to the American literary genre per se, ‘romance’ came to signify a dissociation of American literary texts from their surrounding political reality, from which they were seen to escape into purely symbolic and psychological realms. Viewed from today’s more ‘liberal’ critical perspective, such a reading is rather shortsighted, especially if applied to the work of Herman Melville which does anything but flee from reality and which recent criticism has shown to consist of a head-on encounter with history. But even the romances of Cooper, for example, which conform to the broader definition of the genre of romance in imaginatively solving social conflicts on the micro-level of families and local communities, can hardly be seen to escape the realm of politics. My reading of The Red Rover suggests that Cooper’s fictions, in seeking to produce materials for a national mythology, escape the world of actual events only in order to return the reader to an idealized version of those events. I have followed Amy Kaplan, Doris Sommer, and others who regard these kinds of romances as ‘foundational fictions’ and who describe the simplistic plot solutions these texts offer as ‘romancing.’ Romance in general is viewed by them as a genre that is largely complicit with the ideological stance of mainstream society.23 Most texts introduced in this book, I would argue, do not employ romance plots but novelistic ones: plots which, as defined by Bakhtin, include strategies of dialogism and double-voicedness, polyvocality and hybridization in order to articulate subjugated knowledges (Bakhtin 1981; Foucault 1980:82–3). The rediscovery of the novelistic discourse of American fiction by New Americanist and new historicist readings has expanded the canon by including works by writers of color, just as it sharpens our perception of the work of discourse and ideology in the classic texts.


Critics of the concept of the American romance as an antirealistic mode point out that such a definition ignores other genres and other cultural voices found in the United States (Fluck 1996:416). The definition of romance as a specifically American genre has effected, first, the suppression of texts that do not fit the criteria—like texts by African Americans, but also the nervous novels of Charles Brockden Brown and Poe or Royall Tyler’s novelistic pastiche. Second, it has effected an almost unbearable thematic selectivity in the discussion of texts that were considered to match the requirements. The classic text that still suffers most from that selectivity, I would claim, is Moby-Dick. And third, the critical emphasis on ‘romance,’ as Toni Morrison and Teresa Goddu argue most convincingly, has prevented a serious analysis of the Gothic element in nineteenth-century American fiction. Taking up Morrison’s claim that the American romance, with its obsession with the ‘blackness of darkness,’ with dark alter egos, live entombment, and gnawing moral suffering ‘flees from’ the reality of slavery and the African American presence in American culture, Teresa Goddu argues that ‘American gothic literature criticizes America’s national myth of new-world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim to purity and equality’ (Goddu 1997:10). That contradiction, America’s ‘nightmare of history,’ Goddu claims, is slavery and the unfulfilled promise of the American Revolution. Her claim is borne out by an earlier article by Joan Dayan who, in her essay ‘Romance and Race,’ claims that ‘[perhaps] we can no longer understand what we mean by romance in the Americas without turning to the issue of slavery’ and who links Poe’s novel Arthur Gordon Pym and his revenge tales to the predominant fear of a slave revolt in the antebellum south (Dayan 1991:90). The Gothic mode, Goddu claims, either in strengthening or in subverting the nationalist ideology of the antebellum decades, ‘serves as a primary means of speaking the unspeakable’ in American culture (Goddu 1997:10). In Goddu’s description, the American Gothic is structurally not dissimilar from the European Gothic which likewise had the effect of both subverting and reinforcing the status quo. But mainstream American Studies criticism, Goddu claims, has prevented such a comparison in claiming the historical evasiveness of the American Gothic—now termed romance.24 Contradicting the view, expressed by Cathy Davidson, that America may not have enough of a history ‘to sustain the Gothic’s generic challenge to history, its rewriting and unwriting of history,’ Goddu asserts that the history of which the American Gothic speaks—a history of slavery and territorial dispossession—is history enough to sustain a literary mode but that it was suppressed by an ahistorical critical tradition (9).25 Aware of the racial connotations of terms like ‘dark romance,’ Goddu replaces ‘romance’ with ‘Gothic’ in order to establish texts like Arthur Mervyn or


Arthur Gordon Pym as important negotiations of early American discourses on race and slavery (6–7). As a genre that is closely tied to an ideological need for America’s collective identity as an emerging nation, romance functions as what Foucault calls a discursive regularity, an implicit set of rules, concepts, and regulations that delimit a given field of knowledge and prescribe the order of those knowledges that are accepted to remain ‘within the true’ (Foucault 1977:199). The Gothic, by comparison, works against the grain of this ‘cognitive regimen of phrases’; it is, to borrow a phrase from Jean François Lyotard, a means of ‘lending [our] ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge’ (quoted in Felman and Laub 1992:202). Another possibility to describe the temporal and geographical wavering and juggling of these texts, then, is offered by the critical language of the Gothic, of haunting, and the uncanny. The relationship between the Gothic mode and colonialism/imperialism has so far received little scholarly attention, and this is not the place to make up for the lack in any systematic way. Let it suffice to mention the simultaneity of the rise of the Atlantic colonial system as a decisive economic factor and the rise of the Gothic mode in literature in the eighteenth century It would certainly be shortsighted to claim a dominant colonial context for European Gothic novels in general, although there are examples where the colonial and the aesthetic converge in interesting ways —as they do in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Fane Eyre, with its racialized madwoman and its racialization of madness as such as a Caribbean disease. But while the main targets of the European Gothic were (in a simplified form) the political system of feudalism, the clergy, and the philosophical doctrine of rationality, this was different in the United States. In Edgar Huntly, for example, Charles Brockden Brown translates, as he writes himself, the Gothic castles of Europe into the colonial warfare of the Western wilderness, thus putting the Gothic mode at the service of a nationalist ideology—a rhetorical move that is disturbed by America’s ambivalent postcoloniality and the ghostly visitations of the agents of America’s dependence on Europe. If the reality that haunts antebellum texts is the unfinished project of America’s revolution—America’s incomplete postcoloniality—that reality often does not readily present itself to a ‘normal’ reading. Possessing the quality of what Morrison calls an ‘ornate absence,’ slavery and the problem of race often manifest themselves in the ‘margins’ of the texts, such as suppressed subplots, internal contradictions of plot, and on the semantic level of tropes and metaphors. Three ‘Gothic’ semantic fields, or extended metaphors, in the texts to be discussed are the language of disease and the body politic (in Arthur Mervyn), the language of masquerade, and the language of enchantment (in Benito Cereno, Moby-Dick, and the fictions of Poe). The aesthetically most highly charged trope of the Gothic, I would


argue, is the language of the sublime, most powerfully evoked by Poe, Melville (in Moby-Dick), and in the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner. The aesthetic of the sublime is itself inscribed with the ideology of Europe’s cultural superiority, but its semantics of vastness and excess at the same time testify to a kind of sacred terror accompanying Europe’s project of secularization.26 As the Gothic, the sublime produces ‘a sort of delightful horror’ in the beholder (Burke 1990:123). With its emphasis on metaphysical terror, pain, violence, and savagery, the language of the sublime aestheticizes the actual occurrence of these phenomena.27 A common theme of all of these tropes—disease, masquerade, enchantment, and the sublime—is the uncertainty of individual and collective identity and of representation, as well as a collapse of the ‘rational’ order of time and space. Discourses of the Gothic and the sublime, with their emphasis on the monstrous, the excessive, and the grotesque, unsettle the clean divisions of the Enlightenment system of nature and of Enlightenment rationality as such. Whatever the ‘intended’ conservative ideology of theories of the sublime,28 in their aesthetic realization the literary modes of Gothic and the sublime open up views on suppressed histories and articulate cultural anxieties. The Gothic must therefore also be seen as the mark of an ideological crisis. If the texts discussed in this book are particularly predisposed to include Gothic and sublime elements, it is perhaps because most of them are set on the high seas. The mode of the Gothic and sublime, in the sea fictions of Melville, Poe, Philip, and Douglass, exchanges the certainties of measurable time and space for a vision of temporal and geographical complexity which allows us to see formerly disparate histories as related to one another by the otherwise disavowed reality of colonialism. Their ‘Gothic’ temporality and spatiality renders many of the narratives chartless—without generic precedence, lost at sea, facing the final abyss, and in desperate search of a new order. Avery Gordon refers to the ghostly presence of slavery in American texts in terms of ‘haunting.’ Haunting, she writes, gives ‘notification’ to what is absent yet there and hidden, and she links her idea of haunting to Freud’s definition of the uncanny (Gordon 1997:178). The present study, too, greatly benefited from Freud’s definition of the uncanny as the sudden and terrifying return of formerly familiar knowledges. Once disengaged from its ego-psychological fetters, Freud’s thesis is particularly helpful for the analysis of the uneasy presence of disavowed histories in fictional texts. What makes it so useful is its temporal dimension—a dimension that readily points to the complex problematic of historical trauma, narrative, and cultural or collective memory. The unspeakable speaks, as Starbuck says, in strange and ancient tongues that were once familiar but are now forgotten. The origin of the history whose return the uncanny effects in the texts treated in this book lies beyond the confines of the nation—before the


constitution of the United States, beyond its present borders, and beyond the sea. It is the history of the middle passage as the ‘decisive episode that establishes the amnesian conditions of American freedom’—as a freedom gained through the enslavement of others (Gordon 1997:169). But if the middle passage and the history of the Black Atlantic are, as Morrison writes, the ‘ghosts in the machine’ of American culture, if it is the traumatic event which cannot be named or adequately remembered yet disturbs early American literature down to its very essence, how can we as critics claim to represent that which remains unrepresentable (Morrison 1989:13)? Our task is facilitated by the recent canon shifting, which now allows us to include texts by African American writers which do address the reality of the slave trade quite unashamedly. These texts help us to rediscover the hidden subtext of the works by Anglo-Saxon writers. Apart from that, however, the readings to follow rest on the very general psychological assumption that a historical reality of so farreaching consequences as the transatlantic slave trade and the slave-based Atlantic economy cannot go unmentioned by the mythical discourse of a culture, even if it is occluded and put under erasure. Written within a New Historicist or cultural materialist critical framework, my study is informed by the conviction that literary texts are discursively relatively autonomous cultural artifacts to be read as manifestations of particular social and ideological conflicts. This conflictual moment is most manifest where it inscribes itself in the very form, or formlessness, of fictional texts—as it did, I argue, in the texts of Tyler, Brown, Poe, Douglass, Delany, and Melville. The larger theoretical and methodological question looming behind the particular inquiries of the chapters to follow thus concerns the relationship between historical trauma and narrative form: a problematic whose importance reaches far beyond the subject matter covered in this book.

2 The emergence of the ‘postcolonial’ Atlantic Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Tyler’s Algerine Captive

Magical accumulations: Robinson Crusoe and the mystification of Atlantic slavery From the beginnings of European settlement, North America has been tied into the Atlantic cultural and economic system—a system that was crucially dependent on the labor of, and trade in, African slaves. As I will argue in this and the following chapter, America’s involvement in the transnational contact and conflict zone which we have come to refer to as the Black Atlantic did not significantly change in the years after American independence. I therefore want to begin this investigation by taking a look at the ideological transition from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in early American, or rather ‘Atlantic,’ fictional discourse. Since the early modern period, the cultural-geographic space of the Mediterranean gradually ceded its role as commercial center to the North Atlantic but retained a residual importance until around 1800. Both protagonists of this chapter—Olaudah Equiano and Royall Tyler’s figure Updike Underhill— link the maritime space of the Mediterranean with that of the Atlantic in quite interesting ways. Their experiences will give us a sense of the wider ‘Black’ maritime world from which the United States emerged and against which it defined its national identity. But a chapter dealing with the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century would be incomplete if it did not begin with a comment on Robinson Crusoe, that magical narrative of primitive accumulation and pious selffinding which is generally thought to have inaugurated both the genre of the modern novel and modern Europe’s fictional discourse on colonial America.1 As we know, Crusoe’s twenty-year sojourn on an uninhabited Caribbean island, during which he runs through all stages of the Lockean and Aristotelian theories of possessive individualism and natural masterslave relationship, is prefigured by his capture by Moslem pirates in the Mediterranean. His captivity off the coast of Africa interrupts Robinson’s first attempt to engage in the Guinea trade, just as his later shipwreck will interrupt his first self-financed venture to the African slave coast. After

26 INTERESTING NARRATIVE AND ALGERINE CAPTIVE

spending some time in captivity, Robinson is able to escape, together with the ‘Maresco’ boy Xury, a Spanish Moor who happens to be in the fishing boat with which Robinson flees. As they sail through the Strait of Gibraltar and potter south along the coast of Africa in the hope of meeting up with an English merchant ship, Xury is of great help to Robinson in warning him against hostile inhabitants and assisting him in bartering with friendly ones. It is therefore even the more surprising that Robinson, once rescued by the Portuguese captain who will later become his ‘banker,’ includes Xury in the list of items he sells to his benefactor. Crusoe later regrets having sold Xury—not for moral reasons, as one might expect, but because he thinks the boy would have been useful for him as a laborer on his Brazilian sugar cane plantation. The income derived from foreign sources (80 Pieces of Eight for the boat with which he had fled, 60 Pieces of Eight for Xury, 20 Ducats for the skins of a lion and a leopard he had killed in heroic single combat) forms Robinson’s starting capital with which he begins his Brazilian plantation (Defoe 1994:26–7). This initial fantasy of complete commodification is counterbalanced, in the main plot, by the no less fantastic account of how Crusoe’s capital increases over a period of more than twenty years which he spends innocently ‘composing’ his self in complete isolation from human society and colonial markets. Because when he returns to Lisbon, Robinson finds out that his Portuguese friend had managed his financial affairs even without knowing whether Crusoe would ever return. In loving detail Crusoe lists his monetary affairs: 1,174 moidores coming out of his farm for six years, which increased to another 3,241 moidores during the next four years, another 872 moidores not distributed to the charities, five chests of ‘excellent sweetmeats,’ and ‘a hundred pieces of gold uncoined.’ In sum, Crusoe finds himself master, all on a sudden, of above 5,000 l. Sterling in money, and had an estate, as I might well call it, in the Brasils, of above a thousand pounds a year, as sure as an estate of lands in England: and in a word, I was in a condition which I scarce knew how to understand, or how to compose my self for the enjoyment of it. (Defoe 1994:204–5). Crusoe claims that Xury willingly lets himself be sold to the Portuguese captain, thus providing him with the necessary funds for his Brazilian plantation, and that Xury’s structural counterpart Friday willingly submits himself to Crusoe’s command, which provided him with the necessary labor force. A mythical version of the modern imperial self, Crusoe extends absolute mastery over others while receiving their voluntary submission and friendship in return. The key feature in Crusoe’s financial success story, as Peter Hulme has pointed out, is a spirit of benevolence that rules the

INTERESTING NARRATIVE AND ALGERINE CAPTIVE 27

activities of all his business partners. Benevolence, Hulme argues, ‘is at one and the same time a narrative device which holds together the many disparate strands of Crusoe’s commercial activity, and an aspect of that ideologeme of ‘wish-fulfilment’ identified by Frye as central to the romance form’ (Hulme 1986:212–13). Hulme aptly establishes Crusoe’s generic identity as a ‘colonial romance’—that is, as something quite different from what it is usually regarded, the first modern novel. Robinson Crusoe offers a romantic version of Europe’s commercial transition from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It represents that movement as involuntary and unplanned (Crusoe is driven by a vague desire to rove about at sea) and as the result of ‘African’ captivity. What is easily forgotten by the text’s main narrative of Crusoe’s spiritual selffinding and Lockean digging and delving is the fact that his capital, which accumulates invisibly during his years of pious self-discovery, stems from the African slave trade. This narrative marginalization is a feature which Robinson Crusoe shares with other fictions to be discussed in the following chapters. The adventures of an American Black Jack A quite different experience of the eighteenth-century colonial Atlantic world is rendered by the black slave Briton Hammon in his Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon (1760). Like Crusoe, Hammon ships out to sea, but the lust for adventure is a minor reason for him. Being a slave in colonial Massachusetts, he hires on board a ship bound for the Caribbean ‘with the leave of my Master’ Mr. Winslow in the winter of 1747. The ship takes on board logwood in the Bay of Campeche but is shipwrecked on the return voyage off the coast of Spanish Florida. Trying to get on shore, all crew members are killed by Indians except for Hammon who ends up in Indian captivity. Brought to Havana by a Spanish captain who visits the coastal tribe, he first spends a year in the house of the Cuban governor but is captured by a press-gang and subsequently forgotten in a dungeon. After four years he is rescued from oblivion and again stays with the governor as a prisoner. He finally escapes with the help of a friendly English captain, is brought to England where he gets entangled in various sea battles against the French during the Seven Years War, spends some time in London hospitals to cure a wound and a fever, and finally decides to hire on an African slaver as a cook. But his trip to Africa is prevented when he accidentally comes across his Boston master who, to Hammon’s great joy, carries him back to New England and into regular servitude (Hammon 1998:1004–8). In the subtitle of this earliest known autobiographical account of an African American, Briton Hammon identifies himself as a ‘Negro Man’— an identity that he never repeats for the rest of his text. All his subsequent


self-identifications are relative to the identities of the people he encounters: he is one of ‘the people’ when the crew of his first ship protests against the captain’s materialism, he is a civilized man when encountering the Indians, adopts an English identity when escaping from Cuban captivity, offers his services as a cook to the African slaver, and is happy to reenter his role as slave in New England. As Jeffrey Bolster has remarked, this protean identity —the virtual opposite of Crusoe’s obsessive self-finding—is quite typical of African seamen, as for seamen in general: Sailors constantly crossed cultural and geographic boundaries as they maneuvered between white and black societies ashore and maritime society afloat. Through interactions in the maritime workplace, African American sailors combined and recombined their various identities (racial, regional, gender, class, occupational) in different ways…. Strikingly absent from Hammon’s account of seafaring during the 1740s and 1750s is any sense of a unified identity among people of color. (Bolster 1997:35) Bolster’s statement is slightly counteracted, however, by the author’s name, which combines a British identification with a Biblical-African one (Hamman) and at the same time anticipates Melville’s naming of his artificial slave-turned-man in ‘The Bell-Tower.’2 The first autobiographical narrative by an African ‘American’ was thus written by someone who nominally identified himself as black British. Similarly absent from Hammon’s narrative of his various captivities is any comment on his primal captivity as a slave in New England. As Angelo Costanzo writes, Hammon is still in bondage when he writes—or dictates— his tale, which may be a reason for his silence. What strikes the reader is the emphasis with which he graphically depicts the horrors and sufferings of his Indian and Spanish captivities without criticizing his initial bondage: ‘what Hammon has omitted is an account of his life of slavery in New England’ (Costanzo 1987: 92–3). Costanzo names one reason himself: Hammon was still a slave in 1760 when his text was published. The pious ending of the text, in which Hammon praises the Lord for returning him to his ‘own Native Land, to Shew how Great Things the Lord hath done for Me’ (Hammon 1998:1008), suggests that his narrative, published and widely circulated as a broadside, fulfilled the ideological purpose of reconciling Hammon, and his (black?) readers, with the situation of domestic bondage, of making them more comfortable with a situation of servitude by giving a glowing account of the perils lying in wait for them abroad. The larger allegorical meaning of Hammon’s experience is that servitude at home is less dangerous than hiring oneself out to sea which is


likely to offer a new and worse kind of captivity instead of the freedom with which it was increasingly associated by black men. Olaudah Equiano and the fashioning of a transoceanic identity At the beginning of American postcoloniality, then, are the peregrinations of African seafarers seeking temporary relief from bondage by subcontracting their labor to ship captains.3 Crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, the Americas, the Mediterranean, and Northern Europe, people like Briton Hammon and, as the present chapter will suggest, Olaudah Equiano deserve to be labeled the first true postcolonial figures in the history of the United States: slaves whose longing for freedom was instigated, and at times satisfied, by their special status as sailors. The reason for this is twofold: unlike the regular citizens of the United States, whose postcoloniality can only be defined vis-à-vis England, African seafarers, both in their lives and in their writings, carved out an identity that defied the racial ideologies of both countries. And second, African seafarers, unlike the nationalistic citizens of the United States, transgressed the boundaries of race and nation in their definitions of identity, appealing instead to the enlightened and revolutionary discourse of universal humanity as expressed, for example, in Thomas Paine’s seminal work Rights of Man, first published in 1791, concurrently with the outbreak of black revolution in Saint Domingue. As my discussion of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative will also show, the subversiveness of this ‘Ethiopian’s rhetorical strategies is at the same time more subtle and more far reaching than the bilateral postcolonial mimicry of Royall Tyler (discussed in the next section) or James Fenimore Cooper (discussed in Chapter 3). Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself is an account of Equiano’s life from his birth in Africa around 1745 to the year of publication, 1789, when Equiano had settled down in London and become one of the leading protagonists of the abolition movement. It is the story of a man who spent most of his life on board different ships, from the slave ship that carried him to the Caribbean and the second slaver that carried him to Virginia, to all the ships on which he served since, crisscrossing the Atlantic world between London, the Caribbean, and Philadelphia, with various trips to the Mediterranean and Turkey, a rather quixotic attempt to establish a colonial settlement in present-day Nicaragua, and an exploration voyage to the North Pole which reached a farther latitude than all previous ones. As the personal servant of various sea captains, Equiano witnessed numerous cases of violence against Africans in the Caribbean and participated in various world historical events such as the Battle of Louisburg during the Seven Years War during which he shared the ship’s


deck with General Wolfe (on the North Pole trip he shared a deck with the future Admiral Nelson) as well as several important sea battles in the Mediterranean. With the end of the war, Equiano began working on his liberation, which he achieved half-way through his narrative and which he documents by including the text of his letter of manumission. But he soon had to learn the bitter lesson that nominal freedom did not mean a life in security: making his living as a trader in the Caribbean, he was at best cheated out of his money and merchandise and at worst threatened with arbitrary reenslavement. It is through his ability as an able-bodied seaman that Equiano gained the respect of his white shipmates, who, he claims, called him ‘captain’ after he saved a ship in a storm and who fully relied on his skill and fortitude in a second storm. Annoyed by the fickleness of freedom in the Americas, Equiano established his permanent residence in London, worked as a hairdresser, learned to play the French horn, experienced a spiritual conversion, joined the Methodist Church, and became involved with the inventor and wouldbe colonizer Dr. Charles Irving who masterminded the North Pole and Nicaragua schemes. The narrative ends with Equiano’s growing abolitionist activities and his plan to sail to Sierra Leone as supervisor of a settlement scheme for blacks—a plan that misfired because of the embezzlement of government funds. Even a cursory reading of Equiano’s travels should suffice to recognize in him a valuable real-life witness of the life at the other end of Robinson Crusoe’s world of magical accumulation and possessive individualism. It counters Defoe’s fictions with more realistic, and more troubling, accounts of capital accumulation and personal emancipation. But the Interesting Narrative is not just an important historical document; it also deserves our attention for its rhetorical composition as a text that had a direct impact on the abolitionists’ motion for a parliamentary debate about the slave trade (Costanzo 1987:42–3). My following discussion will try to assess the relevance of the Interesting Narrative within the context of Atlantic writing and of the emerging national (‘postcolonial’) discourse of the United States. The Interesting Narrative appeared in London in 1789. A second edition followed by the end of the year, a third in 1790, a fourth in Dublin in 1791, a fifth in Edinburgh in 1792, and two more in London in 1793. Nine editions were published in Britain during Equiano’s lifetime, besides the American edition of 1791, as well as translations into Dutch (1790), German (1792), and Russian (1794) (Walvin 1998:161; Carretta 1995:xxix). In other words, Equiano’s text was determined by, and in turn determined, a cultural field dominated by political movements for reform throughout Europe and the Americas. As one of the consequences of this general political awareness, the cause of abolitionism was on the upswing in the 1780s. It was significantly precipitated by the revelation of the brutality and inhumanity of the treatment of Africans on the slave ships brought to light by the famous case of the slave ship Zong which went


through the London courts in 1783, where the proprietors of the ship demanded insurance remuneration for the death of 131 Africans thrown overboard because of an alleged shortage of supplies.4 In 1780 the former slave captain and recent convert John Newton published his ship’s log whose unemotional listings of the numbers of slaves acquired and slaves who died present a model case of the rationalization of violence. Eight years later he added the tract ‘Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade,’ in which he gives an account of his spiritual awakening to the cause of abolition (Newton 1962). In the same year, and one year prior to the publication of Equiano’s narrative, there appeared Alexander Falconbridge’s report of the conditions on slave ships, related from the perspective of a ship’s surgeon (Falconbridge 1927). Both of these texts greatly assisted the motion of several abolitionist leaders for a parliamentary investigation of the African slave trade, which began in 1788 (Thomas 1998:498). Published in the year of the storming of the Bastille, the Interesting Narrative maps a geography of resistance against various forms of unfree labor that spanned the Atlantic world. As James Walvin, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker have shown, Equiano was instrumental in the formation of a panAtlantic movement for the liberation of both slaves and the working class, establishing important contacts between the London Corresponding Society led by his house-mate Thomas Hardy and various reform groups in England, Wales, and Ireland (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000:333–8). This short-lived cross-ethnic movement was thwarted by a series of repressive government measures in reaction to the revolutions in France and Saint Domingue in the early 1790s. The uprising in Haiti divided, thereby incapacitating, the abolitionist movement itself, and the defeat of the British expedition against Haiti in 1795–6 may be seen as the original moment of scientific racism (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000:340, 352).5 This is the general political climate in which Equiano published his Crusoelike account of his own process of primitive accumulation, which would eventually allow him to buy his freedom: After I had been sailing for some time with this captain, I at length endeavoured to try my luck and commence merchant. I had but a very small capital to begin with; for one single half bit, which is equal to three pence in England, made up my whole stock. However I trusted to the Lord to be with me; and at one of our trips to St. Eustatia, a Dutch island, I bought a glass tumbler with my half bit, and when I came to Montserrat I sold it for a bit, or sixpence. Luckily we made several successive trips to St. Eustatia (which was a general mart for the West Indies, about twenty leagues from Montserrat), and in our next, finding my tumbler so profitable, with this one bit I


bought two tumblers more; and when I came back I sold them for two bits, equal to a shilling sterling. When we went again, I bought with these two bits four more of these glasses, which I sold for four bits on our return to Montserrat; and in our next voyage to St. Eustatia, I bought two glasses with one bit, and with the other three I bought a jug of Geneva, nearly about three pints in measure. When we came to Montserrat I sold the gin for eight bits, and the tumblers for two, so that my capital now amounted in all to a dollar, well husbanded and acquired in the space of a month or six weeks, when I blessed the Lord that I was so rich. (Equiano 1995:116)6 Equiano’s humble beginnings as an intra-colonial merchant are facilitated by the fact that his master, Mr. Robert King, a Quaker from Philadelphia, is engaged in trading commodities with the North American colonies, which includes the traffic in slaves from Montserrat to Georgia and to Charleston, South Carolina (IN 100). King allows his African servant to carry out his own petty business on the side. Perceiving his success, Equiano decides to save enough money to be able to buy his freedom. Having gained his manumission, however, Equiano continues to gain his money in the tradition of his former master by becoming a member of his crew as an able-bodied seaman at 36 shillings per month and helping King to bring human cargoes from the Caribbean to Savannah (IN 138). Saving another cargo in a storm (which had been announced to him in a providential dream) by forcing its captain to refrain from nailing down the hatches on the ship’s hold, Equiano ensures the correct delivery of the slaves—that is, the few who survived the hurricane, shipwreck, and numerous successive hardships (IN 149–58). The acquisition of his personal freedom, paradoxically, made Equiano also become a member of the exploitative system of slave trading. Equiano’s account of capital accumulation is accompanied by a series of visionary dreams by which, he believes, God communicates his special electedness to him. This concurrence of material increase and piety evokes not only the Weberian thesis but also Robinson Crusoe’s transformation into a possessive individual who, in consequence of his self-possession, now also becomes master over the bodies of others. The responsibility for this cruel contradiction is displaced on to the providence of God. But of course the relationship is more problematic than that, as Equiano’s account as a whole inverts the value system represented by Crusoe, on the one hand, and fills out the silences of Defoe’s colonial romance on the other. Because it is precisely in order to gain his freedom from slavery that Equiano accumulates his capital, not to reap wealth from the slave-based colonial economy. It may strike the reader as ironical that Equiano won his own freedom, and continued to exercise his new identity as a freedman, by


complying with the terms of ‘an economic system where humans are commodities, empty markers, ciphers’ (Fichtelberg 1993:471). But, as Houston Baker argues, Equiano had hardly any other chance to win his freedom in compliance with the colonial legal rules. Having been reduced to a piece of property himself, he ‘decides that neither sentiment nor spiritual sympathies can earn his liberation’ but that ‘only the acquisition of property will enable him to alter his designated status as property’ (Baker 1984:35). Putting down on its realistic feet Crusoe’s magical effacement of the economic source of Robinson’s new-found self, the Interesting Narrative relates the capitalist success story from the other side, from the perspective of one who was denied a social identity grounded in the ideology of property. Equiano is the equivalent of the boy Xury whom Crusoe sells without considering the immorality of this act. Interestingly, Equiano writes of his fear of being eaten by the whites when taken on board as a young child, as if to parody Crusoe’s obsessive fear of being deprived of his corporeal integrity by savage teeth (Overton 1992:306).7 Equiano is acting according to the rules of capitalist society because he has no other choice if he wants to become a legitimate citizen. Marion Rust argues that the ‘loving detail’ which Equiano bestows ‘on each transaction suggests the significance to him of his ‘mastery’ of international capitalism’ and that ‘he is not only purchasing manumission but also legitimacy within the world into which he has been kidnapped’ (Rust 1996:27). It is highly ironical, of course, that he is forced to resort to imitating the worst aspect of the colonial economic system, the trade in human beings, to obtain social acceptance in the colonial world. But his text exemplifies that the decision to buy his freedom was the logical consequence of his complete disfranchisement in Euro-American legal and moral discourses. A case in point is a scene ensuing from his first master’s arbitrary decision to sell Equiano to a captain bound for the Caribbean. Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa, as Pascal calls him in parodistic allusion to the Swedish king), who had recently been baptized, is greatly alarmed as he had expected to be released by his beloved master any day: ‘besides the assurances I had received that he had no right to detain me, he always treated me with the greatest kindness’ (IN 92). When he learns of Pascal’s intention, Equiano tells him ‘I was free, and he could not by law serve me so.’ But he learns better when Pascal sells him to Captain Doran who now calls him his slave. Again Equiano insists on his right: I told him my master could not sell me to him, nor to any one else. ‘Why’ said he, ‘did not your master buy you?’ I confessed he did. But I have served him, said I, many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize-money, for I only got one sixpence during the war; besides this I have been baptized; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me: and I added, that I had heard a lawyer, and others at


different times, tell my master so. They both then said that those people who told me so were not my friends: but I replied—It was very extraordinary that other people did not know the law as well as they Upon this Captain Doran said I talked too much English, and if I did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. I was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said: and my former sufferings in the slave-ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollection of them made me shudder. (IN 92–4) Equiano believes himself to be legally free because he has been baptized. This agrees with the widespread belief that baptism conferred freedom which persisted in the decades before Judge Mansfield ruled in the Somerset case in 1772 that it was unlawful to transport slaves from England back to the colonies against their will (Walvin 1993:14–15; Fichtelberg 1993:474). His unpleasant experience teaches Equiano that it is dangerous for a colonized subject to rely on the colonial society’s law or custom. Doran bluntly rejects his arguments by gesturing to his superior power and reminds Equiano of the most terrible experience of powerlessness. This is only one of several instances where Equiano evokes the discourse of law to argue his case as a human being. In numerous reflections he appeals to his readers to consider the inhumanity of the slave trade, which ‘violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency, and gives one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend’ (IN 111). But again and again he has to realize that his Jeffersonian appeals to the right of nature are ineffective if uttered by a black person; that ‘legally, the voice of the black person is not permitted to sound in colonial(ist) white society’ (Marren 1993:102). It is against this ‘silencing’ that Equiano shores up a large amount of written documents—his manumission document, letters, petitions—in order to establish himself as a legal subject within a society that denies him such a position: in deploying legal discourse by invoking its absence with regard to himself and by asserting legal and quasi-legal judgments in the form of interpolated documents in the Interesting Narrative, Equiano does finally, with the narrative itself, reinvent himself as a juridical subject under the protective eyes of natural law. (Hinds 1998:640) That reinvention takes place through the act of writing, by ‘talking too much English’ in the opinion of his antagonists. Equiano, who had early conceived of the ‘magical’ power of the written text in his famous encounter with the ‘talking book’ (see Gates 1988), now makes ample use


of that magic in the composition of his narrative—more use indeed than was formerly conceded, as recent research shows. But Equiano’s narrative also gives evidence of what Gates has called ‘doubletalk.’ An instance of this is the tension his text produces between the discourse of spiritual awakening and the discourse of revenge. Realizing, as the American founding fathers did around the same time, that the rhetoric of emancipation lacks a legal foundation in British society, Equiano resorts to a religious discourse of universal equality, that of Methodism, whose antinomian foundation greatly appealed to both Africans and Native Americans (Marren 1993:102). The modern reader may lose the radical message behind Equiano’s tedious account of his religious conversion; the contemporary Christian reader certainly did not.8 But his seemingly acculturated discourse of spiritual awakening is coupled with an intertextual evocation of the danger of slave revolt—a threat that could not be misunderstood at the time of slave uprisings in the Caribbean, especially after the revolution in Saint Domingue in 1791. The second half of Equiano’s text is riddled with quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost. His harangue about the ‘pestilence’ of the slave trade and the tortures on the plantations ends with the words: ‘Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection?’ and he adds a quotation from Beelzebub’s speech mobilizing the fallen angels to rebellion: No peace is given To us enslav’d, but custody severe; And stripes and arbitrary punishment Inflicted—What peace can we return? But to our power, hostility and hate; Untam’d reluctance, and revenge, tho’ slow, Yet ever plotting how the conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice In doing what we most in suff’ring feel. (IN 112; cf. Paradise Lost 2:332–40) Equiano’s postcolonial mimicry effectively accentuates the colonial subtext of Paradise Lost by translating its theme of satanic vengeance into the present threat of slave rebellion. In doing so, Equiano fully exploits the romanticization of the figure of Satan inaugurated by Milton. Because, as Carretta notes, by ‘quoting lines spoken in Paradise Lost by Beelzebub, one of Satan’s followers, Equiano appropriates a voice of alienation and resistance from within the very culture he is demonstrating that he has assimilated’ (Carretta 1995:xxiii).9 The Milton quotes are more than just gestures of authorization showing that he has read the classics (Doherty 1997:576), but can rather be seen as an implicit rejection of religious authority or orthodoxy (Fichtelberg 1993:461), as well as an


ideological siding with the revolutionary discourse of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Blake.10 His subtle counterbalancing of the discourses of religion and of revolution is perhaps the most remarkable example of double-voicedness or signifyin(g) to be found in Equiano’s text (see Gates 1988:158). As a black man whose Miltonic rhetoric of revenge and whose journey to the ice-covered ends of the earth anticipate the fictional use of the same tropes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who accompanied a colonial plantation venture to Mesoamerica, and who happened to meet the crème de la crème of contemporary leaders during his cruises to different ends of the Atlantic world, Equiano presents himself in the style of a novelistic hero. Many scholars have indeed argued that he made conscious use of the novel form, especially that of the picaresque novel. Creating himself as a protean self in the tradition of the pícaro, Equiano demonstrates his ‘ability to manipulate language in print and render experience through the prism of articulate prose,’ thus serving an intellectual broadside to the racist assumptions of colonialist society (Doherty 1997:576).11 And yet, as Martin Christadler maintains, Equiano’s wanderings are insufficiently grasped if exclusively read within the picaresque mode. Christadler argues that the seemingly voluntary and naive succession of episodes and observations in Equiano’s text does not express the wavering perspective of a protean consciousness ready to assimilate itself to all situations, but that it rather testifies to the formation of a critical and enlightened personality who is conscious of his cultural liminality—of acting under coercive ideological pressures which he cannot control (Christadler 1999:206–7). It is precisely his experience of his social marginality and inbetweenness which allows Equiano to develop an enlightened intellectuality. That intellectuality, we might say, was an oceanic one, as Equiano remained out at sea both physically and culturally for most of his life (see Ensslen 1999: 86). In the last analysis, Equiano’s identity is that of a sailor; it is the relative freedom of shipboard life which endows him with an uncommon selfconfidence, allows him to argue with his masters and to acquire a knowledge of writing and of navigation, which entitles him to be called ‘captain’ after saving a ship in a storm and enables him to acquire his freedom. Passing as a black Englishman, he also constantly passes, as Marion Rust emphasizes, through the oceans that divide one geographic homeland from another: ‘Water becomes the most important place in his Interesting Narrative not only because that’s where he spends the most time but also because it’s where he obtains the greatest authority’ (Rust 1996:23; see also Costanzo 1987:70). In the world on shore, however, which is dominated by the discourses of nations, of ethnic difference, and of social status, Equiano’s identity can only be divided.


The self which presents itself in the Interesting Narrative appears divided right from the beginning. Henry Louis Gates has referred to Equiano’s account of his African childhood as ‘double-voiced’ in the sense that the infantile voice of memory constantly interacts with the reflecting voice of the adult narrator (Gates 1988:153). The effect of the text’s doublevoicedness, Gates suggests, is that it presents a dynamic self that has matured through experience (Gates 1988:155). But Gates’s reading for textual unity tends to smooth over the internal division marked by the two voices. Thus Equiano presents Africa as both Arcadian and exploitable. His descriptions of the land in terms of the classical golden age—as ‘rich and fruitful,’ producing ‘all kinds of vegetables in great abundance’ and pineapples ‘without culture’—are balanced by his frequent emphases on the productivity and diligence of the population, whose chief employment is agriculture—a rhetorical strategy that looks forward to the glowing appeal for the establishment of regular trade relations with Africa at the end of the Interesting Narrative (IN 37, 233–4). It is also in his description of Africa where Equiano ‘trips over his pronouns’ (Doherty 1997:579). In what Doherty calls a ‘culturally schizophrenic passage,’ Equiano describes the agricultural practice of his tribe: ‘Our manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natives are unacquainted with those refinements in cookery which debauch the taste,’ he writes, with the Montaignesque slur on the refinements of ‘culture’ demarcating the distance between ‘us’ and ‘the natives.’ The passage continues in the same vein: bullocks, goats, and poultry supply the greatest part of their food…. To make it savory, we sometimes use also pepper…. Our vegetables are mostly plantains, eadas, yams, beans, and Indian corn…. Before we taste food, we always wash our hands…tossing a small quantity of the food in a certain place, for the spirits of departed relations, which the natives suppose to preside over their conduct…. They are totally unacquainted with strong or spiritous liquours…. Our principal luxury is in perfumes. (IN 35) The pronouns can largely be divided into two different discourses which keep interchanging in this passage: the Arcadian ‘we’ discourse of natural simplicity and innocence and the colonialist ‘they’ discourse of paganism and potential exploitation. Indeed it is possible to detect a conflictual discursive pattern in Equiano’s chapters on Africa and the middle passage, in which the ‘authentic’ voice of ‘memory’ constantly interacts with the detached and appropriative voice of the colonial traveler. Geraldine Murphy stresses the similarity of some of Equiano’s descriptions with the colonial narratives of Captain John Smith: his description of the natural bounty of Africa indeed recalls early colonial reports about America.


Assuring his readers that it ‘would be tedious and uninteresting to relate all the incidents which befell me during this journey,’ he slips into the narrative mode of a colonial explorer: in all the places where I was, the soil was exceedingly rich; the pompkins, eadas, plaintains, yams, &c. &c. were in great abundance, and of incredible size. There were also large quantities of different gums, though not used for any purpose; and everywhere a great deal of tobacco. The cotton even grew quite wild; and there was plenty of red wood. (IN 54) This ‘discourse of travel,’ as Geraldine Murphy notes, ‘implicates Equiano in the imperial gaze as well as western modes of knowing’ (Murphy 1994: 553). The quoted passage anticipates Equiano’s plea to the British merchants, toward the end of his autobiography, to end the present enslavement of African people and establish regular trade relations with Africa instead: I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants would insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. in proportion to the civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures. (IN 233) His appeal to the capitalist logic, according to which trade relations would both effect civilization and open a consumer market for manufactured products, has an uncannily modern ring but at the same time echoes Richard Hakluyt’s instructions to American colonizers 200 years earlier. Equiano’s language becomes even more explicit: Population, the bowels and surface of Africa, abound in valuable and useful returns; the hidden treasures of centuries will be brought to light and into circulation. Industry, enterprise, and mining, will have their full scope, proportionably as they civilize. In a word, it lays open an endless field of commerce to the British manufacturers and merchant adventurers. The manufacturing interest and the general interests are synomious [sic]. The abolition of slavery would be in reality an universal good. (IN 234) Again, Equiano’s language echoes that of earlier colonizers like Sir Walter Ralegh, who in his Discovery of Guiana proposed, in openly gendered


language, to deprive Guiana of its ‘maydenhead’ by sacking and turning ‘the face of the earth’ by agriculture, as well as opening the graves for gold and breaking the mines with sledges (see Mackenthun 1997a:182). And yet these contradictions are the product of Equiano’s disfranchised position. Geraldine Murphy, who proposes the term ‘dissident colonialism’ to characterize Equiano’s ambivalent attitude toward the dominant capitalistic mood, justly states that it should be hard to argue with Equiano’s ‘judgement—based on bitter experience—that purchasing British commodities was preferable to being one’ (Murphy 1994: 561). The discursive conflict that becomes evident in the initial chapters of the Interesting Narrative is in part the result of Equiano having used European travelogues such as Anthony Benezet’s Some Account of Guinea (1762) to supplement his own boyhood memories (Carretta 1995:241, 244; see also Costanzo 1987: 55–6). It is also quite likely that Alexander Falconbridge’s report on the conditions on slave ships, given its recent date of publication (1788), had served Equiano as a source for his account of the middle passage (see Falconbridge 1927:142–50). Thus the voice of the adult, as Thomas Doherty argues, is at the same time that of the sophisticated (armchair) traveler (Doherty 1997:579). Especially in the chapter on the Atlantic crossing, this interaction of different narrative points of view unwittingly produces comic effects, as when a lament of the horrors of the middle passage slides into a quiet and matter-of-fact account of flying fish (IN 59; Rust 1996:31). As the narrative develops and Equiano gains his freedom, the language of the travelogue increases, especially in the chapters on the North Pole expedition and his participation in Dr.Irving’s colonizing scheme on the Musquito Coast. An extreme case of over-acculturation takes place when Equiano joins the inventor Dr. Irving who wants to establish a plantation on the Musquito Coast (present-day Nicaragua). Encountering four Musquito (i.e., Miskito) Indians who lodge with the doctor, Equiano uses the Atlantic crossing for an attempt to proselyte the ‘Indian prince’ with the help of ‘Fox’s Martyrology with cuts’ (IN 202–3). But his efforts are without avail because the Indian finds a discrepancy between Equiano’s teachings and the daily behavior of his shipmates. He asks, ‘How comes it that all the white men on board, who can read and write, observe the sun, can know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only excepting yourself ?’ (IN 204). Having failed as a missionary, Equiano joins Irving to purchase slaves from a Guinea-man, ‘and I chose them all of my own countreymen, some of whom came from Lybia’ (IN 205). In Nicaragua he employs his competence as a ‘white’ man (as which the Indian identified him) when he uses a ‘stratagem’ to appease a conflict between different groups of Miskito Indians:


Recollecting a passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where, on some occasion, he frightened them, by telling them of certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the same expedient…taking hold of the governor [the chief of the aggressive party], I pointed up to the heavens. I menaced him and the rest: I told them God lived there, and that he was angry with them, and they must not quarrel so…and if they did not leave off… I would take the book (pointing to the bible), read, and tell God to make them dead. This was something like magic. The clamour immediately ceased, and I gave them some rum and a few other things; after which they went away peaceably. (IN 208) Equiano’s ‘stratagem’ is not quite identical with that of Columbus, who had predicted a lunar eclipse. It is indeed questionable whether the Indians were as impressed as Equiano claims with the sight of the Bible and the accompanying threat: as Gates reminds us, early colonial reports on similar encounters show the Indians to be much less credulous.12 After acting as overseer to the slaves for a while, Equiano leaves the floundering plantation because of the ungodly lifestyle of the colonizers. He later learns that the African slaves all drowned in an attempt to escape from the plan— tation (IN 210, 217–18). The Nicaraguan adventure shows Equiano eerily complicit with the practices and discourse of colonialism. While a benevolent reading might stress his subtle inversion of the traditional parts of colonizer and colonized in the Bible scene, it is also obvious that he, once he has acquired his status as a freedman, seeks to subject (or brags that he does) other non-European peoples with the same coercive methods that were once used toward himself.13 As I have argued, the ambivalence in the Interesting Narrative between a position we might term ‘postcolonial,’ which appreciates native cultures in their ‘pure’ state and promotes the abolition of slavery, and a colonial position, which seeks to turn indigenous peoples into laborers and consumers dependent on the European market, is already visible in the grammatical tripping in the ‘Arcadian’ description of Africa. One of the facts responsible for the constant shift of semantic and grammatical registers, as has long been known, is Equiano’s reliance on European travelogues. The argument so far was that Equiano had been too young to remember much of the culture of his childhood (he writes that he was taken at the age of 11) and thus had to resort to foreign descriptions of his homeland. Recent research by Vincent Carretta, however, suggests that Equiano may not have been born in Africa. Carretta argues, on the grounds of chronological inconsistencies in connection with external evidence, that Equiano must in any case have been at least two years younger than he claims when he was kidnapped in Africa. External


information from the parish register of St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, where he was baptized and from the crew list of the ship Racehorse on which he went on the North Pole expedition complicates the matter in giving as his birthplace not Africa but ‘Carolina’ and ‘South Carolina,’ respectively (Carretta 1995:261, 286; 1999:102). The presence of the terrified child’s voice in the African chapters may thus not even partly be the result of upsurging memories but a rhetorical fabrication in which the voice of the child functions as a narrative ‘reflector’ through which Equiano can speak of the horrors of the slave trade without resorting to the discourse of sentimentalism (Ensslen 1999:81). In the light of this new evidence the ‘contradiction’ between the two voices (remembering child vs. commenting adult) turns out to be a calculated representational strategy. Lacking any supporting evidence on the American side, Carretta is wary of suggesting that Equiano invented his African birth; in a colonial world that required the ability to keep multiple identities, he may have had reasons to indicate South Carolina as his birthplace even if it was not. But why, Carretta asks, did he suppress the fact of his African birth when enlisting for the North Pole voyage in 1773, seven years after having gained his freedom (Carretta 1999:102)? The fact that he retained his colonial name Gustavus Vassa even after the publication of his autobiography, together with his insistence that it was written by an ‘African’ or an ‘Ethiopian,’ furthermore suggests that Equiano juggled identities according to tactical requirements. Not being able to decide the issue, we are left with the possibility that his African identity amounts to a case of what Gayatri Spivak has called ‘strategic essentialism’: a rhetorical ruse by which he endows himself with the narrative authority necessary for speaking effectively for the cause of abolition (Spivak 1990:280). The possibility that Equiano was born in South Carolina obviously changes the significance of the Interesting Narrative within the discipline of American Studies. If Carretta’s findings were borne out, Equiano’s text would have to be fully integrated into the American literary canon alongside the autobiography of his American alter ego, Benjamin Franklin —that ‘resourceful, pragmatic, print-oriented’ model of the American self, whom Equiano might have seen on the streets of Philadelphia on one of his frequent visits there and with whom he shares a strong and ‘almost supernatural faith in the printed word’ (Doherty 1997:578). The founding father of the United States and the founding father of a Black Atlantic consciousness sat down at the same time to write their autobiographies in 1788 (Doherty 1997:578).14 Equiano may then be seen to have lived that part of American history that was successfully blotted out from the American intellectual historiography; he may be seen to represent the black presence which had to be forgotten in order for the narrative of national independence and individualism to take shape.15


The suggestion to alter the dominant view of the (African) American literary tradition by including in it the transnational life-story of Olaudah Equiano was already made by Houston Baker in 1984. Most American commentators, however, have stressed the model character of the Interesting Narrative for the development of the domestic fugitive slave narrative. The anthologization of the text has largely followed suit in excluding the transoceanic element of Equiano’s life.16 It is indeed quite ironical that the most frequently anthologized parts—the descriptions of Africa and of the middle passage—are now suspected to be fabrications. But this revelation does not change the fact that the Interesting Narrative challenges the widespread exceptionalism of American intellectual historiography in countering its narrative of national emergence on virgin soil with a narrative, part true, part invented, of a complex, multiethnic, and transoceanic Black Atlantic world to which the United States owe their existence. Identity by amnesia: oriental captivity and transatlantic slavery in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive Equiano did not live to see his labors rewarded. It would take another two decades after the publication of his Interesting Narrative until the British Parliament finally decreed the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. The process of abolishing the trade was slowed in the 1790s because of the shock caused by the bloody revolutions in France and the Caribbean which elicited a conservative reaction from the British government. All the while American intellectuals were preoccupied with forging a national identity out of the colonial past. Royall Tyler, whose novel The Algerine Captive was published in 1797, regarded it as one of his tasks to lay the imaginative groundwork for a national American literature. The Algerine Captive is the story of Updike Underhill, a fictional descendant of the famous Indian fighter and antinomian John Underhill, whose future fate is announced to his mother in a dream during her pregnancy: she dreams that her house was beset by Indians and her son captured by Indians. As Updike grows up in rural New England, he is schooled in Greek, Latin, and the classics, which all prove ineffectual in turning him into a good farmer. Making best use of his training, Updike becomes a schoolteacher and later enters an apprenticeship with an itinerant physician. While he accompanies his master throughout colonial North America, he has many comic encounters with stupid backsettlers, selfimportant Southerners, and the devious methods of quacks. Disgusted with the ignorance of his fellow Americans, Updike hires on the slave ship Freedom bound for London where he observes ‘a motley race in whose mongrel veins runs the blood of all nations’ (Tyler 1970:99).17 In 1788 he boards the slave ship Sympathy bound for Africa and from thence to


Barbados and South Carolina. He fulfills the office of ship’s surgeon in selecting and examining the slaves. On the trip to America, the ship is overtaken by disease and the crew land Updike with the sick slaves on an island off the coast of Africa. Here they are taken captive by an Algerian ship. Experiencing kindness and humanity from one of his former slaves in Algerian captivity, Updike promises to fight for the cause of abolition if he should ever return to his home country. The second volume deals with Updike’s six years of captivity among the Algerians and develops into a second-hand travelogue with information on the history, culture, and customs of Algeria and other Moslem countries. Underhill becomes the captive of the Dey, almost falls victim to the proselyting effort of a Moslem priest, and eventually practices his profession at the hospital in Algiers. A Jew, whose son he cures, offers to buy his freedom but the scheme fails when the Jew dies and his son feigns not to remember the agreement. Taken along on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Updike is sold to pirates by the deceitful Jew, but the pirate ship is surprised by a storm and Updike is liberated by a Portuguese frigate off the coast of Sardinia. He returns home to his parents a prodigal son, grateful that although he had been ‘degraded to a slave,’ he has ‘now advanced to a citizen of the freest country in the universe’ (AC 224). The plot ends with Updike planning to marry ‘some amiable woman,’ to become a ‘worthy federal citizen,’ and ‘to contribute cheerfully to the support of our excellent government, which I have learnt to adore in schools of despotism’ (AC 224). Dedicated to David Humphreys, who, together with the poet and diplomat Joel Barlow, negotiated the first American treaty with the Barbary states in 1795, Tyler’s novel intervenes in contemporary discourses of national identity and foreign politics.18 In his preface, Updike Underhill explains his reasons for writing down his tale: it is to counteract the morally dubious influence of British novels on the minds of New England readers. He relates his adventures with the express wish to contribute to an authentic native American literature which would ‘exhibit our own manners,’ display a portrait of contemporary life in New England, and inform about the manners of the ‘Algerines,’ ‘that ferocious race, so dreaded by commercial powers, and so little known in our country’ (AC 28–9). The historical background of Tyler’s novel is the commercial battle between the Christian trading nations and the Barbary Coast states Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco. For centuries since the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, these Moslem states, which in the eighteenth century were part of the Ottoman Empire, were feared throughout the Mediterranean for their piratical assaults on European shipping. The reason for their ‘piracy’ consisted in the fact that, due to their Islamic faith, Moslem merchants were denied access to European markets. Although the trade embargo was not explicit and complete, it practically resulted from


the dozens of rules, tariffs, and special regulations that were imposed on Moslem traders. Their only options for participating in the Mediterranean trade network were either to trade through Jewish merchants, who entertained an extensive trade network throughout Europe, or to impose tributes on European ships cruising in the Mediterranean or capture the ships if their governments did not want to pay for the ‘protection.’ As European merchants were highly dependent on their commerce with the Italian city states and Turkey, most of them consented to the demands of the Barbary states (Wolf 1979:294–5; Kitzen 1993). After having gained its independence from Britain, the United States was no longer protected under the British contract with the Barbary states. As the markets of France and Britain were closed to them under the mercantilist legislation in the years after the revolution, American traders looked toward Turkey for a profitable market. But only in 1799 did American diplomats finally agree with the rulers of the Barbary states on the amount of the tribute to be paid (the United States government finally paid $800,000 for the protection of its ships) (Wolf 1979:312). When the Pasha tried to increase his tribute demands, the United States opted for war; the Tripolitan War ended with victory under Stephen Decatur and the cession of tribute payments in 1815. The Algerine Captive is set in the 1790s, the period of legal limbo before an agreement was reached between the young government of the United States and the Algerians and a period in which they were curiously united in their pariah status. No longer protected by the agreement with Britain and not yet having reached their own agreement with the ‘pirates,’ American merchants were taken prisoner en masse in order to be exchanged for high prize sums. In this postcolonial situation—a situation crucially marked by America’s loss of the colonial protection of Britain and by the political vacuum that ensued from American independence—Updike Underhill gets captured by Algerian pirates just at the moment when he is himself engaged in the trade in human beings from Africa. Interestingly, his trip to Africa on the slave ship, ironically called Sympathy, is preceded by a chapter in which Updike rails against Thomas Paine’s atheism and involvement with the Robespierre regime. Yet, the date of his departure for Africa is July, 1788, one year before the French Revolution and a date that marks the first concerted effort to end the transatlantic slave trade by trying to effect a parliamentary decree against it. Accordingly, Updike sounds like a sentimental version of the author of the Rights of Man when he describes the ‘cruel commerce’ by which the peaceful husband-man [is] dragged from his native farm; the fond husband torn from the embraces of his beloved wife; the mother, from her babes; the tender child, from the arms of its parent; and all the tender, endearing ties of natural and social affection rended by the


hand of avaricious violence…. I execrated myself for even the involuntary part I bore in this execrable traffic. I thought of my country and blushed. (AC 108–9) His own function on the ship is to examine the bodies of the slaves: by my station in the ship, I had a principal and active part of this inhuman transaction imposed upon me. As surgeon, it was my duty to inspect the bodies of the slaves to see, as the captain expressed himself, that our owners were not shammed off with unsound flesh…. The man, the affrighted child, the modest matron, and the timid virgin were alike exposed to this severe scrutiny, to humanity and common decency equally insulting. (AC 109–10) Underhill’s narrative continues with a detailed account of the conditions on the slave ship, including the sanitary situation in the hold, the rape of African women by sailors, and the attempts of slaves to starve themselves. In two chapters exclusively dedicated to this purpose, he tells of slaves being beaten, whipped, and tormented and of slaves being packed so tightly below deck that they could hardly breathe: The stagnant confined air of this infernal hole, rendered more deleterious by the stench of the feces and the violent perspiration of such a crowd, occasioned putrid diseases. Even while in the mouth of the Formosa, it was usual to throw one or two Negro corpses over every day. It was in vain I remonstrated to the captain. In vain I enforced the necessity of more commodious berths and a more free influx of air for the slaves. In vain I represented that these miserable people had been used to the vegetable diet and pure air of a country life, that at home they were remarkable for cleanliness of person, the very rites of their religion consisting almost entirely in frequent ablutions. (AC 113) The captain is unmoved by Underhill’s protest and calls it ‘some Yankee nonsense about humanity,’ and his assistant reminds him of his duties as surgeon to discover all slaves with the slightest symptoms of disease in order to ‘tie them up and cast them over the shipside together; and thus, at one dash, to purify the ship.’ Two-thirds of the slaves on board the Sympathy die of disease before the ship even leaves Africa. Reflecting on his complicity in this voyage, Underhill remarks:


I cannot reflect on this transaction yet without shuddering. I have deplored my conduct with tears of anguish; and I pray to a merciful God, the common parent of the great family of the universe, who hath made of one flesh and one blood all nations of the earth, that the miseries, the insults, and cruel woundings I afterwards received when a slave myself may expiate for the inhumanity I was necessitated to exercise towards these, MY BRETHREN OF THE HUMAN RACE. (AC 109–10) After having been marooned on an island with the remaining sick slaves and captured by the ‘Algerine rover, Hamed Hali Saad,’ the weakened Underhill is attended by one of the Africans who escaped the carnage of the hold. This undeserved humanity makes him promise that if he should ever once again taste the freedom of my native country, …every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce. I will fly to our fellow citizens in the southern states; I will, on my knees, conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic which causes it to bleed in every pore…. I will conjure them…to cease to deprive their fellow creatures of that freedom which their writers, their orators, representatives, senators, and even their constitutions of government have declared to be the unalienable birthright of man. (AC 118) Marking the end of the first part and standing at the center of the novel, the chapters on the slave trade at the same time signal a change in tone. They separate the satirical first part, in which Tyler parodies the romantic delusion, intellectual backwardness, and hypocritical piety of his American fellow citizens and in which Underhill is presented as an ‘overeducated bumpkin’ (Davidson 1986:202) from the more serious second part, which relates Updike’s adventures at the Algerian court, his flight, and his return in the style of the then fashionable oriental travelogue and Bildungsroman.19 In length, seriousness, and realistic detail, the slave trade chapters, which sound as if they were based on the report of the English slave ship surgeon Alexander Falconbridge, either directly or through its adaptation by Equiano, by far exceed the episodes related in the domestic satire and oriental captivity tale.20 But they are not only central in terms of location and narrative intensity; they also form the ideological crux of the novel.21 Underhill hopes that the ‘wounds’ he received ‘when a slave myself may expiate for the inhumanity’ he was ‘necessitated’ to impose on the Africans as a slave ship surgeon. He repeats his comparison between the slave ship


and his Algerian captivity at various other points. In other words, he offers his captivity, which allows him to move about and work as a surgeon at the hospital until his ransom, as an adequate analogue to the kidnapping of Africans, their transportation to America under inhuman conditions, their wasting away in the ship’s hold, and their treatment as chattels in the American plantation system. The text performs a major ideological move in lumping together different kinds of captivity with the ultimate effect of reconciling Updike Underhill to the liberalist values of his home country. It is through his Algerian captivity that Updike is converted from an itinerant greenhorn to a mature citizen able to identify with the political doctrine of his nation. The discourse of Algerian slavery was aptly used by Benjamin Franklin in his parody of a speech delivered by the Georgia Congressman ‘Mr.Jackson’ in defense of plantation slavery in 1790. Assuming the pen name ‘Historicus’ and claiming to quote the speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, ‘a member of the Divan of Algiers of 1687,’ Franklin has the ‘African’ defend the enslavement of Christian sailors on the grounds that they were no better off in their own countries, especially England, where they are seiz’d, and confin’d in Ships of War, condemn’d not only to work, but to fight, for small Wages, or a mere Subsistence, not better than our Slaves are allow’d by us. Is their Condition then made worse by their falling into our Hands? No; they have only exchanged one Slavery for another, and I may say a better; for here they are brought into a Land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light. Franklin then goes on to express his belief that as likeminded arguments produce similar effects in the minds of the listeners, the Congressman may not worry that the British Parliament may abolish the slave trade (which it did not) (Franklin 1970:89, 91). The satire of course consists in the fact that the arguments of the Southern Congressman are placed on the same level with those of an Algerian ‘pirate.’ Like Franklin in his sketch, Tyler wants to remind his readers of ‘the tyranny of slavery upon which the economies of Algeria and the United States are both based’ (Davidson 1986:200). And yet the comparison remains problematic, because as Thomas Paine—whom Updike slanders for his involvement in the French Revolution before continuing his narrative of his slaving venture— reminded his American readers in 1775 already, they would search in vain in ancient history for examples of the modern slave-trade. Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war. But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like


wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against humanity and justice, that seems left by heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians (Paine 1987:54) The examples of both Tyler and Franklin evince a common rhetorical strategy, frequently applied in revolutionary America, of mixing different forms of slavery. Underhill’s change of fortune from ‘involuntary’ aggressor to ‘insulted’ victim is reiterated on the national level by the rhetorical appropriation of the discourses of slavery and (Indian) captivity in revolutionary America, in which white Americans frequently pictured themselves as slaves or captives throwing off the shackles of foreign bondage (Schöpp 2000:292). While Tyler uses this trope in his novel, the chapters on the slave trade also betray the superficiality and arbitrariness of the comparison. However, by the end of the second part, the reader is likely to have forgotten Updike’s previous engagement in the making of foreign captives, as well as his promise to spend the rest of his life in service of the abolition of African slavery. Franklin’s playful imitation of the Southern Congressman’s antiabolitionist stance is sharpened by his reference to the ‘light’ of Islamism, a formulation that parodies the pro-slavery argument that Africans were better off in America for receiving the ‘light’ of Christianity there. Franklin uses the fictional character Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim in accordance with the Enlightenment tradition of cultural relativism, in which the trope of the savage critic serves to hold up a mirror to the ills and the hypocrisy of Christian societies.22 The trope reappears in Tyler’s novel in the figure of a Mollah whom Updike encounters in a Coran school. The Mollah offers him the chance to convert to Islam and thus gain his liberty He invites the reluctant Updike to a learned dispute in which they would compare their faiths—a debate in which Updike sadly fails. His claim, echoing a common prejudice, that ‘Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword,’ is answered by the Mollah with a small history lesson: My friend, you surely have not read the writings of your own historians. The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre: from the institution of the Christian thundering legion, under Constantine the Great, to the expulsion of the Moors out of Spain by the ferocious inquisition, or the dragooning of the Huguenots from France, under Louis the Great. The Mussulmen never yet forced a man to adopt their faith…. The companions and successors of the apostle conquered cities and kingdoms, like other nations. They gave civil laws to the conquered, according to the laws of nations; but they never forced the conscience of any man. It is true,


they then and we now, when a slave pronounces the ineffable creed, immediately knock off his fetters and receive him as a brother…. We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert. (AC 142) Being reminded of his own nation’s enslavement of human beings, which his account of his Algerian captivity seeks to repress, Updike is ‘so abashed for my country I could not answer him.’ After quoting a few more speeches of ‘this artful priest,’ Updike, ‘disgusted with his fables’ and ‘confounded by his sophistry,’ resumes his slave’s attire and seeks safety in his former servitude (AC 143). The cultural relativism and implicit critique of Christianity which Tyler expresses through the medium of the Islamic priest caused an outcry of protest among contemporary critics. John Engell, who compares the conversation with the Mollah with similar scenes in Gulliver’s Travels, remarks that this is ‘no ‘gentle’ satire of America but a full broadside, an attack on the fundamental villainy and hypocrisy of slavery in the New World’ (Engell 1989:26–7). Tyler’s readers understood the subversiveness of the scene. He nevertheless waited more than twenty years before renouncing the accusation that he was idealizing Islam and slandering the Christian faith. But his response that the passage was ‘written with a view to do away the vulgar prejudices’ against Islam and display the ‘monstrous absurdities of the Koran’ sounds half-hearted and contradictory (Carson and Carson 1979:67). It actually repeats the rhetorical gesture contained in the quoted passage from the novel, in which the very plausible remarks of the Mollah are couched in Underhill’s orientalist language of falsity and treachery (he calls the priest ‘artful’ and refers to his statements as ‘fables’ and ‘sophistry’). In comparing the two religions and the two cultures’ treatment of their slaves, the Mollah drives home a point which Updike would like to forget: that Algerian captivity cannot be compared with the treatment of African slaves on American plantations. The fact that Updike resigns himself to his role as slave rather than confront the shallow liberalism at home is perhaps the most acute display of his ideological cure through displacement: his growing appreciation of American republican virtues, which increases proportionately to the time he spends away from home. But the conversation with the Mollah may also invite the reader to distance himor herself from Updike’s behavior and to find a more fitting response to the Mollah’s accusations. The cultural work of the novel, I would argue, is ultimately not to confront the problem raised by the Mollah but to seek national unity in the vision of the United States as the best of all possible worlds. If the first part


of the novel ends with Updike’s conversion to abolitionism, the second part ends with Updike the ‘Yankee Candide’ (Carson and Carson 1979:60) accommodating his ideals to the social realities of America. He ends his narrative by appealing to his countrymen to cherish as their ‘first object’ to keep ‘union among ourselves. For to no nation besides the United States can that ancient saying be more emphatically applied; BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL’ (AC 224). Oriental captivity functions in Tyler’s novel as what Joseph Schöpp calls a ‘proleptical resolution’ of unresolved domestic problems (Schöpp 2000: 293). In this regard, Underhill’s account of his unfortunate travels performs a similarly recuperative act as Briton Hammon’s. Obviously, the Orient functions as an ideological foil for negotiating the domestic dilemma of Southern slavery and the involvement of American ships and captains in the African slave trade. Underhill’s shame at thinking of the brutality of his countrymen against Africans, which is temporarily revived by his shame at the Mollah’s words, is finally displaced by the rhetoric of American democratic ideals and by his reintegration into American society —now no longer the nomadic country bumpkin but a valuable citizen of the republic. In replacing the capitalized motto at the end of part one, ‘MY BRETHREN OF THE HUMAN RACE!’ with that at the end of part two, ‘BY UNITING WE STAND; BY DIVIDING WE FALL,’ the novel dramatizes the emergence of an American national identity through amnesia, an identity fired by the inversion of the roles of colonizer and colonized. This rhetorical move can already be observed at the very beginning of the text where Updike writes at length about his forefather John Underhill’s antinomianism (to be read as an embryonic form of contemporary liberalism) but hardly mentions his ancestor’s decisive role in the Pequot War of 1637. Expressing his need for an unbroken national genealogy, Updike Underhill here urges his readers to ‘pass over those few dark spots of zeal’ that led the Puritans astray into persecuting his liberalist forefather in order not to cloud America’s ‘rising sun’ (AC 40). The darker sides of American history, he signals, ought to be forgotten in favor of the larger aim of a continuous national historiography. In participating in the larger ideological project of producing national identity through amnesia, The Algerine Captive can be seen to look forward to the ideological struggles of the 1840s and 1850s which I will discuss in Chapters 3 and 4. Tyler’s narrative of reconciliation, which counters the shortcomings and contradictions of postcolonial America with an account of foreign bondage, dramatizes a more general discursive movement in the early republic, whose political rhetoric concentrated on domestic issues while keeping its continuing transatlantic involvement at bay. The fact that Tyler was highly aware of the problem of slavery as a Supreme Court judge to the state of Vermont testifies to the discursive pressure to which his text yielded.


Choosing national unity over antislavery division, the foundational fiction of The Algerine Captive anticipates similar forms of narrative closure in the fictions of Brown and Cooper.23 The Algerine Captive inaugurates a rhetorical pattern of ‘postcolonial’ discourse in the early United States in which the national identity arising from its independence from Britain is consistently disrupted by its continuing colonizing relationship to Native Americans and Africans. Tyler’s novel is one of various examples in which a discourse of postcoloniality thrives by appropriating for itself a rhetoric of unjust foreign bondage while silencing the claims of those that are kept in bondage in the United States. Ultimately it testifies to the fatal ambivalence of American postcoloniality itself which would lead to civil war more than half a century later: its painful and ritualistic self-invention as a nation morally grounded in the right of nature which had to silence the voices of other claimants to the same concept. As Thomas Philbrick remarks, most of Updike Underhill’s peregrinations are by water—a characteristic which he shares with Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano (Philbrick 1961:31). Admired by Cooper, who feared that the text might be lost to posterity, Tyler’s novel also points ahead to Cooper’s own sea novels, one of which I will discuss in the next chapter. All four figures discussed in this chapter (Robinson Crusoe, Briton Hammon, Olaudah Equiano, and Updike Underhill) share an inexplicable desire for travel, a certain picaresque plot and a conversion experience. But while Crusoe, who dramatizes the emergence of the modern solitary self, is symbolically reconciled with the capitalist world system, and Updike Underhill at the end of his travels discovers his liberal republican self and learns to arrange himself with the ‘national sin’ at the root of his nation’s existence,24 Equiano and Hammon remain uncertain of their cultural identities. Unlike Underhill and Crusoe who successfully create for themselves dualistic world pictures, Equiano remains a cultural mongrel, endlessly performing the part of the authentic African while signing his letters with his colonial name and finding it difficult to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ In the world of nations he necessarily remains a marginal figure; it is only in transgressing the discourses of nationalism, ethnicity, and geography that the example of his life—and those of others like him— can be fully appreciated. Tyler reiterates one of the key moments of Defoe’s novel in letting his protagonist experience Algerian captivity as a result of his engagement in the slave trade, but without further consequences for his ‘postcolonial’ plot. Equiano’s mimicry of colonial texts (of both Crusoe and Paradise Lost) is by comparison much more subtle and far reaching. This has perhaps to do with the fact that Equiano’s text was a serious instrument in the struggle for the abolition of the slave trade—a transnational struggle which Updike Underhill promises to join but ultimately forgets in favor of


a life of domestic bliss, and that the narrative of national union has to forget if it wants to remain a narrative of liberty and equality.

3 Textual and geographical displacement in Arthur Mervyn and The Red Rover

The first American edition of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative appeared in New York in 1791. Failing to catch the attention of the reading public in a similar way as in Europe, it was to remain the only American edition for a long time. The year of 1791 is also the beginning of the black revolution in Saint Domingue, in which free blacks, mulattos, and African slaves united in shaking off the colonial rule of France. The ‘Black Jacobins,’ as C.L.R.James calls them (James 1978a), not only gained control over the most important colony in the Caribbean but also defended their independence against the armies first of Britain and then of France. Although it succeeded in capturing Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the uprising, in 1802, and starving him to death in a remote Alpine valley in 1803, the Napoleonic government had to accept the independence of Saint Domingue, now called, after its indigenous name, Haiti, in 1804.1 Equiano, who lived to witness the events from distant England, referred to the slave trade as a ‘traffic’ that ‘spreads like a pestilence, and taints what it touches’ (IN 111). He knowingly or unknowingly alludes to an interesting nexus between the language of disease and the theme of colonial slavery which had been lastingly imprinted on English literature by James Thomson in his influential pastoral poem The Seasons (1727). In the section ‘Summer,’ Thomson relates the infectious diseases that scourge European cities to an African origin. Breeding in ‘swampy fens,’ ‘impenetrable shades,’ and ‘recesses foul,’ the ‘Vapours’ causing the ‘pestilent disease’ are traced back to their origin in ‘Ethiopia’s poisoned woods’ and ‘stifled Cairo’s filth’ (Thomson 1891:93–4). Thomson gives a very vivid description of the ravages of the fever, which turns a thriving city into a necropolis and the ‘cheerful haunt of men’ into ‘the worst of deserts,’ and which shuts up ‘the smitten wretch’ in ‘doomed house[s]’ from where he breaks loose only to run into the streets and infect his neighbors: And, struck by turns, in solitary pangs They fall unblest, untended, and unmourned. Thus o’er the prostrate city black despair

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Extends her raven wing (94) Thomson’s description of the infected city is preceded, and prepared, by his evocation of the transatlantic slave trade. It is the slave ships, carrying the sons of ‘unhappy Guinea’ across the sea and filled with ‘steaming crowds,’ ‘rank disease, and death,’ which bring the epidemic to European shores, drawing ‘a close incumbent cloud of death’ across ‘intemperate man’s… guilty domes’ (92–3). While the geographical origin of both slaves and disease is Africa, then, the poem also establishes a causal link between the two (‘guilty domes’), insinuating that disease comes as a punishment for the ‘intemperate’ Europeans’ hunger for wealth. This is one of many examples which suggest that the imagery of disease formed a powerful ideologeme within the formation of colonial discourse, and not without reason: the defeat of the British and French Armies in Haiti was largely the work of yellow fever and malaria which carried away more than one-third of the 20,000 English troops brought into Saint Domingue between 1793 and 1798 and 24,000 of the 34,000 French soldiers within the first year of their occupation. At the end of 1802, 8,000 Napoleonic soldiers were in hospital and only 2,000 remained healthy (Watts 1997:237; Dayan 1995:152).2 Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800) is not usually regarded as in any way connected with the world of Atlantic slavery which forms the topic of Tyler’s and Equiano’s texts discussed in the previous chapter. And yet, as I will try to show, the plot of Brown’s novel is crucially determined by this transatlantic history—marginal as it may appear for readers trained in a ‘domestic’ perspective. In order to prepare the scene for Brown’s novel, a few introductory remarks about the sociopolitical context of the American 1790s, centering on the issues of ‘disease’ and ‘black revolution,’ are indispensable. Black contagion: Philadelphia and yellow fever Between August and November 1793, Philadelphia was visited by a yellow fever epidemic. About 5,000 Philadelphians died of the disease, while another 20,000 fled to the countryside (Pernick 1972:559). The victims perished after heavy fever attacks, often with their skin turned yellow and vomiting a black substance —which gave the disease its other name, ‘black vomit’ Since its beginnings in the summer, most of the more prosperous inhabitants of the city, including many members of the city council, fled the town in order to escape infection. Unsurprisingly, the fever hit strongest among the poor citizens unable to flee, whose living conditions lacked the

ARTHUR MERVYN AND THE RED ROVER 55

hygiene necessary to prevent the disease from spreading. By September the truncated city council found itself no longer able to control the situation. There were not sufficient doctors and nurses to tend the sick and more and more carters and gravediggers refused to carry out their jobs for fear of infection. Husbands deserted their wives and parents abandoned their children. Mathew Carey, one of the chroniclers of the epidemic who had himself fled to the countryside, writes that ‘less concern was felt for the loss of a parent, a husband, a wife or an only child than, on other occasions, would have been caused by the death of a servant or even a favorite lap-dog’ (Carey 1794:23). A great number of people perished in abandoned houses or in the streets for lack of treatment, or starved for lack of attention. In their distress, the city fathers appealed to the black community for help. The African Americans and their leaders, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, readily assented to assist the white population when called upon by Benjamin Rush, leading physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, with whom they were well acquainted because of his abolitionist stance. In fact, Rush had been instrumental in founding the first African American church in Philadelphia in 1793. Now, assuming that persons of African descent were immune to yellow fever, he suggested to Allen and Jones that the epidemic might be ‘a divinely inspired way of eradicating prejudice and fostering racial harmony’ between Philadelphia’s ethnic groups (quoted in Winch 1988:15–16). The African community, organized in the Free African Society (FAS), accordingly grasped the situation as an opportunity for fighting widespread racial discrimination and for proving their practical skill, civic virtue, and Christian humanitarianism (Nash 1988:123). Blacks began acting as nurses for whites and transported the sick to the emergency hospital at Bush Hill, a converted colonial mansion. They drove off the dead in carts and buried them—this only eleven years after the black community had been granted the right to fence in a portion of potter’s field and turn it into the first graveyard for blacks (94). They paid a high toll for their solidarity, because not only was Rush wrong in assuming their immunity (the percentage of fever victims among Philadelphia’s blacks was almost as high as that among the whites: about one-tenth of each group succumbed to the fever) but they in addition became the subjects of public slander (124–5). In his widely circulated leaflet A Short Account of the Malignant Fever (1794), Mathew Carey charged the black nurses with a violent and avaricious behavior toward the sick. His pamphlet triggered an indignant response from the African American leaders Jones and Allen, who rejected the charges and in their Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (1794) gave innumerable examples of acts of charity and kindness by blacks towards whites.


While yellow fever was raging, the doctors fought bitter academic battles in trying to explain its origin and agree on the right cure. Benjamin Rush favored a cure that consisted of bloodletting and mercury purging. Believing, like many of his European contemporaries, that any specific illness is merely a manifestation of a master disease and was best cured by cleansing the body of all poisonous substances, he forced potions of jalap and mercury down his patients’ throats, some of which, in the estimation of his colleagues, would even have killed a horse (Powell 1965:80–2, 227). It is believed that many hundreds died of Rush’s cure rather than of yellow fever. Rush was opposed by those of his colleagues who preferred the socalled ‘bark and wine’ cure. This was used by French doctors in the Caribbean and some others on the continent and consisted of different mixtures of wine, chamomile tea, effervescing salts, vitriol, bark and laudanum, and fresh fruit. Some doctors also prescribed cold baths, which, they claimed, offered great refreshment to the patients (77). This cure, as becomes obvious, was based on the idea of assisting nature to do its work. It lacked the violence of Rush’s cure and was thus at least mildly more effective (78–9). The situation improved when the wealthy merchant Stephen Girard volunteered to take over the makeshift hospital—a deserted estate called Bush Hill which the city government had confiscated for that purpose. Within only a few weeks, Girard and his assistants transformed the place from a pesthouse into a hospital. With a mixture of strict sanitary measures, a mild application of the ‘French’ cure of stimulants and quinine, and a strong measure of personal attention to the patients, Girard and his assistants improved the state of the hospital to such a degree that not only fewer people died of yellow fever but those suffering from other illnesses also began to apply to be brought to Bush Hill (Powell 1965: 182). After initial resistance from the city council, Girard succeeded in appointing the French—Caribbean doctor Jean Devèze as the head physician of Bush Hill. The method of Devèze, who would later become one of the leading physicians of France, differed markedly from that of Rush. Where Rush insisted on applying the same treatment to all patients (based on the notion that all illnesses derived from the same cause), Devèze based his treatment on close observation of the individual case. Compared to Rush’s schematic purism, his theory sounds remarkably modern: Being in the habit of seeing the diseased, and to observe nature, can alone guide the practitioner, and render medicine a really useful science, but any one who, seduced by the brilliancy of a system, will force nature by the rules of the method he has adopted, he, I say, is a scourge more fatal to the human kind than the plague itself would be.3


Clearly voicing his antagonism to Rush’s schematic and forceful cure, Devèze insists that a remedy that may cure one person may be impotent or even dangerous if administered to another person: ‘The diversity of effects proceeding from the same cause will always prevent specifics from becoming remedies generally; which means that medicine will never be as certain a science as experimental physics’ (quoted in Powell 1965:173). Devèze’s knowledge derived from his practice as chief surgeon of the French troops at Cap François in Saint Domingue. He had recently fled to Philadelphia from the revolutionary uprising on that island (Powell 1965: 168–9). Thus the citizens of Philadelphia, in fighting the disease, mostly depended on the help of domestic ‘aliens’ and of foreigners with their nonconformist medical practice. The fact that the Philadelphia blacks were hired by Rush and, in nursing the sick, used Rush’s horse cure, may have contributed to their bad reputation. But the major reason of the white citizens’ fear of ‘Rush’s black bleeders’ (Pernick 1972:584) must be looked for in the larger symbolic and political context of the epidemic of 1793. What is remarkable about the Philadelphian querelle des docteurs is that none of them had the slightest notion of how the disease was incurred. The process by which yellow fever is transmitted was first demonstrated by Walter Reed in 1901 (Pernick 1972:562). In 1793, without any knowledge of the existence of microbes (first discovered by Louis Pasteur in 1854), the doctors were split into two camps: the contagionists, who believed that the fever was passed on by bodily contact, or by contact with the clothing of a diseased person; and the defenders of the miasma theory, who assumed that the fever emanated from a polluted environment, from poisonous ‘miasmata’ and ‘effluvia’ usually located in the poorer areas of a city and near the waterfront.4 The real cause, as we now know, was a combination of the two: the transmitter of yellow fever is Aedes aegypti, a mosquito of African origin which had probably first been brought to the Americas on a slave ship in 1647 (Watts 1997:213). In part because of large forest clearances for sugar cane production, Aedes aegypti found ideal reproduction conditions in the swamp areas created thereby in the West Indies. It spread the disease by first biting an infected person and then a non-infected one. After various epidemics since the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands were well acquainted with the disease, which is one of the reasons why Girard’s and Devèze’s French-Caribbean cure was ultimately more successful than Rush’s. The yellow fever virus is likewise of African origin and was unknown in America before 1492. The disease is endemic in most parts of West Africa, which means that most Africans undergo a mild infection as children which gives them lifetime immunity. Together with malaria, however, yellow fever became the major scourge of European colonizers. In the light of the incredible casualties among British and French troops in Haiti, it is hardly


surprising that even non-superstitious contemporaries came to regard yellow fever as a ‘black’ disease —and this not only because of its prominent symptom, the black vomit. Yellow fever functioned as an uninvited biological weapon that greatly assisted rebelling slave populations to shake off European colonial rule by disabling military interventions.5 As Philip Curtin concludes, epidemic disease outbreaks are triggered by migration (Curtin 1997:140). While both Europeans and Africans were immune within their respective local environments, they died in large numbers when migrating to a foreign disease environment. Not surprisingly, while at least rough numbers on European losses are available, next to nothing is known about the numbers of Africans who died during the process of ‘seasoning’ in the Americas. One is beginning to understand why the price for a ‘seasoned’ slave was so much higher than for an ‘unseasoned’ one. It was the bad luck of the black citizens of Philadelphia that many of them had not been born in Africa but were brought up in America as slaves. Unfortunately for them, viruses are colorblind and have no respect for man-made racial differences. If nothing else, the high death toll among black Philadelphians teaches us that their community was by no means an ethnically or culturally homogeneous group but that its members were scrambled together from different corners of the Atlantic world. Biologically, if by no means politically and culturally, Philadelphia’s blacks had become part of the domestic population. The yellow fever epidemic of 1793, as can already be seen, occurred at a historical nodal point. Its function as a physical and symbolic link between different historical and intellectual events in the Atlantic world is heightened by the fact that its eruption in Philadelphia coincided with the appearance of French refugees from the black revolution in Saint Domingue. In July 1793 the refugees from Saint Domingue, of different ethnicities and professional walks of life, began to appear in Philadelphia harbor in search of asylum. By the end of August their number exceeded 2, 000, which caused the city community no little trouble in providing them with shelter and food (Powell 1965:4–5). Some of the refugees were infected with yellow fever and died shortly after disembarking. This is how the contagionists among the Philadelphia doctors explained the origin of the disease. Modern scholars generally agree with their thesis; they are convinced that the magnitude of the plague was in fact due to the large number of refugees arriving at Philadelphia that summer, which by far exceeded the rate of human contact caused by normal commercial exchange with the West Indies. Rush, being a climatist, rejected the theory of foreign origin; he rather saw the cause in the noxious effluvia emanating from the filth in certain parts of the city and from open sewage canals. Both theories were right, of course: while some of the


refugees were infected with the virus when they arrived in Philadelphia, the subtropical heat and humid environment provided Aedes aegypti with ample opportunity to multiply and carry out its fatal task. The major revolution of the 1790s, of course, was the revolution in France. The proclamation of the French Republic in 1793 was followed by war with England. This created problems of allegiance for many Americans. While Hamilton’s Federalists sided with England and were worried about developments in France, the Democratic Republicans initially supported the French Revolution; their sympathy only declined when the hope and optimism of the first years gave way to the Terreur in 1795–6. When Jay’s Treaty renounced the freedom of the seas and allied the United States with England against France in 1795, the Republicans strongly opposed their government’s anglophilia. The public rage caused by the governing Federalists’ anti-French foreign policy led to the proclamation of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which closed America’s gates to foreigners suspected of spreading republican ideas and basically prohibited any criticism of government policy in American newspapers (Christophersen 1993:12–14; Gardner 1998:56–64). The concurrence of the revolutions in France and Haiti with the appearance of the fever in American seaboard cities came in handy for the critics of Jacobinism. Opponents of the revolutions used the imagery of disease for expressing their antirepublican ideas. Federalist defenders of the ‘foreign contagion’ theory located an additional source of the fever in the passengers of the French ship Sans Culottes and its prize, the Flora, whom they suspected to have carried the disease into Philadelphia harbor (Pernick 1972:568; Powell 1965: 16). Especially Federalists blamed the epidemic on the French. As Martin Pernick shows, yellow fever increasingly served a rhetorical purpose within the political debates between Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans on the one hand and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists on the other. He demonstrates that generally followers of the Federalist Party (politicians and doctors among them) tended to espouse a ‘foreign contagion’ theory of origin whereas those affiliated with the Republicans favored a theory of domestic origin. For the latter group, yellow fever was the result of the ‘impurity’ of the city itself. Looking back to the epidemic in 1800, Jefferson even expressed the opinion that the ‘yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation,’ adding that he viewed ‘great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man’ (quoted in Rosen 1952:36). The Federalists, conversely, used the fever for expressing their growing Francophobia in response to the French Revolution. Siding with England (then at war with France), Federalists resented American commerce with the French Caribbean and took yellow fever as an opportunity for demanding its limitation, as well as the


quarantine or rejection of French and French-Caribbean refugees (Pernick 1972:568).6 Thus the 1793 yellow fever, in addition to posing a very real catastrophe, acquired the status of a powerful metaphor—a metaphor which, as its use in Thomson’s Seasons suggests, was not invented in 1793. In addition to becoming available for expressing a growing xenophobia, the language of disease was also used to articulate internal political dissension. It provided Jeffersonians with arguments in favor of a healthy agrarian republic and Federalists with rhetorical fodder for their antidemocratic and Francophobic sentiments. Disease is traditionally seen as a danger inhabiting the borders of a body politic and threatening that body with ‘pollution’ in the form of social strife and dissent (Douglas 1988). At least since the eighteenth century, with its rise of medical theories, the Western conceptualization of society as a body demands purity as a condition of health and thus makes the temptation to defilement a ‘natural’ characteristic. This has endowed us with a mode of representation in which health and cleanliness serve the logic of stability, and disorder is rendered as disease and dirt (Campbell 1992:93). Following Foucault’s analysis of the medicalization of society since the eighteenth century, David Campbell points out that disease joined other symbols of pollution in becoming a trope for the ‘pathological’ antithesis of the ‘normal’ state of mental and bodily purity (94). Disease discourse increasingly conflated various stigmata of racial, class, and gender difference into a powerful symbol of social danger (98).7 In keeping with this Enlightenment logic of ‘purity and danger,’ Jeffersonian political theory held that ‘the biological, social, psychological, and moral relations of man to his environment were so interlocked that they were all one’ (Rosen 1952:33). Benjamin Rush in particular believed that a change in politics would entail a change in a society’s health. He believed that a democratic government would improve the health of a society, observing that ‘hysterical’ women were cured of their condition if they favored the American Revolution (Rosen 1952:40). For Rush and Jefferson, of course, social health required a rural lifestyle, with a lot of exercise in the clean air of the countryside. Urbanization and industrialization to the Jeffersonians entailed poverty, disease, political inequality, and social injustice (Rosen 1952:41). But Jefferson’s agrarian republic was to be an all-white republic. He famously envisioned his ‘empire for liberty’ as an ethnically homogenous realm, ideally inhabited by people of a pure Anglo-Saxon extraction. As Reginald Horsman demonstrates, Jefferson even ‘managed to think of the South American continent without its people when, in the 1780s, he wrote of the republic [i.e. the United States] as being the nest from which both North and South America would be peopled’ (Horsman 1981:92).


Repeating this idea in a letter to Monroe in 1801 when speculating about Western colonization without blacks, Jefferson envisions a time when our rapid multiplication will expand itself…and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. (Quoted in Horsman 1981:92–3) Jefferson’s fear of miscegenation and slave insurrection is well documented. As Michael Zuckerman shows, Jefferson’s afrophobia was crucially responsible for his alliance with the despotic Napoleonic regime in its attempt to suppress the black government in Haiti. His fear of a black republic in the Caribbean thus overruled any sympathy with the only other postcolonial republic in the western hemisphere. Although American merchants continued their trade relations with Haiti (more than 500 American ships called at the ports of Saint Domingue in the 1790s), Jefferson, sharing the fears of other Southern plantation owners, joined forces with the colonial power France in trying to avoid the ‘contagion’ of black revolution from spreading over to the American South (Zuckerman 1993: 180–5). This attitude stood in stark contrast with that of American Federalists who actively supported the revolutionary government and who sent the surgeon Edward Stevens to Haiti as American consul where he assisted Toussaint L’Ouverture in developing the economy of Haiti (193, 203). Jefferson’s texts, whose language strikes the reader for its conspicuous avoidance of direct references to African American slaves (Dayan 1995: 188), testify to a growing fear of black insurrection. In a notorious paragraph in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), he speculates on the destruction of morals brought about by the peculiar institution and concludes: And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference. (Jefferson 1975:214–15)


Hidden as it is in a chapter on ‘Manners,’ Jefferson’s expression of racial anxiety also contains an interesting comment on the moral basis of a slave rebellion, which he can only locate in God’s ‘supernatural’ interference. As the right of nature served as moral legitimation for the American Revolution against Britain, Jefferson was careful not to cite it as a moral basis for a revolution against the United States. Especially after 1791, when Haiti fell into the hands of a black government, Jefferson’s apprehension of racial danger increased and led him to entertain the idea of relocating rebellious American slaves to Haiti while simultaneously isolating the island from international commerce (Dayan 1995:188–9; Zuckerman 1993: 200, 213). Without doubt Jefferson’s apprehensions about the events at Saint Domingue represent those of many other Americans—they would reverberate throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, finding their most articulate literary expression in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.8 But in 1793, Philadelphia, where Brown’s novel is set, would open its city gates to refugees from the politically ‘contagious’ area, risking the political, cultural, and economic sanity of America’s ‘mighty heart’ Charles Brockden Brown wrote Arthur Mervyn, and also his ‘frontier’ novel Edgar Huntly, during yet another yellow fever epidemic in New York in 1798. He actually experienced his most intense period of creativity during his own illness, writing his four best known novels concurrently within only a few months— precisely the period surrounding the yellow fever.9 Commenting on his feverish activity, Brown writes in a letter to Dunlap: ‘I could muse and write cheerfully in spite of the groans of the dying and the rumbling of hearses, and in spite of a thousand tokens of indisposition in my own frame’ (quoted in Ferguson 1979: 294). For a representative of dark romanticism, the scene of writing could probably be hardly more inspiring. One could argue that the feverishness of the scene of writing has translated itself into the structure of the novels and into the characterization of their protagonists. Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, conceived and written in a state of mental extremity, not only mark a turning point in American literature (this has long been pointed out), but they articulate the mental and ideological transformation from a predominantly Atlantic setting to a continental setting. This transformation entails a reorientation from a transnational to a national constellation. Both novels, moreover, voice the fears and anxieties attending this process of ideological and political reorganization.10 Arthur Mervyn was published in two volumes in 1799 and 1800. It is subtitled Memoirs of the Year 1793.11 The events of the novel are organized around a highly convoluted crime plot. While the novel has been widely identified with Arthur’s youthful quest for a place in postrevolutionary American society, recent historical readings of the text show


that his quest is implicated in a larger narrative involving fraud, embezzlement, and murder: a frame, moreover, that links the story of adolescence with the cultural-historical context I have sketched. Arthur’s increasing involvement in criminal activities effectively distances the reader from conventional expectations he or she might have harbored about Arthur’s purity of character. The plot of youthful initiation, the text signals, belongs to a bygone age: Arthur’s quest for identity, as that of Edgar Huntly, does not lead to a superior knowledge or enlightenment but ends in a retreat from America’s moral and political chaos. The criminal activities of the characters, moreover, link the local center of the text, the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, to a transnational setting. Arthur Mervyn, far from being a ‘methodized’ reflection (as Brown claims in his Preface), must in fact be seen as the major fictional negotiation (‘memoir’) of the early republic’s economic and political entanglement in the Atlantic world. Arthur Mervyn’s infected capital: the postcolonial fictionalization of economic transformation At the climax of his adventures with the villain Thomas Welbeck, Arthur Mervyn finds himself in the frightening position of having to partake in the burial of the sea captain Amos Watson in the cellar of Welbeck’s mansion. Watson has just been shot by Welbeck after demanding satisfaction from him for ravishing and destroying his sister. Now the young country boy Arthur has obediently followed Welbeck into the basement to assist him with his gruesome task. But as so often, Arthur’s imagination plays foul tricks on him. He grows hysterical when Welbeck, snatching the only candle, leaves him alone with the corpse in order to fetch a spade. In a scene which Poe may have used as a model for his story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ Arthur, convinced that Welbeck has locked him in, loses his way in the dark, bumps into a beam and frantically grapples around the subterranean labyrinth with blood running down his face. His terror is in part incited by his previous observation of Watson’s body. With his ‘imagination distempered by terror,’ Mervyn had fantasized (or hadn’t he?) that the dead man for a moment opened his eyes and threw wild glances around him (AM 103–4). When Welbeck returns after all, Mervyn helps him to bury Watson and then accompanies his master in a boat out on the Schuykill River where he witnesses Welbeck’s suicidal plunge into the water. As these scenes indicate, Arthur Mervyn is far from being the classical novel of initiation it has often been read as. Rather, the story of Arthur’s peregrinations through the labyrinthine streets and social structures of Philadelphia is told in a combination of crime and mystery plots. As we learn quite early on, Arthur has a special gift for observing mysterious


deeds and overhearing private conversations in hidden places. Losing his scant belongings already on the day of his arrival at Philadelphia, the inexperienced country youth is introduced into the complexities of cosmopolitan society by listening to the bedroom conversation of the merchant Thetford and his wife. He has ended up in the merchant’s bedroom because of a prank played on him by Thetford’s apprentice, who has locked Arthur into his master’s closet. From his hiding place, Arthur cannot but overhear Thetford tell his wife of his fraudulent commercial scheme, aimed at depriving a rich ‘nabob’ of $30,000 (38). When the couple fall asleep, Arthur manages to escape from his prison and is soon hired as a scribe by Welbeck, only to discover that Welbeck himself is the ‘nabob’ mentioned in the secret conversation. The pernicious scheme is to convince Welbeck of buying and equipping a ship with a cargo to be sold in the West Indies. Should the ship return safely, the gain would be double the original expense; but even in case the ship should be wrecked or captured by the British (whose Navigation Laws of 1783 prohibited the trade of American ships with the Caribbean) Welbeck’s investment would be retrieved due to a favorable insurance contract. Welbeck, who is destitute of cash but dissimulates the rich aristocrat in Philadelphia’s high society, purchases ship and cargo on credit, counting on the promised returns within a few months’ time (91–2). What he does not suspect is that Thetford, whose brother acts as supercargo on Welbeck’s ship, is planning to have the ship confiscated by the British and clandestinely buy it back himself at an auction for a fifth or tenth of its original value (130). In a scene that directly precedes the killing of Watson, Welbeck learns from Thetford that his ship has been captured by an English privateer under a pretense of carrying contraband: Two French mulattoes had, after much solicitation, and the most solemn promises to carry with them no article which the laws of war decree to be contraband, obtained passage in the vessel. She was speedily encountered by a privateer, by whom every receptacle was ransacked. In a chest, belonging to the Frenchmen, and which they had affirmed to contain nothing but their clothes, were found two sabres, and other accoutrements of an officer of cavalry. Under this pretence, the vessel was captured and condemned, and this was a cause of forfeiture, which had not been provided against in the contract of insurance. (AM 96) Since Watson, who brings the news to Thetford, is said to have just returned from ‘St. Domingo’ (meaning the French part of Hispaniola, Saint Domingue), we may assume that the forfeiture of Welbeck’s ship (for


smuggling weapons and ‘mulatto’ officers to the French Caribbean) is a direct result of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution. As it turns out, both Welbeck and Thetford are ruined by the scheme: Welbeck, after his unexpected return from the depths of the Schuykill, is apprehended by his creditors and thrown into debtors’ prison, where he dies. Thetford likewise dies because his material greed makes him stay in the city against the advice of others. Without completing his fraudulent business scheme, Thetford succumbs to yellow fever. Arthur Mervyn, often read primarily in terms of its protagonist’s adolescence and initiation,12 is America’s first economic novel. Its general themes are the instability of fortunes and the disinheritance of the young generation by their elders (Cohen 1986:366). Its characters are ‘closely associated with the uncer— tainties of a complex economy in which wealth often takes extremely fluid, even ephemeral, forms,’ writes Daniel Cohen. And he continues, quoting James Justus, that In no other novel before the Civil War are we so assaulted by the sheer immediacy and pervasiveness of a commercial society…. Purloined money, remissions of claims, embezzlers, and almoners are not metaphors in Arthur Mervyn; they are actual, and they account for the action of the characters, Arthur no less than… Welbeck. (366) Bill Christophersen, writing about the same topic, observes that Brown’s novel deals with the process by which the commercial revolution had turned ‘the City of Brotherly Love into a sort of casino’ (Christophersen 1993:111). The novel’s main subject, then, is the illegal acquisition of money, indeed the ‘spectrality’ of paper money itself at a time when banknotes had only recently been introduced to the economy in 1781. During the 1790s in particular, the early republic and its political and financial capital Philadelphia were caught by a speculative fever that included a great instability of fortune and caused an endless series of private bankruptcies (Doerflinger 1986:246, 262). As Benjamin Rush notes in 1791, ‘Merchants, grocers, shop keepers, clerks, prentice boys, and even sea captains, all forsook their usual employments to speculate in Script’ (quoted in Cohen 1986:367). A few years later, Rush reports, sixty-seven people went to debtors’ prison in just two weeks. Another Philadelphian referred to the speculation mania as ‘infection’ (Doerflinger 1986:313). Thomas Doerflinger points out the centrality of distrust and secrecy in doing successful business—attitudes which Arthur Mervyn portrays to an almost debilitating extent: the novel is filled with instances of hidden treasure, prohibitions to spread ‘private’ information, and a myriad of conflicting tales which are always subject to revision and whose truth is


never firmly established. If one theme of the novel is the volatility of capital, another is the volatility of meaning and language. As Teresa Goddu writes, in Arthur Mervyn’s commercial world, ‘stories and money are both fictions that circulate without stable referents, earning credit through exchange. The meaning of the tale, like the value of paper money, is only an agreed-upon fiction’ (Goddu 1997:35; see also Tompkins 1985: chapter 3). Opposition against the use of paper money arose right after its introduction. An unknown author, for example, deplores its lack of substance in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1785: [It] is an indispensable condition of it [money] that its own value be determined and known…. Gold and Silver alone possess this properly, and no substitute for them can safely be relied on as a medium of commerce, which has an intrinsic principle of fluctuation. It plainly appears from the many bankruptcies since the revolution, he continues, ‘that Government has it not always in its power to give to paper money this indispensable property of gold and silver’ (quoted in Doerflinger 1986:268). The merchant Thetford personifies the ruthless and reckless enterprising spirit of the period. The means by which he cheats Welbeck include his superior ‘secret’ knowledge of the financial world, and of the political practice between postcolonial America and Britain with regard to ships captured in violating the navigation laws. Welbeck, by comparison, represents a mixture of the new with an older economic order: by nature indolent, he is left destitute by the bankruptcy of his father, a Liverpool merchant. Opposing the idea of physical labor, he moves to America, but the Protestant work ethic which rules its capitalist economy offers him no relief from his financial difficulties. After a failed attempt at a rich marriage, and after seducing the sister of his benefactor, Captain Watson, Welbeck tries out the counterfeiting of banknotes but finds this business too perilous. Preferring suicide to physical labor, he decides to drown himself in the harbor of Wilmington, Delaware. For once, the wheel of fortune turns in his favor, however, when he encounters Vincentio Lodi, the son of an Italian-born plantation owner from Guadeloupe, who has just disembarked from a West India ship and is dying of yellow fever. Before his death, Lodi entrusts Welbeck with $20,000 in banknotes, asking him to deliver the money to his sister Clemenza, and with an Italian manuscript, written by his father (AM 87–8). His accidental meeting with Lodi thus saves Welbeck from suicide and enables him to lead a quasiaristocratic lifestyle. He ‘adopts’ Clemenza as his ‘daughter’ but in fact turns her into his mistress and sends her to a brothel when her pregnancy can no longer be hidden. He rents the most splendid mansion in


Philadelphia and entertains Philadelphia’s high society with his wit and eloquence. Lacking both a Protestant work ethic and the know-how necessary to cope with his enterprising fellow citizens, Welbeck depends on fresh infusions of foreign capital. Incapable of multiplying his capital, his economic logic is that of the soldier of fortune whose survival rests on his well-timed discovery of a treasure or human charity. In other words, Welbeck’s financial behavior is thoroughly parasitic; his personality is reminiscent of an earlier colonial age. Compared with Thetford, Welbeck has retained traces of a pre-modern ‘chivalric’ code: Thetford, in his paranoia of catching the fever while waiting for the ship to turn up at auction, causes the death of his own daughter by packing her off to Bush Hill, though the doctors reassure him that she does not suffer from yellow fever. He represents the egotistic personality of an economic system based, at least in Brown’s view, on material gain and on fraud and lacking any residue of humanity. Welbeck, conversely, develops unexpected Samaritan qualities in nursing Arthur back to life during his fever bout. Though a fullblooded villain, Welbeck does not altogether lack a feeling of moral obligation toward his dependants. Arthur Mervyn, the protagonist of the novel, is by nature as indolent as Welbeck and constantly ‘inherits’ large sums of the money embezzled by his master. He first discovers another $20,000 sealed into the pages of Lodi’s manuscript (aptly enough, the tale of an Italian robber who stumbles over a treasure in a tomb), and he later receives from Welbeck the sum of £10,000 in banknotes which Welbeck discovered in the girdle of the dead Watson some time after his entombment in Welbeck’s cellar. But while Welbeck acts like a character sprung from the fictional world of Lodi’s Italian rogue novel, and fails because he adheres to the wrong kind of fictionality, it is Mervyn’s part to correct his mistakes. He is unable to return the first sum to Clemenza because he burns it in response to Welbeck’s strategic lie that the notes were counterfeit. This first blow to his credulity is followed by another when he returns the second sum to its rightful owners but only earns suspicion and ingratitude. These unsatisfactory deliveries may give rise to the opinion that this money, entrusted to Arthur through the invisible work of fortune, may indeed have been better employed elsewhere—for instance, as Arthur considers at one point, as a donation to the Bush Hill hospital. Arthur is split between his feeling of obligation toward individuals and that toward society; on an allegorical level, his indecision articulates the moral difficulties experienced by a society that finds itself between two different economic and ideological systems. The impression of social anarchy which the novel transports and which is unrelieved by any appeal to the ordering function of the law, is enhanced by the yellow fever, which Brown uses to delineate the collapse of moral


principles in America’s capital due to the introduction of infectious capital. Significantly, Arthur infects himself (or thinks he does) in Thetford’s house. Imported from the French Caribbean islands, the fever is metonymically tied to colonial capital, acting as a kind of revenge for North America’s entrepreneurial entanglement in a morally dubious commerce. But the fever, rather than simply representing the decline of virtue, also plays the part of early modern fortuna, furnishing one villain with money (Welbeck owes his ‘fortune’ to Lodi’s death by the fever) but punishing another villain (Thetford dies of the fever).13 In striking anyone without logic and without moral distinctions, the disease becomes symbolic of a society out of joint. In faithful keeping with contemporary controversies about the origin of yellow fever, the novel suggests two theories, one semantically and the other rhetorically. Medlicote, a charitable Quaker whom Mervyn meets in the deserted house, espouses the Jeffersonian theory of domestic origin, imputing the disease ‘not to infected substances imported from the east or west, but to a morbid constitution of the atmosphere, owing wholly, or in part to filthy streets, airless habitations, and squalid persons’ (AM 153). But in its emplotment, the novel counters this variation of the miasma theory with the story of Lodi, who imports both money and fever from the French Caribbean. The fever, however, is not the reason for Lodi’s flight from Guadeloupe. He rather carries out his father’s wish to sell the plantation and emigrate to the United States. But Lodi finds his father dead on his arrival from Italy: It appeared that the elder Lodi had flattered one of his slaves with the prospect of his freedom, but had, nevertheless, included this slave in the sale that he had made of his estate. Actuated by revenge, the slave assassinated Lodi in the open street and resigned himself, without a struggle, to the punishment which the law had provided for such a deed. (88) Lodi’s story of the planned transference of property from the West Indies to the United States, together with the death of his father by the hand of a rebellious slave, finds its structural equivalent in the story of the Maurice family, whose money Welbeck wrings from the ‘half-decayed limbs’ of Watson (240). The Maurices had entrusted Watson with the sale of their plantation in Jamaica, as ‘the Island [was] becoming hourly more exposed to the chances of war and revolution’ (230). It seems that Watson has toured the most dangerous places in the Caribbean; besides acting out his orders in Jamaica he is said to have arrived from ‘St. Domingo’—a term frequently used for both the Spanish and French parts of Hispaniola. The fortunes of the characters of the novel, then, are deeply implicated in the


(post) colonial Atlantic and its multiple relocations of people and property. More precisely, the actions of the novel are largely determined by the ups and downs of the slave-based Atlantic economy (see Goddu 1997:37). Welbeck’s initial misfortune, which stems from the ruin of his father, is a casualty of that very same economy, given the fact that most Liverpool merchants at that age were in one or another way involved in the Atlantic slave trade—a trade which, as it grew more specialized and came to be concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy merchant firms able to endure risky long-term ventures, brought financial loss and ruin to many a petty private slaver (Mannix and Cowley 1962: 123).14 Lodi and the Maurices react to the decline of the British colonial system, due at least in part to American independence, the British infringements of American shipping in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and the increase of slave revolts in the West Indies. Though relegated to the margin of the narrative, these Atlantic and Caribbean destinies, as Teresa Goddu and Bill Christophersen have suggested, are central to the plot of Arthur Mervyn and its very peculiar dramatization of America’s domestic withdrawal from the international world of the Atlantic: ‘While the novel consistently displaces discussion of the nation’s domestic economy onto the international scene,’ Goddu writes, ‘the specter of slavery lurks in every economic transaction. Money from slave societies ubiquitously circulates to America, revealing America’s international and domestic economic dependence on slavery’ (Goddu 1997: 37). As Olaudah Equiano’s narrative testifies, Philadelphia functioned as an important colonial entrepôt between the West Indies and England in the eighteenth century. The West Indian trade had been Philadelphia’s economic stronghold ever since the 1690s (Heinrich 1997:9). Its close commercial ties with the Caribbean endured even the severest British trade prohibitions. Being the largest harbor town of the United States, Philadelphia retained this function even after independence. America’s economic transformation is aptly illustrated by the changing business interests of one of its major merchants, Stephen Girard. Girard, the French-born citizen of Philadelphia who played such a decisive role in fighting yellow fever, had accumulated his wealth in the West Indian trade, especially with Haiti and Cuba. For him, the turning point came after the fever when his commercial interests shifted to Europe, Africa, and South America. Most importantly, however, Girard opened America’s China trade, which had hitherto been closed to American vessels because of the British East India Company’s monopoly Girard was the first Philadelphia trader to send ships to China; between 1787 and 1802, his ships—named after French philosophes, ‘Voltaire,’ ‘Rousseau,’ and ‘Montesquieu’—made fifteen voyages to Canton, returning with tea, silk, and textiles (Doerflinger 1986:117–18, 287, 292; Heinrich 1997:11; Lee 1985:104). Girard’s trading activities thus ran the full circle of the geographical area covered in this book.


Arthur Mervyn’s main duty is to manage and hold in trust the masterless West Indian money arriving at Pennsylvania’s shores from areas threatened with revolution and slave revolt: Jamaica had been shaken by recurring maroon revolts for several decades, and the French Caribbean, as I showed above, had been in uproar since 1791.15 But the novel also ‘contains’ and tames this dangerous Caribbean by translating the chaos beyond the national borders into a domestic allegory of a newly independent nation in search of its identity. Though crucial to the development of the plot through its repeated infusion of motive to the characters, the Atlantic experiences are not dramatized: the unpunished crime inflicted upon the sea captain Watson, who rots away in the cellar of a magnificent Philadelphia mansion, is powerful evidence of this process of narrative effacement. Watson’s ‘corpse in the basement,’ which is never retrieved or given a decent burial, at the same time symbolizes the unburied corpse in the basement of America’s national mansion: the ‘corpse’ of America’s past and present entanglement in the economy of the Black Atlantic. ‘Dominique!… Diable noir!’: Arthur Mervyn’s Caribbean subtext Arthur Mervyn’s plot of thwarted business schemes and murder, I am arguing, negotiates the difficult economic and ideological transition from a colonial to a postcolonial constellation. Economically, that transition consisted in a shift from the monopolistic closure of mercantilism to the openness of free trade commercialism, as well as from a predominantly maritime to a predominantly land-based economy; politically it was accompanied by a conflict between residual feudalist structures in the South and the rising democratic political organization in the North. Arthur Mervyn shows the society of the early republic in a state of ideological fluidity, caught in between two ideological systems, both applauding and fearing the dissolution of the old body politic without knowing whether and how the new one would function. Yellow fever is a fitting metaphor for expressing this state of flux and this fear. Written in a growing xenophobic climate and in the light of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Brown’s novel is comparatively mild in its representation of foreigners. While many public commentators used the imagery of disease to articulate their antagonism to the revolutions in France and Saint Domingue, Arthur Mervyn gives evidence of Brown’s identification of almost all Americans as foreigners, expressed in his conviction that ‘It is true we derive little primarily from our own soil. We are all emigrants, or the progeny of emigrants from Europe and Africa’ (quoted in Hedges 1974: 113; my emphasis). What is remarkable about this quote is that Brown, whose foreigners are usually a hodgepodge of different European nationalities, includes Africans in his list. Where foreignness is accepted as


the normal state of affairs, the appearance of foreign-looking people gives little occasion for fear. Sitting in a coach to Baltimore, to where he travels in order to deliver the Jamaica money to the Maurice family, Arthur encounters a motley group of fellow travelers: I mounted the coach at day-break the next day, in company with a sallow Frenchman from Saint Domingo, his fiddle-case, an ape, and two female blacks. The Frenchman, after passing the suburbs, took out his violin and amused himself with humming to his own tweedletweedle. The monkey now and then munched an apple, which was given to him from a basket by the blacks, who gazed with stupid wonder, and an exclamatory La! La! upon the passing scenery; or chattered to each other in a sort of open-mouthed, halfarticulate, monotonous, and sing-song jargon. The man looked seldom either on this side or that; and spoke only to rebuke the frolicks of the monkey, with a Tenez! Dominique! Prenez garde! Diable noir! As to me my thought was busy in a thousand ways. I sometimes gazed at the faces of my four companions, and endeavored to discern the differences and sameness between them. I took an exact account of the features, proportions, looks, and gestures of the monkey, the Congolese, and the Creole-Gaul. I compared them together, and examined them apart. I looked at them in a thousand different points of view, and pursued, untired and unsatiated, those trains of reflections which began at each change of tone, feature, and attitude. I marked the country as it successively arose before me, and found endless employment in examining the shape and substance of the fence, the barn and the cottage, the aspect of earth and of heaven. How great are the pleasures of health and of mental activity. (AM 354–5) In Brown’s tongue-in-cheek deployment of the current scientific preoccupation with racial difference, Arthur subjects his travel companions to the same scientific gaze with which he studies the order of the landscape. In the style of his contemporaries Comte du Buffon, Abbé Raynal, and indeed his countryman Thomas Jefferson, he produces discrete racial types (monkey, Congolese, Creole-Gaul) in order to categorize them according to an imaginary taxonomy Brown’s pointed conflation of beasts and men (‘my four companions’), which initially even includes the fiddlecase, testifies to the parodistic character of this description, while the mode of parody works in turn to ban contemporary fears of black revolt: the ‘black devil’ Dominique, reminiscent of Haiti’s black revolutionaries, is a harmless monkey.


While the daylight encounter with strangers merely drives Arthur to pseudoscientific speculation, things look different in the gloomy half-light of a fever-stricken colonial mansion. Still in search of shedding some light on Welbeck’s mysteries, Arthur returns to what he takes to be Thetford’s mansion in the middle of the fever epidemic. He encounters a black hearsedriver and two white helpers and overhears their conversation on the semidead state of the body they are about to cart off. Entering the house, Arthur instantly believes he has caught the fever from its ‘infectuous’ and deadly ‘Vapour’ (137). On inspecting the apartments, he finds traces of pillage and finally a dying man on a bed. Turning around, his attention is caught by a large mirror hanging over the table: A moment scarcely elapsed, when some appearance in the mirror… called my attention. It was a human figure. Nothing could be briefer than the glance that I fixed upon this apparition, yet there was room enough for the vague conception to suggest itself, that the dying man had started from his bed and was approaching me. This belief was, at the same instant, confuted, by the survey of his form and garb. One eye, a scar upon his cheek, a tawny skin, a form grotesquely misproportioned, brawny as Hercules, and habited in livery, composed, as it were, the parts of one view. Upon turning around to face the stranger, Arthur receives a blow upon his head and swoons. Lying unconscious, he is haunted by a fearful dream. I conceived myself lying on the brink of a pit whose bottom the eye could not reach. My hands and legs were fettered, so as to disable me from resisting two grim and gigantic figures, who stooped to lift me from the earth. Their purpose methought was to cast me into this abyss. My terrors were unspeakable, and I struggled with such force that my bonds snapped and I found myself at liberty. At this moment my senses returned and I opened my eyes. (140–1) He recognizes the men he had previously encountered in the street and concludes that he has made a hair-breadth escape from being buried alive. After a longish conversation with Mr. Estwick, who commands the cart drivers, Arthur finds out that he had entered the wrong building and was knocked unconscious for being suspected of pillaging. The ‘grotesque’ and ‘tawny’ figure he speaks of is unquestionably the black hearse-driver he had previously noticed. Finding the real Thetford house the next day, Arthur realizes that the half-dead body carted off by the three hearse-drivers must have been Thetford himself (AM 148).


It is a domestic black and the intrusion of unfamiliar cultural codes into the domestic sphere which infuse Arthur with irrational fear. The novel contains several other instances in which blacks figure either as rapacious nurses or grim Charons carting the dead and dying to the potters field or to hellish Bush Hill. Blacks in Arthur Mervyn only become fearful when they ‘invade’ the domestic sphere, when their ‘grotesque’ and ‘misproportioned’ figures replace Arthur’s own image in the mirror, forcing him to stare into a carnivalesque version of himself (see Davidson 1986:253). He is scared by the vision of a black man in domestic attire—though the word ‘livery’ may also evoke the hybrid clothing of the black leaders in Saint Domingue, whose mixing of European ‘civilized’ garments with non-European elements can best be read in terms of postcolonial mimicry. The black’s grotesque body, in which traces of domestic foreignness mingle with reminiscences of Caribbean maroon leaders, represents the muddled state of New World racial economy: the domestic black helper is inscribed with the codes of (foreign) black belligerence and rebellion.16 What is more, the uncanny domestic threatens Arthur with a similar fate as Captain Watson: anonymous burial or, worse still, violent disposal while still alive. The mirror scene dramatically illustrates one of Brown’s major concerns in Arthur Mervyn and his other novels: a preoccupation with split personalities. As critics have frequently pointed out, the portrait of Arthur Mervyn’s character is anything but consistent. His lack of identity, which is one of the reasons why he constantly seeks to attach himself to other people, is accompanied by an uncanny multiplication of his identity: he has at least three doppelgänger and tends to adjust his personality to his dress. In his novel fragment Steven Calvert, which he began writing concurrently with Arthur Mervyn in 1798 but finished much later, Brown expresses his concern with split personalities in the best romantic vein: The world is eternally producing…prodigies, anomalies, monsters. Innate, dastardly, sordid wickedness frequently springs up where genial temperature and wise culture had promised us the most heavenly products’ (quoted in Watts 1994:198). Brown’s fragmented characters, besides personifying the general romantic critique of Reason producing its own monsters, poses an aesthetic response to the experience of a very specific social crisis. The abnormal psychology of Mervyn and others, as Steven Watts convincingly argues, is indicative of the fluidity of identity at the core of liberal society— not merely a ‘bizarre Gothic excess’ but a reflection of ‘the sense of danger accompanying the disintegration of an older order and the emergence of a new one’ (Watts 1994:191–2). A sense of danger, one should add, that springs from a disquietude about America’s unsolved racial problem. Noting the symbolic centrality of this mirror scene and its relation to an earlier one in which Arthur views himself in elegant European attire, Bill Christophersen writes that Brown’s mirror imagery discloses the conflict between America’s republican and egalitarian self-image and the practice


of slaveholding, making visible ‘the grotesque self beneath [America’s] enlightened projection, threatening to erupt violently, to shatter the glass’ (Christophersen 1993:108). Brown’s Philadelphia, in other words, is characterized by the ‘racial paranoia…stalking Philadelphia along with the plague’ (Christophersen 1993:107). As becomes clear from the previous discussion, Arthur Mervyn not only is an economic novel but also exhibits traits of the Gothic novel. As the example of the monstrous apparition in the mirror suggests, the uncanny source of anxiety is not located ‘out there’ (in France or Haiti), beleaguering or invading the borders of the self/the nation. It rather appears at the very core of society, in the mirror and in empty mansions— places associated with feelings of self-certainty and familiarity.17 The sense of Gothic horror—of uncanny experiences—in fact pervades the novel. Besides his dark alter ego staring at him from the mirror, Arthur has at least two more doppelgänger, and the vivid descriptions of the feverridden city intensify the Gothic atmosphere of Brown’s, or Arthur’s, narrative. And yet, the novel is not very successful in its achievement of Gothic effects on the reader. Though some of its settings and descriptions are indebted to the Gothic novel, and though it partakes in the Gothic novel’s project of social critique, Arthur Mervyn, like Browns other texts, is tainted in its narrative execution by Brown’s hasty (feverish) writing habit. What is more important is that many of its structural features, like the return of the ‘dead,’ unfamiliar apparitions in the mirror, and the conspicuous doubling of persons and repetition of events, are characteristic of the uncanny as defined by Freud.18 In this sense, Arthur Mervyn could be seen as a pathological text—a text whose narrative structure enacts (or ‘performs’) the atmosphere of social crisis in addition to making it its thematic center.19 Brown’s uncanny narrative shatters and defamiliarizes that which the representatives of the American Enlightenment thought to be most secure and reliable: a general belief in the rationality and benevolence of human action, in the regenerative power of an agrarian lifestyle and rural simplicity, in the stability of generational relations, and in the feasibility of an economy based on the institution of slavery. Arthur Mervyn counters these—mostly Jeffersonian ideals of purity with its visions of ‘danger’ arising in a moment of historical crisis. As Teresa Goddu argues, ‘Arthur Mervyn horrifies precisely because it upholds the paradox that the Enlightenment narrative of good health may finally be indistinguishable from the gothic narrative of disease’ (Goddu 1997: 32). Aided by an ‘uncanny’ narrative structure and the imagery of infection, the novel locates the origin of danger in American bourgeois society’s repression of these corruptive moments. In its aestheticization of America’s act of racial repression (which is the one I am mainly interested in), Brown’s novel counters Jefferson’s famous notion of the United States as a country ‘without blot or mixture’ with specters of racial hybridity arising


within American society (the growing presence of free blacks and of ‘mulattos’) and the transgression of national boundaries (which, with a view to the ‘black’ or ‘hybrid’ Caribbean, is at the same time a transgression of racial boundaries). Arthur Mervyn, whether intentionally or unwittingly, reminds its readers that what American society represses is its own raison d’être: the fact that its economy is based on slavery and on the commerce with slaveholding countries, and that the ‘postcolonial’ transformation of Caribbean societies would unavoidably spread to the United States, introducing a growing Africanist and racially ‘hybrid’ presence to America’s streets and America’s houses. The failed business fraud around which the events of the crime plot are organized—the forfeiture of Welbeck’s ship due to the discovery of mulatto smugglers from Saint Domingue on board—is paralleled by a real event. In October 1793, the New-York Journal mentioned the growing ‘insolence’ of the ‘negroes’ reported from Charleston, including an attempt to pilfer a weapon’s magazine. Two months later Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, warned the governor of South Carolina of two mulattoes coming from Saint Domingue to incite insurrection (Jordan 1969:381). Brown condenses the two events into a single image of two mulattoes smuggling weapons from Saint Domingue. His vision of racial disorder threatening the nation from abroad echoes Jefferson’s worst fears. Although tamed into the language of comedy and parody in the coach scene, it is countered by multiple references to blacks gaining power over whites (as nurses, hearsedrivers, rebellious slaves).20 As Christophersen has shown very impressively, the mirror scene anticipates Brown’s later political essays on the racial future of the Untied States. Commenting on the danger of slave rebellion in an 1803 Address to the Government, Brown writes: When war [with France] becomes a topic of discourse, this people will turn their eyes to the calamities of St. Domingue, and then to their own provinces, where the same intestine plague exists in a degree equally formidable, and where their utmost care is requisite to prevent the struggling mischief from bursting its bonds. Devoted to the worst miseries, is the nation which harbours in its bosom a foreign race, brought, by fraud and rapine, from their native land; a race bereaved of all the blessings of humanity; whom a cruel servitude inspires with all the vices of brutes and all the passions of demons; whose injuries have been so great that the law of selfpreservation obliges the state to deny the citizen the power of making his slave free; whose indelible distinctions of form, color, and perhaps of organization, will forever prevent them from blending with their tyrants, into one people; who foster an eternal resentment at


oppression, and whose sweetest hour would be that which buried them and their lords in a common and immeasurable ruin. (Quoted in Christophersen 1993:108–9) With its ‘plague imagery reiterating the fever symbolism of Arthur Mervyn’ (109), Brown’s message spells out the massive fear of a slave insurrection which permeated American society in the light of the recent conspiracy of Gabriel Prosser in 1800. Brown continues by expressing his fear that France might ‘raise, at any moment, a Spartacus or L’Ouverture’ against slaveholders in the American South, concluding that ‘The blacks are a bane in our vitals, the most deadly that ever nation was infested with’ (109). In a much more outspoken way than Jefferson, Brown’s pamphlet shows that, as Eric Sundquist argues, ‘the trope of San Domingo’ was about to become ‘a prophetic simulacrum of events feared to lie on the horizon of American slavery’ (Sundquist 1993:32). After a period of feverish fictional outpouring Charles Brockden Brown ceased writing fictional texts after 1800. Instead he turned to the genre of the political pamphlet. In various texts published between 1800 and 1804, he greeted and encouraged Jefferson’s policy of territorial expansion, sharing Jefferson’s view that Fate has manifestly decreed, that America must belong to the English name and race’ (quoted in Gardner 1994:453). Brown’s ‘early formulation of Manifest Destiny’ (453), which shares Jefferson’s racial Anglo-Saxonism, suggests that with the beginnings of Jefferson’s presidency Brown had overcome the state of ideological confusion testified to by his novels. He publicly urged America’s expansion into the trans-Mississippi West, claiming that the United States had a natural right of possession to the Louisiana Territory, and advocated war in case France would not be willing to cede its colonial possessions in the West (Watts 1994: 176–7). Brown’s view that westward expansion would heal America of its social ills incurred by pestilential commercialism, that it would purify the American character and ennoble the national purpose of the United States (Watts 1994: 179–80), was shared by President Jefferson. Using the argument of the geographical location of the United States, Jefferson claimed the possession of Louisiana on the basis of America’s ‘natural’ right to security (Weinberg 1963:21–3). Couching his vision of continental expansion in the language of ‘geographical predestination’ (43), Jefferson even risks a black regime in the Caribbean. After all, the Louisiana purchase, by which Jefferson’s dream of possessing the whole continent of North America was at least in part accomplished, was the direct result of Napoleon’s loss of Saint Domingue and France’s subsequent retreat from that part of America. As Robin Blackburn notes, Jefferson’s silent acquiescence with Napoleon’s attempt to subdue Toussaint’s regime gains an ironical twist from the fact that Napoleon’s failure was to ‘yield a resounding and historic success, for himself and for the slaveholders of the


United States. It enabled him to double the size of the United States and greatly to extend the area open to the further expansion of North American slavery’ (Blackburn 1988:281).21 Thus Jeffersonian America gained a vast empire at the expense of having to endure a properly postcolonial nation in its Caribbean courtyard: a geopolitical situation that, as we shall see, left its imprint on nineteenth-century fictional texts. America’s purchase of expansion at the price of a black model republic within easy reach of its Atlantic shore would deeply inscribe itself in the ambivalent presence of the Black Atlantic in antebellum fiction. Arthur Mervyn ends with Arthur marrying the wealthy Jewess Achsa Fielding and with their intention to leave the pestilential city for Europe. Brown’s coterminous attempt to produce a narrative of national origins with Edgar Huntly hardly turned out more convincing, as the plot of Edgar’s ‘regeneration through violence’ is interwoven with a plot of filial and economic dependency and amnesia (see Mackenthun 1997b). America would have to wait for James Fenimore Cooper to see Brown’s vision of a genuinely American national literature fulfilled. The Red Rover and the domestication of nature’s right Cooper’s work combines the continental with the maritime aspects of American nationalism. While his continental ‘romancing of empire,’ best articulated in The Pioneers (1824), has received sufficient attention in recent criticism (see Cheyfitz 1993; Gardner 1998; Thomas 1987), his ‘maritime nationalism’ as deployed in The Red Rover (1827) has become a collateral damage effect of American continentalist discourse.22 Cooper’s fictional project is quite well embraced by Henry Nash Smith, who writes in his classic Virgin Land: The early visions of an American Empire embody two different if often mingled conceptions. There is on the one hand the notion of empire as command of the sea, and on the other hand the notion of empire as a populous future society occupying the interior of the American continent. If these two kinds of empire are not mutually exclusive…they nevertheless rest on different economic bases and imply different policies. Engrossing the trade of the world is an ambition evidently taken over from the British mercantilist ideal. On the other hand, creating new states in the dreary solitudes of the West is an enterprise that depends upon the increase of population resulting from agricultural expansion into an empty, fertile continent. This second version of the American Empire, based on agrarian assumptions, more nearly corresponds to the actual course of events during the nineteenth century. (Smith 1978:12)


The two alternative economic concepts which Smith sketches, maritime commercialism and continental expansion, already served as historical impetus to Charles Brockden Brown’s novels. Maritime trade, Smith argues, formed a continuation of British economic practice while Western settlement of what Smith, in unwitting imitation of colonialist rhetoric, calls an ‘empty, fertile continent’ corresponded to the actual course of events during the nineteenth century. Arriving at the end of the paragraph, with its insistence on the historical predominance of agrarian settlement, we may get the impression that the maritime empire mentioned in the beginning was really just a ‘notion’ to be abandoned. But such a reading obscures two important facts: first, the fact that the American maritime commercial empire was a reality, at least until the mid-nineteenth century; and, second, the fact that continental expansion, just like maritime commerce, was a continuation of British imperial policies. The version of the history of the United States as a historically unique process of agricultural expansion into an ‘empty continent’ is an ideological construct produced in response to the need for formulating a national narrative of progress. By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner (in the light of the United States’ military involvement in Cuba and the Philippines) would translate this narrative into the metaphor of the frontier, which would in turn serve as the object of critical analysis by the pioneers of the American Studies School, with Henry Nash Smith as its spearhead. Developing into an independent discipline, American Studies would soon pass over the hesitant formulations of Smith’s text, and it would largely forget Smith’s emphasis on the American Empire’s expan sion into the Pacific. The outcome was a view of American history as a history of continental expansion, a history of the acquisition of national virtues and vices in confrontation with the ethnic ‘other’ on the other side of the frontier (see Philbrick 1989:38). The present study is part of a larger critical attempt to retrieve the forgotten oceanic aspect of early American history. Intellectual historiography’s exclusive attention on the frontier disregards the fact that maritime commerce remained an important economic leg of the United States until the 1850s. In other words, our view of the early decades of American history is strangely blurred by our knowledge of post-Civil War history, which saw the collapse of the economic system of plantation slavery and the decline of American commercial involvement in the Atlantic economy due to the completion of the transcontinental railway, the intensification of Western conquest, and the discovery of gold in California which drew more and more settlers westward. Cooper’s novels take us back to the 1820s, a period when Western settlement and Atlantic commerce were equally important for the economy and the imagination of the United States. Thomas Philbrick even claims that to most citizens of the new republic the ocean was the ‘primary


frontier’ (Philbrick 1989:38). He marks the victory of the United States against Britain in the War of 1812 as the beginning of America’s maritime nationalism: With the end of hostilities in 1815 the country entered what has aptly been called the golden age of American shipping, a period of thirtyfive years during which American seamen came to challenge and even to displace the British hegemony of many of the most important areas of maritime activity. To the West Indian, Baltic, and Mediterranean trades, established in colonial days, and the Northwest and Canton trades, first explored in the 1780s, were added new ventures. Massachusetts vessels carried spices from the Fiji Islands, Madagascar, and Zanzibar, rubber from Brazil, sandalwood from Hawaii, and hides from California in exchange for nails, firearms, blankets, rum, and even that most abundant of Yankee commodities, ice, which, cut from Fresh Pond in Cambridge and Walden in Concord, enabled the priest of Brahma to drink at Thoreau’s well. (Philbrick 1961:2) In 1816 the famous Black Ball line and other packet lines opened up and offered a transatlantic shuttle service that could make the distance between New York and Liverpool in sixteen days (Egan 1995:64). By the 1840s the American whaling fleet comprised more than three-quarters of the world’s total, and the increasing demand for efficient shipping culminated in the construction of the fast and beautiful clipper ships in American shipyards (Philbrick 1961:3). The American navy fleet likewise doubled in size between 1816 and 1842 and challenged the priority of the former mother country (85). In his Notions of the Americans (1828) Cooper accordingly rejects the opinion that the United States was primarily an agricultural nation, referring to the ‘obstinate, glaring, and long-continued fact, that the American has and does neglect the tillage of his virgin forests, in order to seek more congenial sources of wealth on the ocean.’ America, he concludes, ‘is to be the first maritime nation of the earth’ (quoted in Philbrick 1961:48–9). He is seconded by Alexis de Tocqueville, who in 1835 arrived at the conclusion that At all times the Anglo-Americans have shown a decided taste for the sea. Independence, by breaking their commercial links with England, gave a new and powerful stimulus to their maritime genius. Since that time the number of the Union’s ships has grown at almost as quick a rate as the number of its inhabitants. Today it is the Americans themselves who carry to their shores nine tenths of the products of Europe. It is the Americans too who carry three quarters of the


exports of the New World to European consumers. American ships fill the docks of Le Havre and Liverpool, while the number of English and French vessels in New York harbor is comparatively small. He sees that the Americans will not only continue to provide for the needs of producers and consumers in their own country, but they will increasingly tend to become, like the English, the commercial agents of other nations…. One cannot doubt that the North Americans will one day be called on to provide for the wants of the South Americans…. Seeing how energetically the Anglo-Americans trade, their natural advantages, and their success, I cannot help believing that one day they will become the leading naval power on the globe. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world. (Tocqueville 1963: I: 401–7) The naval activities of the early republic, as Thomas Philbrick and others have shown, occasioned a significant, if aesthetically wanting, popular literature on the sea.23 It is important to recall these facts in order to understand the aesthetic projects of Poe and Melville, to be discussed in the next chapters. Their sea fictions are hardly conceivable without the pioneering work of Cooper’s Red Rover. Published simultaneously in England, the United States, France, and Germany in 1827, The Red Rover was an immense popular success in both America and Europe. Goethe and Scott read it, Melville read it twice and reviewed it while working on Moby-Dick, and Berlioz took it as an inspiration for his opera Le Corsair. The novel went through various editions and dramatic versions, and its influence, particularly of the figure of the charismatic pirate, can be seen in both American and European sea fiction for decades to come (Philbrick and Philbrick 1991:XXVIII). Its impact can moreover be traced in the public discourse of the period, as when the New York Herald writes of the famous Somers mutineer Philip Spencer: ‘Spencer reads the pirate works, has his imagination fired, and wants to sail a Red Rover…. Cooper’s ‘Red Rover’ and ‘Water Witch’ have done an incalculable amount of mischief.’ Spencer, who was duly executed in spite of being the son of the Secretary of War, had sworn early in his life that he would become a pirate. The journalists blamed Cooper’s novel for having instigated this desire, claiming that in The Red Rover, a pirate’s life is painted in the most fascinating colors, and could young SPENCER now be heard from, we doubt not but he would


point to Mr. Cooper’s Red Rover as one of the most prominent causes for his determination to war against civilized society. (Quoted in Rogin 1983:6) Set in Newport and on the Atlantic Ocean in 1759 and (in the last chapter) at the end of the War of Independence, The Red Rover describes the passage from the colonial to the postcolonial period as the complicated, and not altogether credible, reunification of an American family. The two central characters are the colonial officer Henry Wilder who serves on a British navy ship and is sent to spy out and eventually deliver the infamous Red Rover, and the Red Rover himself, a noble pirate culled from the work of Byron, who outwits his opponents with his skillful disguises and masquerades. Wilder wins the confidence of the Rover and is sent as a prize master on board the merchant ship Royal Caroline. However, having fallen in love with Gertrude, the shipowner’s daughter returning to her father’s Carolina plantation, Wilder attempts to escape the pursuing pirate. His effort proves futile when the Royal Caroline is wrecked in a storm and her passengers are rescued by the Rover, who instantly begins to exert his charismatic power over Gertrude and her governess, Mrs. Wyllys. Wilder, too, seems to be under the spell of the Rover, who now calls himself Captain Heidegger. The ship arrives at the site of the designated rendezvous with a British warship in the Caribbean and the Rover unmasks Wilder as a British agent. Remaining victorious during the ensuing sea battle, the Rover prevents his men from murdering Wilder and his comrades when Mrs. Wyllys discloses that Wilder is her son. The Rover burns his ship and disappears, but returns to Newport twenty years later as a dying man. Meanwhile, Wilder, having married Gertrude, has become a rich man and revolutionary hero. We now further learn from Mrs. Wyllys that the Rover is her younger brother and thus Wilder’s uncle, and that Mrs. Wyllys has been secretly married to Gertrude’s cousin—which means that Wilder is in fact Gertrude’s great-cousin. The Rover dies holding up the Stars and Stripes, exclaiming ‘Wilder! …we have triumphed!’ (Cooper 1991:441).24 The Red Rover plots, and ‘romances,’ the national emergence of the United States as the reunification of a family that had been separated during the ups and downs of colonial warfare. The novel ends with a dynastic (not to say incestuous) marriage between a New Englander and the daughter of a Southern plantation owner—a marriage that certainly looks ahead to the building conflict between Southern slaveholders and the free states in the North. Cooper’s familiar method of translating political processes into domestic drama is here coupled with the domestication of the pirate. Like Captain Conrad in Byron’s epic poem The Corsair (on whom the Rover is modeled), Cooper’s pirate is a noble outcast who breaks the laws of the world while remaining faithful to superior codes of


honor and justice. Above all, however, he is also a revolutionary avant la lettre. Almost twenty years before the beginning of the War of Independence, Heidegger, a British subject born in America, carries out his private revolution against the oppressive colonial government of Britain. His rebellion, as he reveals to Wilder, was the result of his violent reaction to a slanderous remark against his native land by a British commander. The Rover’s illegal existence is in fact an act of defiance against the colonial power of Britain and becomes unnecessary once America gains its independence (RR 302). Seeking to impress Wilder, who has just entered his service, the Rover gives him a display of the luxuries of his cabin. Arriving at his flag locker, he gives an account of the various national colors and particular characteristics: This is the Lily of France you see. No bad emblem of your stainless Frenchman: an escutcheon of pretence without spot, but nevertheless a little soiled by use. Here you have the calculating Dutchman; plain, substantial and cheap. It is a flag I little like…. This is your swaggering Hamburgher: he is rich in the possession of one town, and makes his boast of it, in these towers…. These, are the crescents of Turkey…. And these the little satellites that play about the mighty moon—your barbarians of Africa…. Ah! Here comes the man I like; your gorgeous Spaniard! This field of yellow reminds one of the riches of his mines. And this crown! One might fancy it of beaten gold, and stretch forward a hand to grasp the treasure. What a blazonry is this for a Galleon! Here is the humbler Portuguese; and yet is he not without a wealthy look. I have often fancied there were true Brazilian diamonds in this kingly bauble. (RR 86) Among the other flags that particularly catch Wilder’s attention are the banner of the Vatican, which the Rover prefers to use in combat with Algerian corsairs, and the various flags of Britain, including, to Wilder’s great consternation, the Royal Standard. Asked by Wilder as to his favorite flag, the cosmopolitan trickster responds that while sailing he loves to sport a dozen a day, but when it comes to fighting he most affects a flag consisting of ‘a deep, blood-red field, without relief or ornament of any sort’ (RR 88–9). Only one flag, the Rover tells Wilder in one of their later conversations, is missing from his collection, ‘and one, which had it existed, it would have been by pride, my glory to have upheld with my heart’s best blood!… Had that flag been abroad, Mr. Wilder, no man would have ever heard the name of the Red Rover’ (RR 302). The not-yet-existing flag for which the Rover has forfeited his citizenship will later serve as his shroud. It is one of the ironies of the novel, and a sign of Cooper’s conservatism,


that the romantic visionary Heidegger is denied the enjoyment of the harvest of his revolutionary struggle, while the rather unprincipled opportunist Wilder carries off the boon in form of wife, wealth, and national honor. The Rover gives a live demonstration of the uses of his flag collection when his ship Dolphin reaches the place of the assigned rendezvous in the Antilles. Heidegger’s ship approaches the British warship Dart, which lies in wait for him, and masks its true identity by successively displaying the colors of Holland, Portugal, and France. After hoisting his own red flag, the Rover boards the man-of-war, disguising himself as a British navy captain, commander of the new cruiser Antelope (RR 358–60, 368–77). Playing what the British captain calls a ‘harum scarum twig of nobility’ (RR 389), the Rover uses his communicational skill in teasing all the particulars of the intended capture out of the British commander. Heidegger’s multiple masquerades, which stand in direct opposition to his fidelity and friendship toward his prisoners, undermine the legal principles of colonial society. The reader is introduced to the Rover (without knowing who he is) as he spies out the situation at Newport in the disguise, ironically and significantly, of a lawyer. As Michael Rogin observes, the pirate takes on identities at will; no lawyer or captain is safe from suspicion once the Rover has imitated their characters. As the Rover appropriates and discards legitimate roles, he dissolves them…. This split between authority’s appearance and its genuine character undermines the constituted order. Disguise destroys one’s confidence in a stable, morally legitimate world. But in contrast to the unsettling masquerades of the common trickster, the Rover hides ‘an authentic self underneath his masks’ (Rogin 1983:5). With its conservative ending, the novel both defuses the threat inherent in the Rover’s political shapeshifting and suggests that pirates like the Rover, who prefer an existence in lawlessness to the toleration of unjust colonial bondage, vanish together with the end of the colonial period. Like Natty Bumppo, who leads an existence outside of the law but at the same time represents the moral essence of Western civilization, the Rover is an outcast of society who is morally superior to his fellow men. Like Bumppo’s lawlessness, that of the Rover is rhetorically legitimated by Cooper’s narrative (Peck 1976:598). The Rover’s actions are throughout directed by a strong ‘natural’ sense of justice: one indeed wonders how he makes a living as he does not sack a single merchantman. The order in which his ship is kept, reflecting an ideal order of state, very much appeals to the ladies (RR 123–4). With his passionate speeches, testifying to his


extraordinary sense of fidelity and justice, he exerts a seductive impact over both his male and female counterparts. The Red Rover, which the critics regard as the inaugurating moment of modern sea fiction, features the ocean not as a mere background but as an agent of the action. Legally, the high seas were regarded as one of the last resorts of freedom, an extrajuridical space subject to no national law. Like the wilderness, the ocean provides the natural setting for a truthful interaction between human beings, unadulterated by the laws and conventions of society. An extraterritorial space, the ocean and the ship deck are ruled by no law but by theatricality: toward his unruly crew, the Rover sustains his regime only through charisma, masquerade, social drama, and a complex network of spies. Especially at times of piratical inactivity (as the time of the novel’s action), his authority is constantly imperiled. It is his lofty isolation, his lawlessness in the eyes of the world on the one hand and his constant need for vigilance toward those whose freedom he eloquently defends on the other, which adds a tragic quality to the Rover. Heidegger’s lawlessness is reinforced by the lawlessness of the ocean itself which is indeed his most faithful ally, enabling his victory over both the Royal Caroline and the Dart by wrecking them in terrible storms which leave the Dolphin, as if it was in secret alliance with nature’s elements, mysteriously unharmed. The identification of the pirate with nature itself is poetically articulated in the language of the oceanic sublime. Tapping the contemporary literary style of European romanticism (especially Byron, Coleridge, and, through them, Milton), Cooper uses the description of a storm at sea to produce delight in the reader— a delight which then works in favor of the reader’s identification with the Red Rover. In his description of the Rover’s pursuit of the Royal Caroline during an approaching storm in the Atlantic, for example, the sailors’ superstitious tales of the Flying Dutchman work as moodsetters for the subsequent unfolding of sublime imagery: The night was misty rather than dark. A full and bright moon had arisen, but it pursued its path through the heavens behind a body of dusky clouds, that was much too dense for the borrowed rays to penetrate. Here and there, a straggling gleam appeared to find its way through a covering of vapour less dense than the rest, falling upon the water like the dim illumination of a distant taper…though the time was propitious, the wind not absolutely adverse, and the heavens rather gloomy than threatening, an uncertain and to a landsman it might seem an unnatural light gave a character of the wildest loneliness to the view. (RR 192–3)


The pirate ship appears on the horizon, its spars looking ‘like the delicate work of a spider’ against the strangely illuminated night sky, and gives occasion for superstitious speculation about the Flying Dutchman who cruises off the Cape of Good Hope and who ‘often gets on the weather side of a stranger and bears down upon him’ (RR 196, 198). But then the mariners correctly conclude, ‘this cannot be the Dutchman, since it is so many long leagues from the pitch of the Cape to the coast of North America,’ and because the Dutchman ‘is never seen in a Northern latitude’ (RR 201, 203). Like the Flying Dutchman, the Rover’s specter ship, mysteriously unharmed by the storm which wrecked the Royal Caroline, came on through the mist, with a swiftness that nearly equalled the velocity of the tempestuous winds themselves. Not a thread of canvass was seen on board her. Each line of spars, even to the tapering and delicate top-gallant-masts, was in its place, preserving the beauty and symmetry of the whole fabric, but no where was there the smallest fragment of a sail opened to the gale. A moment later, the stranger came booming, with the steadiness and grandeur with which a cloud is seen sailing in the hurricane. No sign of life was discovered about her. If men looked out from their secret places, upon the straightened and discomfited wreck of the Bristol trader, it was covertly, and as darkly as the tempest before which they drove. (RR 229) In a rare unfolding of poetical skill,25 Cooper establishes the notion that there is an order outside the law-based system on shore. But more importantly, he evokes the order of nature and its fallen hero as the moral foundation of the United States: the Rover dies wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, fighting for the cause of American independence which had been his raison d’être all along. The law of nature which the Rover personifies— a personification so powerfully evoked through the language of the oceanic sublime—is the same ‘law of Nature and of Nature’s God’ to which the founding fathers appealed in the Declaration of Independence in legitimating their separation from Britain. In translating Heidegger’s rebellion into the principle of American national identity, The Red Rover ‘contains’ its revolutionary potential, just as the ending of The Pioneers contains Bumppo’s radical sense of justice in the figure of Oliver Effingham. Effecting closure by the unification, or reunion, of families, and in removing the representatives of dissent,26 both texts finally deny the further existence of a juridical space outside United


States law. Both historical novels are safely removed in time (to 1793 and 1759, respectively), and Cooper leaves no doubt about the fact that the conflicts they dramatize have unanimously been solved. The temporal remoteness of the narrated incidents works to obscure the fact that The Red Rover poses a fictional negotiation of a more recent political debate —a debate which not a little disturbed the diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States in the 1820s. When we first encounter the pirate ship, it is anchored in the harbor of Newport, then the capital of the American slave trade. The reader’s introduction to the scene of action is ironical: ‘By a singular combination of circumstances and qualities, which is, however no less true than perplexing, the Merchants of Newport were becoming, at the same time, both slave-dealers and gentlemen’ (RR 16). What is more, the ship Dolphin disguises itself as a slaver. This gives the townsfolk ample opportunity to discuss its mysterious distancing from the other ships. The townspeople, for whom the strange ship is an object of general attention, suspect it to be a pirate. If it really was, as it claims, merely an ‘innocent,’ ‘harmless’ and ‘fair-trading slaver,’ they argue, why should it lie apart from the rest of the merchantmen (RR 41–2)? In 1759, the year when the novel is set, the Rover, being a pirate, was legally worse than a slaver because at that time ‘the slave trade had legal protection in the colonies’ (Rogin 1983:4). Yet by 1827, the publication year of Cooper’s romance, the United States government had joined the major European powers in declaring the transatlantic slave trade illegal and equating it with piracy. The government had failed to execute this juridical redefinition, however. After a long series of political debates which reach back at least to the year 1818, the House of Representatives finally proposed in 1823 that the slave trade, which had been officially abolished in 1808, should be treated as piracy: that is, as a crime against the law of nations. This gave way to difficult diplomatic quibbles between the British government (to whose pressure the United States had reacted) and the United States: first, about whether slaving should be declared piracy according to the law of nations, in which case the culprits could be tried in international mixed courts, or whether it should be punished according to statute law, which would entail their trial in the respective national courts (DuBois 1986:140). The United States favored the latter definition but finally agreed to the former one, reserving for itself the right to try those ‘pirates’ who were American citizens in their own courts. The next question concerned the best way to put the bilateral treaty into effect. Britain insisted that the United States grant a general Right of Search to British cruisers to search all American ships suspected of piracy—that is, of trading in slaves—on the African coast. The United States government, by contrast, wanted the Right of Search to be restricted to actual pirates. This created the problem of how a navy officer could determine the


identity of the slavers who tended to disguise themselves as lawful merchantmen (Soulsby 1933:27). American resistance to British demands must be seen in the context of the maritime warfare between the two nations in the preceding decades. Both the War of Independence and the War of 1812 had to a large extent been carried out at sea; the revolution was at least in part a reaction to British trade restrictions against the colonies, and Jefferson had between 1807 and 1809 even enforced a trade embargo for American ships in reaction to British attacks on the American merchant marine (Heinrich 1997:10–11). The larger issue behind the present debate was clearly that the dwindling British-American trade empire tried to keep a secure foothold as an Atlantic sea power against the growing presence of the American merchant marine. John Quincy Adams, acting as Secretary of State during the negotiations with Britain, accordingly regarded the British effort to obtain a general Right of Search as an attempt to encroach on the national sovereignty of the United States. Stratford Canning, the British Minister to the United States, reports that Adams laboured to persuade those gentlemen [at the House of Representatives] that the admission of the right of search would be no less than a surrender of the national flag’ (quoted in Soulsby 1933:29; see also DuBois 1986:139). President Monroe was similarly apprehensive: ‘If the freedom of the sea is abridged by compact for any new purpose, the example may lead to other changes’ (quoted in Soulsby 1933:32). The two nations finally, in 1824, agreed on a treaty which granted mutual Right of Search provided that the culprit be tried in the courts of his own nation. At the same time, it foreclosed the possibility of using it as a legal basis for impressment of American sailors—a common fear at the time (Soulsby 1933:34). Immediately ratified by the British government, the agreement became the subject of dissensions during the presidential election of 1824 in the United States. Adams, who was running for president, became the object of a systematic campaign—mostly carried out by Southerners—to reject the slave trade convention. Although the convention was finally ratified by the United States government, it contained amendments which were unacceptable for Britain, and a British attempt to renew the negotiations failed (Soulsby 1933:37–8). Had an unlimited Right of Search been granted to Great Britain, W.E.B.DuBois argues, it would virtually have made Britain ‘the policeman of the seas’ (DuBois 1986:138).27 The failure of the 1824 convention, which prevented the capture and punishment of suspected slavers as pirates traveling under the American flag by any other nation than the United States, is clearly the result of America’s troubled postcoloniality. The treaty failed because of America’s understandable fear that Britain might use it as a means to infringe upon the freedom of American shipping, and because the United States


government came under increasing pressure from the Southern states who turned any attempt to limit the practice of slavery into a state affair. The Red Rover enacts this postcolonial conflict. Almost one-quarter of the novel is dominated by discussions about the real nature of the unidentified ship in Newport harbor. Disguised as an old salt who calls himself Tarry Bob, the Rover mingles with the customers of the tavern ‘Foul Anchor’ in order to nourish the rumor that his ship may indeed not be an ‘honest trader,’ aiming to achieve the opposite reaction (RR 146). But for the reader of the year 1827, wearied by the public debate about when, where, and how slaving would count as piracy and how it should be punished, the novel provides an ironic backward glance to a better time when definitions and forms of punishment were less equivocal. A fictional exploration of the common confusion about the legal distinction between slavers and pirates and about the jurisdiction to be applied, The Red Rover is an emplotment of Britain’s desire for boarding suspected American ships. Read in the context of 1827, Wilder boards a slaver to act out the Right of Search claimed by his king. The slaver soon turns out to ‘really’ be a pirate: but in 1827, this was pretty indistinguishable from being a slaver. In projecting back the contemporary conflict over the illegal slave trade to the period of America’s revolutionary battle against Britain, the novel also casts the present violations of international law by reckless American entrepreneurs as morally legitimate. The present debate over the limits of America’s national jurisdiction in putting an end to an internationally prohibited commerce is imaginatively enacted as a revolutionary struggle for America’s natural right of national independence. The annals of the transatlantic slave trade are filled with accounts of slavers engaged in ‘piratical’ activity. When the slave-trading powers began to abolish the ‘odious commerce,’ the favorite ruse of the slavers was to use the flags of those nations whose laws still regarded the trade as legitimate. These actual instances of the flagging masquerades of Cooper’s fictional pirate would reach their peak in the 1840s and 1850s when slavers increasingly hoisted the Stars and Stripes, relying on the incapacity of United States cruisers to apprehend and United States courts to prosecute the culprits. This historical development, which Cooper perhaps did not foresee when writing his novel, throws a slightly different light upon the Rover’s imperial vision, expressed in his crucial dialogue with Wilder on the need for American independence. He envisions that the flag whose nonexistence necessitates his unlawful activities would ‘be found in every sea nor would the natives of our country have to succumb to the hirelings of a foreign Prince’ (RR 302). The remark wonderfully combines the notion of rebellion against foreign bondage with a vision of world empire, thereby spelling out the fatal causality from which the Untied States derive their national identity. Like Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others, the Rover predicts America’s ascendancy to a sea power. What neither he nor


his author foresaw is the fact that the Stars and Stripes would increasingly be ‘prostituted to crime’ in covering up the piratical actions of foreign slavers (DuBois 1986:145–6). The confusion between slavers and pirates which The Red Rover parodies in the talk of the townsfolk of Newport becomes historically significant if viewed in the context of the case of the slave ship Antelope, which was apprehended by a United States cruiser in 1820. Piracy had become a serious threat to commercial shipping in the Caribbean in the years after the War of 1812. Between 1812 and 1823, 3,002 piratical assaults were reported in the West Indies on merchant ships of all nations, at least 500 of which were committed against United States vessels. Niles Weekly Register refers to this period as the ‘age of piracy’ The cause for this increase of piratical activity must be seen in the fact that many veterans of the Napoleonic wars had been released into an uncertain future. A second group of war veterans had been ‘spewed out of the late… contests between Spain and her late “American colonies”’ (Niles Weekly Register, quoted in Philbrick 1961:88). As John Quincy Adams explains in 1817, the fleets of South American colonies fighting against the Spanish government for their independence had been ‘fitted out and officered in our ports and manned from the sweepings of our streets.’ It is estimated that since 1812 the United States had provided 15,000 to 20,000 seamen to South American ‘rebel privateers’ (Adams and Niles, quoted in Philbrick 1961:89). These pirates, many of them former United States citizens, preyed upon merchantmen from their home bases in the neutral islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. At least one of them, Jean Lafitte, established his own trade empire at Barataria, until the United States Navy sent Commodore David Porter against him and other West Indian rovers in 1823. Mostly defeated by 1825, some pirates continued their activities until 1835 (Philbrick 1961:89). These events produced a considerable popular literature whose attitude toward the pirates, however, starkly differed from Cooper’s romantic representation. John Smith, the pirate captain who had captured the Antelope and turned it into a pirate ship, was brought to trial—a trial that was used some twenty years later by John Quincy Adams as a precedent in his defense of the Amistad defendants. Adams gives a vivid account of the events which deserves to be quoted at full length: In the month of December, 1819, at a time when piracy, from her sympathetic and favorite haunts of Chesapeake bay, and of Cuba, was habitually sallying forth against the commerce of the world, but chiefly under the manycolored banners of the newly-emancipated colonies of Spain, transformed into a multitude of self-constituted sovereign and disunited States, capturing wherever they could be found the trading vessels of Portugal and of Spain, a privateer, named


the Columbia, commanded by a citizen of the United States named Metcalf, came into the port of Baltimore under the flag of Venezuela — there clandestinely shipped a crew of thirty or forty men, not one of whom had ever owed allegiance to the Republic of Venezuela, and sailed in search of adventure, to pounce upon the defenceless upon any and every ocean for the spoils. She scarcely got beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the United States when she changed her name of Columbia for that of Arraganta, hoisted the flag of Artigas, then ruler of the Oriental Republic of La Plata, and proceeded for the slave-coast of Africa—a mighty huntress, and her prey was man. There she fell in with sister pirates in abundance—first an American, from Bristol, Rhode Island, and borrowed twenty-five negro captives from her; then sundry ostensible Portuguese vessels, from which she took nearly two-hundred; and lastly, a Spaniard from Cuba, fitted out some months before by a slave-trading house at the Havana, to catch a yet lawful human cargo from a region south of the equator; for the trade north of the equator had even then been declared unlawful by Spain. The name of this vessel was, at that time, the Antelope; and with her and her living merchandise the Arraganta steered for the coast of Brazil, for a market. There the Arraganta was shipwrecked; her master, Metcalf, either drowned, or made prisoner with the greater part of his crew; while the remainder, under the command of John Smith, a citizen of the United States, transshipping themselves and all their surviving African captives into the Antelope, changed her name to that of the General Ramirez, and stood for the southern coast of the United States, and a market. In the month of June, 1820, this vessel, thus freighted, was found hovering on the coast of Florida, with the evident intention of surreptitiously introducing the negroes and effecting the sale of them within the United States. She was there in flagrant violation of two classes of their laws —those intended to suppress the unlawful interference of our citizens in the civil war then raging between Spain and her South American Colonies contending for their independence, and those prohibiting their participation in the slave trade, and denouncing it as piracy. (Adams 1969:95–6) The apprehension of the Antelope led to a whole series of property claims for the restitution of the slaves. Even the pirate John Smith was permitted to file a claim, by virtue of his commission from Artigas (Adams 1969:97). Other claimants included the Spanish government, the Portuguese government (from whose ships the slaves had been taken), and the American Captain Jackson who had captured the pirate-slaver and who ‘claimed salvage for all the negroes who might be adjudged to the Spanish


and Portuguese vice-consuls; and twenty-five dollars a head for all those who might be declared free, according to the act of Congress’ (Adams 1969:98). Because of the international complications it raised —Spain and Portugal had not yet abolished the slave trade at the time the slaves were taken—and because of the difficulty of determining which slaves had belonged to which group, the trial dragged on until 1822, when it came before the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ordered those Africans captured from foreign ships to be returned to the respective countries while the 100 survivors of the group captured from United States ships be returned to Africa (DuBois 1986:132). The absurdities of the attempts of different courts to determine which Africans belonged to which group would fill a chapter of its own; what is most interesting in our context is the text of the Supreme Court ruling of 1825. Written by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Antelope ruling articulates the same fatalism about the practice of the slave trade as Marshall voiced in the Johnson v. M’Intosh case about the dispossession of the Indians two years earlier (see Cheyfitz 1993). Emphasizing that no principle was settled because the Supreme Court was divided about the issue, Marshall goes on to outline the reasons for and against the principle that the international slave trade was contrary to the law of nations (Adams 1969:116). He arrives at the conclusion that the slave trade, although it is against the law of nature, does not violate the law of nations. His argument for the legality of the slave trade under the law of nations, like his argumentation in Johnson, rests on the idea of ‘general usage.’ Slavery, Marshall argues, since it has been a general practice among the peoples of antiquity, and continues to be used by the peoples of Africa, cannot therefore be pronounced unlawful (Adams 1969:117). He insists that a jurist, searching for a legal solution for the problem of the slave trade, would not have to resort to the realm of morality but must search for it in those principles of action which are sanctioned by the usages, the national acts, and the general assent, of that portion of the world of which he considers himself a part… If we resort to this standard as the test of international law, the question as has already been observed, is decided in favor of the legality of the trade. (Summarized in Adams 1969:117; see also Noonan 1977:111–12) Marshall’s history lesson, as Adams sarcastically points out, ignores a few significant episodes, like the rise of Christianity and the fact that by 1825 most Western nations had indeed outlawed the slave trade. It not only declares the moral basis of the law of nations null and void but basically states that the law ought to enforce political practice (as long as that practice would find general consent).28 Governed less by the principles of the American Revolution than by the emerging doctrine of historical


determinism, Marshall, in both the Johnson and the Antelope cases, has to rewrite history in order to be able to state that both Indian dispossession and slavery were in keeping with the law of nations. Against this logic of ‘might makes right,’ Cooper pits a pirate who defends the universal principles of justice against the letter of unjust colonial laws. Whether coincidentally or in an act of subtle authorial irony, the Rover’s ship, when it masquerades as a British cruiser during the final rendezvous, assumes the name Antelope (RR 375). These coincidences (if coincidences they be) of plot and naming stand out against the general thrust of Cooper’s narrative, which transports the problem of the slave trade back to colonial times, thereby implying that—apart from the fact that slavers tended to be pirates anyway—the slave trade forms no part of United States history. Metaphorically, however, the novel suggests that the United States owe their identity to an act of black writing. During the happy (and altogether incredible) family reunion that directly precedes the Rover’s disappearance, Wilder learns about his origin from an inscription on the arm of one of his companions, Richard Fid. The scriptor of the tattoo is Fid’s (and Wilder’s) African companion, Scipio Africa. In an earlier conversation with the Rover, Fid explains to him how he and Scipio had saved Wilder, then a young boy, from a wreck and accompanied him ever since. Fid, for a reason not altogether intelligible, had ordered Scipio to ‘rub’ the name they found on a bucket on board the sinking wreck into his, Fid’s, arm (RR 337). Though ‘rudely imitated’ due to the black’s ignorance of writing, the tattoo on Fid’s arm clearly reads ‘Ark of Lynnhaven.’ This, as is aptly revealed by the chaplain Merton, is the name of an estate in the Caribbean formerly owned by Wilder’s father (Mrs. Wyllys’s husband). The inscription reveals Wilder’s identity as Henry deLacy, son of Admiral Paul deLacy.29 It is the black man who, in an interesting reversal of the actual practice of branding the skins of Africans with their masters’ identities, inscribes Wilder’s history on the arm of his white fellow. In addition to the tattoo, Scipio has preserved the collar of a dog which he and Fid had likewise found on the wreck. Semantically identified as Wilder’s slaves, Fid and Scipio have chosen their bondage freely—just as Cooper’s noble Indians remove themselves voluntarily from their ancestral lands.30 Inscribed by a Black Jack on his companion’s body, then, is the continuity between America’s colonial past and its national future. Having found out about his identity as a native of America, Wilder can more self-confidently fight for his native land than before. Scipio Africa, blessed with the name of a famous Roman general, ensures with his écriture sauvage that colonial power relations will remain valid in the times to come. The reason for the Red Rover’s disappearance from literary memory, I am tempted to argue, has less to do with its aesthetic value than with America’s later ideological reorientation from the Atlantic as America’s


actual and symbolic center to the continent, with its promise of material gain and the fulfillment of masculine fantasies. In associating the Atlantic with the mythical prehistory of the United States, Cooper himself has prepared literary criticism’s denial of the Rover’s entry into America’s national canon. For both, America’s foundational narrative is a continental one, its setting the wilderness of the frontier. The idea of the sea as a counterhegemonic and anti-municipal space which the Rover so eloquently evokes, however, would be retained for a while yet by subsequent oceanrelated American fictions, to be discussed in the next chapter.

4 Ambivalent Atlantic Slave ship memories in antebellum writing

My discussion of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Arthur Mervyn and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover has shown the ideological importance of the Atlantic, both as symbol and as economic trade network, in the formation of American national literature. At the same time, the Atlantic slave trade, as we have seen in Tyler’s Algerine Captive and Cooper’s Red Rover, leads a clandestine existence in postrevolutionary fictional texts. Cooper’s ‘romantic’ deployment of the Atlantic as the symbolic residue out of which the revolutionary spirit arose evokes the philosophical notion of the natural right to rebellion by which the founding fathers justified their rebellion against the colonial mother country. In ‘assum[ing] among the owners of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them,’ the authors of the Declaration of Independence resort to the same notion of justice before the law to which the Red Rover appeals in carrying out his private revolt. This chapter will be dedicated to the Atlantic of the international slave trade which Cooper’s novel both recognizes and represses. At the same time we move from a post-revolutionary ideological framework to an antebellum one. All of the texts discussed in this chapter—Herman Melville’s Redburn and Benito Cereno, Frederick Douglass’s ‘Heroic Slave,’ Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, Martin Delany’s Blake, and a recently rediscovered novel sneaked in from the Caribbean, Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca—situate the United States within the larger context of the slave-based Atlantic economy, and all of them are looking back to the unfulfilled promise of the Declaration of Independence just as they look forward to the building race tensions of the antebellum period. As in the preceding chapters, my attention will focus on the troubled postcoloniality of these antebellum texts, on their use of imagery and narrative in their various attempts to come to terms with a situation which they almost univocally compare to an existence on a ‘slumbering volcano.’1

SLAVE SHIP MEMORIES IN ANTEBELLUM WRITING 95

A deceptive tourist guide I want to begin my journey with Herman Melville’s semi-autobiographical novel Redburn, written concurrently with Moby-Dick and first published in 1849, in which he gives a fictionalized description of his ocean voyage to Liverpool ten years earlier. Hired on the Highlander (whose real-life name was the St. Lawrence) as a cabin boy, the 19 year old Wellingborough Redburn is introduced into the world of capitalistic misery, his own as well as that of others, which would remain a literary topic for Melville for many years to come. On the voyage to England, Wellingborough’s malicious shipmate Jackson, an early version of Ahab and Claggart, initiates him into the Atlantic world with horrific tales of the African slave trade. Jackson, who had previously worked on a Portuguese slaver, informs Redburn ‘with a diabolical relish’ about the middle-passage, where the slaves were stowed, heel and point, like logs, and the suffocated and dead were unmanacled, and weeded out from the living every morning, before washing down the decks; how he had been in a slaving schooner, which being chased by an English cruiser off Cape Verde, received three shots in her hull, which raked through and through a whole file of slaves, that were chained. (Melville 1986:107–8)2 Jackson, who seems bodily infected with the poisonous morality of the ‘odious commerce’ (he suffers from a chronic disease and commits suicide on the return trip), takes pleasure in performing the ‘horse test’ on his shipmates by deducing their age from the state of their teeth—an imitation of the medical examinations performed on slave ships (R 111). As Carolyn Karcher has shown (Karcher 1992), Redburn is inscribed with the history of the slave trade in more ways than one. The protagonist, whose name condenses the two major non-white ethnicities of America, Native Americans (as in ‘redskin’) and African slaves (whose chattel state was inscribed on their skin with red-hot branding irons), experiences his most intense encounter with the history of the slave trade on his ‘filial pilgrimage’ through Liverpool, formerly the major slave harbor of England. Redburn imaginatively retraces the steps of his father, who had visited Liverpool thirty years earlier, and with the help of his father’s slightly outdated guidebook from 1803 (R 218–19, 224). Melville actually juggles with his own chronology at this point, dating Walter Redburn’s visit to Liverpool to the year 1808 while his own father, Alan Melville, had visited Liverpool in 1811 (Karcher 1992:207). Like Melville’s own father, the fictional Walter Redburn had been a textile merchant and had died in poverty after the bankruptcy of his merchant firm when Wellingborough was a little boy (R 221).

96 SLAVE SHIP MEMORIES IN ANTEBELLUM WRITING

During his quest through Liverpool, Redburn discovers numerous discrepancies between his father’s book and the actual layout of the town. Where he expects to find a castle near the harbor, he encounters a tavern; the hotel at which his father used to lodge has long been torn down; and the Liverpool of 1839 looks altogether different from that of 1803. Redburn has to realize that his guidebook is ‘no more fit to guide me about the town than the map of Pompeji’ (R 224). The ambivalence of Liverpool’s glorious past is evoked by Redburn’s discovery of a ‘little brig from the Coast of Guinea’ lying in the harbor: ‘In appearance, she was the ideal of a slaver; low, black, clipper-built about the bows, and her decks in a state of most piratical disorder’ (R 245). The ship’s crew, ‘a bucaniering looking set’ with ‘hairy chests, purple shirts, and arms wildly tattooed,’ are in the process of unloading the ship’s cargo, ‘some kind of ore, which might have been gold ore’ (R 246). The ship, whose description, as Carolyn Karcher has noticed, ‘foreshadows the connections Melville establishes between slavery and piracy in “Benito Cereno”’ (Karcher 1992: 208), represents an anachronism in the year 1839. Its exhibition of ‘piratical disorder’ evokes the present juridical state of transatlantic slave voyages, which were regarded as piracy by both Britain and the United States. The black-hulled brig, reminiscent of the slave ship Amistad whose case went through the American press and courts from 1839 to 1841, connects the Black Atlantic histories of Britain and the United States: as many slavers built less for comfort than for swiftness, it is ‘clipper-built,’ which suggests that it was built in America. Strolling through Liverpool’s streets, Redburn has occasion to speculate on the connections and differences between British and American racial attitudes when he observes how Lavender, the Highlander’s black steward, walks along the docks arm in arm with a white Englishwoman (R 277). He had previously described Lavender as an ‘elegant looking mulatto in a gorgeous turban’ and lover of sentimental romances. Now this ‘sentimental sort of darky’ enjoys a sexual freedom which was available to Olaudah Equiano before him but which was denied him in his home country. The sight occasions Redburn to speculate how the fact that ‘a colored man should be treated as he is in this town’ merely demonstrates the recognition of ‘his claims to humanity and normal equality; so that, in some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence’ (R 58, 139–40, 277–8). The traveler from ‘postcolonial’ America has to acknowledge that the former mother country offers greater rights to its black population than the United States. Redburn’s 1803 guidebook had served his father well during his visit in 1808 (the year the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was enforced in Britain and proclaimed—but not enforced—by the United States). Thirty years later, however, he has to accept that Liverpool


has become a different city: a city shaken by extreme poverty (partly because of abolition) but capable of greater racial tolerance. Redburn experiences the most striking reminder of the situation back home when he encounters a statue of Lord Nelson which represents the English admiral as he expires in the arms of an allegorical female figure of Victory Round the base of the pedestal of the monument Redburn observes four naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, [which] are seated in various attitudes of humiliation and despair. One has his leg recklessly thrown over his knee, and his head bowed over, as if he had given up all hope of ever feeling better. Another has his head buried in despondency, and no doubt looks mournfully out of his eyes, but as his face was averted at the time, I could not catch the expression. These woe-begone figures of captives are emblematic of Nelson’s principal victories; but I never could look at their swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place. And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina; and also to the historical fact, that the African slave-trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution. And I remembered that my father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool; that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc at the fire-sides of the merchants; estranged sons from sires; and even separated husband from wife. And my thoughts reverted to my father’s friend, the good and great Roscoe, the intrepid enemy of the trade; who in every way exerted his fine talents toward its suppression. (R 222–3) Redburn’s reading of this monument commemorating the British Navy in terms of American slavery is an early example of Melville’s skill in fusing past and present as well as different geographies—in conjuring up images of past events against the ideological pull of a dominant discursive amnesia. By reading the signifiers of national and imperial glory against their grain, Redburn imagines a counter-history to Britain’s imperial past that is suppressed by the official narrative. He reminds us that this counter-history of colonialism, slavery, and the Black Atlantic has not just been effaced from the national historiography of Britain but from that of the United States as well—including his own family history. In Redburn, Melville thus dramatizes the process of disremembering the slave trade, whose memory


is preserved in the oral history of sailors’ yarns but purged from the official ‘texts’ (guidebooks, statues) of nationalist discourse. The interpretation of the monument suggests that a city like Liverpool, which owed its wealth to the violation of all principles of humanity, would give a more honest demonstration of its past by dedicating a monument to the abolitionist William Roscoe, a Liverpool ‘historian, poet, and banker’ (R 211), who had been one of the strongest opposers of the African slave trade even before 1783 and as a Member of Parliament contributed to its abolition (Williams 1966:49, 162). Redburn remembers that Roscoe delivered a speech against the trade in Parliament which, ‘as coming from a member for Liverpool, was supposed to have turned many votes, and had no small share in the triumph of sound policy and humanity that ensued’ (R 223). Lawrence Buell’s claim that the narrative of Redburn performs an act of mental decolonization, then, is not borne out by this reading of Melville’s text. Without being nostalgic about the British past, Redburn meditates upon those aspects of British political culture which surpass the present state in America in fulfilling the principles of enlightened humanism (cf. Buell 1992a: 222).3 As these passage from Redburn suggest, Melville had been sensitized to the issues of the slave trade and slavery early on in his life, while his trip to England at the same time challenged the racial prejudices he had been brought up with in America (Karcher 1992:208). He would return to the figure of the shackled slave in two later stories, ‘Benito Cereno,’ with its crucial scene of the chained giant Atufal, and in The Bell-Tower,’ Melville’s Frankensteinian story of the scientist Bannadonna who is killed by his own creature, a shackled mechanic slave. Redburn contains, in embryonic form, an example of Melville’s method of translating his knowledge of social injustice into complex historical narrative—a method I will discuss more fully later in this chapter. ‘Loose-Fish’: natural rights discourse and slave ship revolt Like The Red Rover, Redburn looks back to a time when the slave trade was still legal and traces its disappearance from America’s postcolonial memory. Unlike Cooper, whose novel gives a merely symbolic function to slavery, Melville puts his finger in the wound of antebellum America, reminding his readers of the unfinished state of the project of the revolution which Cooper celebrates. Meanwhile the slave trade from Africa continued, mainly to Brazil and Cuba. At the same time, American ships were carrying slaves from one port within the United States to another. This traffic took place under the increasing danger of slave revolt which was greatiy feared in the slaveholding South ever since Gabriel Prosser’s and Télémaque (‘Denmark’) Vesey’s thwarted insurrections in 1800 and 1822,


respectively, and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, among others. The negotiations between Britain and the United States to end the illegal slave trade froze when slaves took control of the ship Creole on its way from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans in October 1841.4 The blacks, led by the slaves’ head cook, a man called Madison Washington, ordered the surviving crew members (only one of them died) to navigate the Creole to the British Bahamas: the slaves had heard from other slaves that Nassau was a secure haven.5 Once they had arrived in Nassau, the blacks placed themselves at the mercy of the British authorities who, after sending twenty-four black soldiers on board to protect or detain the mutineers, and after some hurried debate of the legal implications, set the slaves free (Jones 1975:28–31). The Council of Nassau argued that the municipal courts had no jurisdiction over the Creole mutiny because it had taken place on the high seas, which the British considered extrajuridical territory (31). Against the intentions of the British authorities, who wanted to detain the nineteen mutineers and release the others, all blacks were released by what Howard Jones calls ‘something approaching mob action’: When the attorney general of Nassau, G.C.Anderson, boarded the Creole… he noticed several boats nearby filled with black islanders. They had begun gathering ashore and in craft around the Creole around noon. By 1:30 the boats had increased to almost fifty. Someone warned the consul that when the troops withdrew from the ship there would be an attempt to free the blacks. (Jones 1975:31) The mutineers were nevertheless detained for another three days because of the intervention of the American consul, who demanded their extradition. On the third day, the innocent were set free and marched on land accompanied by hundreds of islanders. Clearly the situation at Nassau, whose black inhabitants showed great solidarity with the Creole mutineers and outnumbered the whites by a ratio of four to one, allowed for no other choice (33). The nineteen mutineers were detained until the British government decided later in 1841 to set them free as the mutiny had occurred outside British jurisdiction. American extradition requests and demands for financial compensation for the other former slaves were answered in the negative. It is hardly surprising that the case caused a great stir in the United States which was still in the process of consolidating its own national independence from Britain. The Creole incident directly interfered with the negotiations on the Right of Search at whose center stood nothing less than the freedom of the seas. In the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which was finally ratified by the United States Congress in September 1842, the two nations agreed on the immunity of suspected American slavers to British


search on the condition that the United States government would send its own navy squadron to the coast of Africa to intercept slavers traveling under the American flag. In its demand for British non-intervention in the activities of the American merchant marine, the treaty thus ended British dominion of the seas, transforming the ocean into a mare liberum. The law historian D.P.O’Connel consequently argues that with the shift from mercantilism to free trade in consequence of the abolition of the slave trade, as well as through ‘the recognition in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty that the era of unilateral action against the trade had ended, the freedom of the seas acquired an absolute character that it had not previously possessed’ (O’Connel 1982:19–20). In other words, the high seas became ‘free’ when Britain ceded its position as the leading naval power, including its authority to search American ships suspected of illegal slave trading. The juridical ideal of the freedom of the seas became a practical reality at the cost of the unimpeded shipment of Africans in American slavers: one of the ironical peaks of the ambivalent postcoloniality of the United States. It is becoming clear, I think, that the concept of ‘freedom of the seas’ is a highly double-edged matter. On the one hand it was appealed to by abolitionists defending the rights of slaves to carry out mutinies on the high seas. The Ohio Congressman Josuah Giddings, for example, introduced a series of resolutions into Congress in order to define the Creole mutiny as legally and morally justified, arguing that the moment a ship leaves the territorial waters of a state whose law endorses slavery, the slave has passed into the jurisdiction where only nature’s law is valid (Cover 1975: 113). The abolitionist William Jay followed suit in a pamphlet, The Creole Case and Mr. Webster’s Dispatch (1843), arguing that when slaves were shipped on the high seas, the protection afforded by the local law that created slavery would cease. Once beyond the limits of municipal law, the issue, Jay claims, is entirely one of superior force, and if the slaves should overpower their masters, the latter could apply to no rule of law to demand reparations. ‘[R]esistance of…force,’ Jay argues, ‘even unto death, cannot be called mutiny or murder—because they are violating no law by such resistance, but on the contrary vindicating their natural freedom—the gift of God alike to all’ (quoted in Cover 1975:114). It was indeed only a little step from this argument to claiming the slaves’ right to free themselves with violent means wherever they are. On the other hand, however, the concept of the freedom of the seas was appealed to by pro-slavery groups seeking to protect their illegal slaving activities against British cruisers. Their freedom of the seas meant the freedom to enslave others. Defenders of slavery and the slave trade likewise resorted to ‘nature’ as a guarantor of inequality—only that to them ‘nature’ did not mean that Godgiven condition in which all men were equal but rather the racial scientists’ biological construct of nature which


endowed members of different races with different mental capacities, the capacity for ‘freedom’ being one of them. It is interesting that the United States authorities involved in the Creole case never responded to the British government’s offer to use its local facilities at Nassau for trying the mutineers for piracy. The American consul at Nassau never responded to the suggestion (Jones 1975:40). Apparently Americans had learned their lesson from the Amistad trial running concurrently with the negotiations about the Nassau Nineteen, during which the Spanish government, represented in court by the United States government, had accused the Mendi mutineers of piracy but simultaneously defined them as merchandise. John Quincy Adams, in his defense of the mutineers, had noted the contradiction, asking ‘Who are the robbers, and what is the merchandise?’ His conclusion, based on the logic of the Spaniards, was that the merchandise were the robbers and the robbers were the merchandise. The merchandise was rescued out of its own hands, and the robbers were rescued out of the hands of the robbers…. Is any thing more absurd than to say these forty Africans are robbers, out of whose hands they have themselves been rescued? (Adams 1969:23) It can only be surmised that the United States authorities were reluctant to accuse slave ship mutineers of piracy in a recently emancipated British colony and in a general political atmosphere that defined the slave trade itself as piracy. With Britain having abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, the United States had advanced to the dubious status of being the greatest slave power in the Americas, and the public sensibility of this fact, as well as the growing fear of slave revolts on land and at sea, preoccupied the public discourse, as we shall see. The governments of Britain and the United States continued their verbal warfare over the Creole for another fourteen years. The case was closed in 1855 when an Anglo-American claims commission paid $110, 330 to the owners of the liberated slaves. The umpire, a Boston banker, took the position that the Nassau officials had violated international law in liberating the Africans. Thus the United States won the case in theory. But what is more important is that all but five of the 135 Creole blacks had gained their liberty. It is tempting to read the fate of the Creole slaves in terms of Melville’s, or rather Ishmael’s, joking meditation on the philosophical implications of the whaling code of fast fish and loose fish. Explaining the complex issue of taking possession of a whale, Ishmael points out that the official whale code distinguishes between ‘Fast-Fish’ and ‘Loose-Fish’:


I.A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II.A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it… First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nineinch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do. (Melville 1967:331–2)6 But this sounds easier than it is. What if a whaling party succeeds in harpooning a whale but then has to forsake it: does the whale belong to the next party which catches it, or can the original whaler make a claim to its possession? Ishmael cites a court case in which the famous English lawyer Mr. Erskine defended a whaling party who had taken possession of a whale that had already been harpooned but subsequently abandoned by a previous whaler. Erskine, Ishmael tells us, gave the problematic a domestic turn by comparing the property right of his clients to the property rights of a gentleman who ‘re-harpoons’ a lady originally harpooned but then abandoned by another gentleman: ‘the lady then became that subsequent gentleman’s property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her’ (MD 332). By way of analogy, the whale in question had been a Loose-Fish by the time the second party encountered it and was thus by right theirs. Ishmael then extends the lawyer’s fishy comparison and turns the difference between Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish into a universal law: Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? After a long list of Fast-Fish examples, he turns to Loose-Fish: But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the


Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but LooseFish?… What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? (MD 333–4) In his typical ‘double-talk’ fashion analyzed by Carolyn Porter (Porter 1986), Ishmael starts off with a neat opposition—the opposition between bondage and freedom, or between possession and non-possession—and then discusses it until the opposition dissolves in a logical collapse. After all, his meditation tells us, the decisive point is not whether one is legally entitled to possession. What rather counts is the power to appropriate and to defend property. A simple shift or overthrow of power will change the definition of ‘fast’ and loose.’ A simple, and apparently not premeditated, slave ship revolt has changed the property status of 130 slaves.7 Nothing is known of the further fate of the Creole mutineers; having become ‘Loose-Fish’ (but more alive than Ishmael’s whales) they simply walked out of the historical record under the cheers of their Bahamian supporters.8 Chattel records: ‘The Heroic Slave’ In his novella ‘The Heroic Slave,’ Frederick Douglass capitalized on the power of the liberated slaves’ exit. The text ends with the white mate’s account of the Creole’s arrival at Nassau: by order of the authorities, a company of black soldiers came on board, for the purpose, as they said, of protecting the property. These impudent rascals, when I called on them to assist me in keeping the slaves on board, sheltered themselves adroitly under their instructions only to protect the property,—and said they did not recognize persons as property. I told them that by the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States, the slaves on board were as much property as the barrels of flour in the hold. At this the stupid blockheads showed their ivory, rolled up their white eyes in horror, as if the idea of putting men on a footing with merchandise were revolting to their humanity. When these instructions were understood among the negroes, it was impossible for us to keep them on board. They deliberately gathered up their baggage before our eyes, and, against our remonstrances, poured through the gangway,—formed themselves into a procession on the wharf,—bid farewell to all on board, and, uttering the wildest shouts of exultation, they marched, amidst the deafening cheers of a multitude of sympathizing spectators,


under the triumphant leadership of their heroic chief and deliverer, MADISON WASHINGTON. (Douglass 1984:348)9 Published in Julia Griffith’s Autographs for Freedom in 1853, The Heroic Slave’ is the first fictional prose text by an African American writer. Betraying its indebtedness to the themes of the fugitive slave narrative, the novella yet shows many signs of plotting that transcend the autobiographical point of view of the slave narrative. One of these deviations consists in the fact that the events are related from the point of view of two white Americans. The first of these is the Ohio merchant Listwell who overhears Madison Washington’s soliloquy on the cruelties of slavery in a forest in Virginia. Listwell, who is converted to abolitionism by what he hears, encounters Washington again five years later as the slave, now on his flight to Canada, seeks refuge at Listwell’s door in Ohio. Sitting by Listwell’s fireside, Washington relates his plight to his white friend and tells him of his escape and of the five lonely years he spent in a cave in the ‘dismal swamps’ (HS 313). He has to desert his hiding place after a forest fire. Forced to run ‘alike from fire and from slavery,’ Madison feels as if ‘robbed by society of all my just rights’ and aware that the enemy had ‘transformed me into a brute; made merchandise of my body’ (HS 314–15). Conscious that he can find no relief from his troubles in the United States, he decides to go to Canada, a plan in which Listwell helps him. A few days later Listwell receives a letter from Washington informing him that the fugitive slave now ‘nestle[d] in the mane of the British lion, protected by his mighty paw from the talons and the beak of the American eagle’ (HS 323). But one year later, traveling to Richmond, Virginia on a business trip, Listwell meets up with Madison Washington again. He spends a frightful night in a decrepit tavern—a ruined edifice, filled with drunken and degenerate slave traders. The next day Listwell discovers Washington chained in a coffle together with other slaves in order to be brought to New Orleans in a ‘long, low, black’ slave ship. Before Madison boards the ship, he is able to inform Listwell that he had come back to Virginia in order to free his wife and that his wife died in the attempt. Listwell spontaneously procures three files in a hardware store and clandestinely hands them over to Washington. The last chapter of the novella shows the white mate of the Creole, Thomas Grant, discussing the case with another sailor, Jack Williams, at the ‘Marine Coffeehouse’ in Richmond. Grant relates the mutiny and the slaves’ escape in Nassau and presents himself as a recent convert to the abolitionist cause by having witnessed Washington’s deed. Frederick Douglass had celebrated Madison Washington as a model of black achievement even before writing ‘The Heroic Slave,’ which would remain his only piece of fiction. He establishes a rhetorical monument to


Washington in speeches delivered in Britain in 1847 and again in his memorable speech ‘Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano’ in New York in 1849 (Sundquist 1990:12). That Douglass stepped out of his usual way and resorted to a fictional text hadvarious effects, the most obvious of which is that he could utilize the genre ofnovelistic discourse for attacking the slave trade. The last chapter begins with theauctorial narrator’s diatribe against the odious commerce: What a world of inconsistency, as well as of wickedness, is suggested by the smooth and gliding phrase, AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE; and how strange and perverse is that moral sentiment which loathes, execrates, and brands as piracy and as deserving of death the carrying away into captivity men, women, and children from the African coast, but which is neither shocked nor disturbed by a similar traffic, carried on with the same motives and purposes, and characterized by even more odious peculiarities on the coast of our MODEL REPUBLIC. We execrate and hang the wretch guilty of this crime on the coast of Guinea, while we respect and applaud the guilty participators in this murderous business on the enlightened shores of the Chesapeake. The inconsistency is so flagrant and glaring, that it would seem to cast a doubt on the doctrine of the innate moral sense of mankind. (HS 338) Ending with an expression of general doubt about Kantian idealism, the passage clearly addresses the paradoxical situation that the transatlantic slave trade was prohibited in 1807 while the internal slave trade—voyages from one Southern port to another like that of the Creole—was not. Douglass’s concern with the iniquities of the domestic slave trade is repeated in the text by a much broader rhetoric of domesticity, encapsulated in the passage above in his self-confident identification with America (‘we,’ ‘us’). As Robert Stepto and William Andrews have shown, ‘The Heroic Slave’ seeks to inscribe the history of the United States, particularly that of Virginia, with the traces of an African American counter-history. This double history becomes apparent in the novella’s first paragraph, which begins with the evocation of the fame of the state of Virginia for having furnished the American annals with a ‘multitudinous array of her statesmen and heroes.’ ‘History’, the text continues, has not been sparing in celebrating the deeds of famous Virginia-born statesmen. And yet, not all the great ones of the Old Dominion have, by the fact of their birthplace, escaped undeserved obscurity. By some strange neglect, one of the truest, manliest, and bravest of her children…holds now


no higher place in the records of that grand old Commonwealth than is held by a horse or an ox. Let those account for it who can, but there stands the fact, that a man who loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry,—who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson,—and who fought for it with a valor as high, an arm as strong, and against odds as great, as he who led all the armies of the American colonies through the great war for freedom and independence, lives now only in the chattel records of his native State. Glimpses of this great character are all that can now be presented. He is brought to view only by a few transient incidents, and these afford but partial satisfaction…. Curiously, earnestly, anxiously, we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern stars to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness…. Speaking of marks, traces, possibilities, and probabilities, we come before our readers. (HS 299–300) Douglass introduces his tale by promising to repair a gap—to flesh out the mere ‘glimpses,’ ‘marks,’ and ‘traces’—in the historical record that remembers the revolutionary hero George Washington but envelops the memory of the African American hero Madison Washington in darkness. As Russ Castronovo and William Andrews have argued, the unspoken name of Washington in this opening paragraph signifies doubly, nominally uniting slaveholder and slave, statesman and chattel, seemingly complete national history and fragmentary ‘chattel records’ (Castronovo 1995:220; Andrews 1990:28–9).10 Capitalizing on the ideological potential of fictional texts, Douglass produced a counter-myth to the nationalistic myth of the founding fathers and seized the opportunity offered by a fictional text which, unlike a ‘factual’ slave narrative, comes readily equipped with a narrative authority and stands in no need of tedious gestures of authentication (Andrews 1990:30). The coincidence of names was of course very helpful in establishing this analogy (see Stepto 1982:361–2).11 Douglass’s comparison of the mutineer with the founding fathers, his invention of an African American narrative emerging from the cracks and fissures of national discourse, performs the cultural work of an ideological founding act, an act of empowerment for an African American counterhistory. Douglass’s ‘foundational fiction’ answers to the need of a subaltern group for a collective myth that endows them with a sense of identity and belonging. As Stuart Hall has argued, any cultural identity, whether postcolonial or other, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists,


transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. (Hall 1990:225) If a people’s past has been preserved in a very fragmentary way it has to be reinvented. Douglass, who seems to have resorted to a fictional narrative precisely because he shared Hall’s insight, used the means of novelistic discourse in producing an African American founding myth from which his and later generations could derive a sense of collective belonging. Robert Stepto has shown how Douglass activates the power of narrative and symbolism in inscribing the Virginia landscape with the traces of the African American presence and turning the forest in which Washington prays and the ‘dismal swamp’ in which he hides into a ‘ritual ground’ (Stepto 1982:360–2). Stepto further demonstrates that the plot follows the classical outline of the hero quest. But besides claiming the slave state Virginia as a mythical site for the enactment of African American revolutionary empowerment, Douglass also pursued the larger project of reconciling the histories of the two races. Some critics have chastised Douglass for presenting the events, especially the revolt, through the eyes of white characters (see Yarborough 1990: 180). The introduction of the characters Listwell, who is probably modeled on the abolitionist James Gurney (Yarborough 1990:179), and Grant, the fictional version of the Creole’s first mate Zephaniah Gifford, clearly presents a deviation from the historical record. Listwell and Grant turn the reader’s attention away from Washington’s ‘heroic’ acts. For example, Douglass has Listwell provide the files necessary for the slaves to liberate themselves, while Washington had in reality acquired them himself. The distance to the narrated action produced by Grant’s voice frustrates the reader’s expectation of ‘a vivid narration of swashbuckling valor aboard the high seas’ (Stepto 1982:364). In fact the introduction of Listwell and Grant seems to counteract Douglass’s project of creating an African American founding myth. The answer to the riddle is that Douglass indeed wanted to divide the agency for gaining freedom between Washington and Listwell. The foregrounding of the two white characters contains the ‘signal idea,’ as Stepto writes, ‘that freedom for slaves can transform the South and the North and hence the nation’ (Stepto 1982:365). As a minor effect, Andrews argues, the white characters give a semblance of objectivity to the narrated events; their use foreclosed the need for similar gestures of authentication as we find in non-fictional fugitive slave narratives (Andrews 1990:29).


On yet a different tack, Douglass’s novella presents a counter-fiction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s highly influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). It counters the sentimental racialism of Stowe’s novel by inventing Madison Washington in terms of heroic masculinity and charismatic leadership; and it counters Stowe’s approval of the colonization project by emphasizing African Americans’ desire to makes themselves a home in the United States. In a letter to Stowe, who has her rebellious slave George Harris emigrate to Africa at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglass writes: ‘The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and we are likely to remain. Individuals emigrate—nations never’ (quoted in Levine 1997:82). Thus the novella produces Listwell and Grant as model citizens, representing different social groups (merchants and sailors), whose ‘innate’ moral sense, but above all whose encounter with Washington’s charismatic personality, drives them into embracing abolitionism.12 In inscribing the history of Virginia with the ‘heroic’ struggles of fugitive slaves like Washington, Douglass makes a claim to Virginia as both a physical and imaginary homeland. This emphasis on trying to find a way for the peaceful coexistence of white and black Americans in America, together with Douglass’s abhorrence of colonization, explains his neglect of the transnational aspect of the Creole story. He resisted the possibility to take an imaginative leap and develop the story beyond the limits of what is historically known: ‘The Heroic Slave’ ends as the archives do, with the slaves walking on land in Nassau. Read in terms of a quest narrative, or a narrative of initiation, ‘The Heroic Slave’ can be seen to mark a shift in Douglass’s position toward the use of violence in the struggle for abolition. Beginning in the early 1850s, and partly in response to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, Douglass shed a pacifist attitude, which he had formerly shared with William Garrison, and began entertaining the idea of using violent means in the attempt to overthrow slavery. Sure enough, the theme of violence is toned down in the novella: Grant, who relates the violent takeover of the ship, is unconscious during most of the action, and Listwell’s aiding and abetting in procuring the files remains within the limits of the morally acceptable.13 And yet the text presents, perhaps for the first time, a black fictional character who is neither a humble and peaceful victim of colonial aggression nor a dumb and violent brute. Madison Washington’s violence is rendered in decisively Byronic terms—a point to which I will return. Douglass’s turn away from the dominant abolitionist discourse of pious sentimentalism and toward a romantic discourse of revolution signals his capacity to use the tools of the masters for subversive ends (Sundquist 1993:121). The novella’s revolutionary romanticism is associated with the ocean. On a rather practical level, Tom Grant informs his pro-slavery counterpart Williams, the ocean offers more opportunities for rebellion than the land: ‘It is quite easy to talk of flogging niggers here on land, where you have the


sympathy of the community, and the whole physical force of the government, State and national, at your command/ he tells Williams, but, sir, I deny that the negro is, naturally, a coward, or that your theory of managing slaves will stand the test of salt water…. It is one thing to manage a company of slaves on a Virginia plantation, and quite another thing to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty. (HS 340) As a result of his experiences, Grant decides ‘never to set my foot on the deck of a slave ship…again’ having come round to the view that the slave trade is ‘a cause which my conscience does not approve. I dare say here what many men feel, but dare not speak, that this whole slave-trading business is a disgrace and scandal to Old Virginia’ (HS 341). Grant’s views on the practical side of a slave ship revolt (it is much easier carried out) are reiterated in more philosophical terms by Washington himself. Warning Grant, who had just awoken from unconsciousness, to stand back, he says, Sir,…your life is in my hands. I could have killed you a dozen times over during this last half hour, and could kill you now. You call me a black murderer, I am not a murderer. God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night’s work. I have done no more to those dead men yonder, than they would have done to me in like circumstances. We have struck for our freedom, and if a true man’s heart be in you, you will honor us for the deed. We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they. (HS 345) Faced with such uncommon ‘eloquence,’ Grant ‘forgot his blackness in the dignity of his manner…. It seems as if the souls of both the great dead (whose names he bore) had entered him.’ Seeing his men sitting way up in the masts clinging to the rigging ‘like so many frightened monkeys,’ Grant cannot but conclude that resistance is out of the question. Meanwhile the ship enters a storm: The wind howled furiously,—the ocean was white with foam, which, on account of the darkness, we could see only by the quick flashes of lightening that darted occasionally from the angry sky…. A more savage thunder-gust never swept the ocean. Our brig rolled and creaked as if every bolt pressed out of the seams. (HS 346–7)


Like the Red Rover, whose revolutionary spirit he shares, Madison stands firmly at the helm during the storm, meeting it with ‘the equanimity of an old sailor.’ When the storm begins to cease, he shouts to the mate: ‘Mr. mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.’ This powerful speech makes Grant feel in the presence of a superior man; one who, had he been a white man, I would have followed willingly and gladly in any honorable enterprise. Our difference of color was the only ground for difference of action. It was not that his principles were wrong in the abstract; for they are the principles of 1776. (HS 347) Douglass’s rhetorical allusion to the founding fathers evokes the oceanic context of the American Revolution itself. Madison’s eloquence echoes that of Cooper’s Byronic pirate, just as it conjures up the ancient notion of the charismatic leader as an eloquent bearer of superior knowledge and civilization.14 As Eric Cheyfitz shows, eloquence was considered a mark of civilization since antiquity. Cicero’s De Inventione, ‘that most important influence on the Renaissance idea of eloquence,’ begins with a story of civilization, in which the orator assembles the men who were ‘scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats’ and transforms them from a state of savagery to a state of gentleness by the power of his ‘reason’ and ‘eloquence.’15 Madison Washington’s plight, which likewise begins in the forest and follows the traditional pattern of the quest from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, is superscribed with the myth of the ancient civilizer—and the ancient art of eloquence, which, as contemporary treatises on the Ethiopian and Egyptian origins of civilization claimed, was introduced to the classical age from Africa (see Levine 1997:9; HorsleyMeacham 1991:235). The contents of Washington’s speeches, as Eric Sundquist has noted, resemble the language used by the abolitionists Josuah Giddings and William Jay during the juridical debate on the Creole mentioned above. Washington in particular echoes Jay who had contended that the case is stronger for Liberty on the ocean than on the land—for the Earth may be, has been, subjugated by the iron hand of Power; but the free, the untamed Sea, disdains the puny grasp of the mightiest of earthly despots. As cited above, Jay concluded that the slaves’ resistance was consistent with the natural right of revolution, ‘the gift of God alike to all’ (quoted in Sundquist 1993:117). Douglass had evoked the transformative power of the ocean four years before the publication of ‘The Heroic Slave,’ in his


‘Slumbering Volcano’ speech on the Creole mutiny delivered in New York. Here he directly relates Madison’s desire for freedom to his experience of observing the ‘swelling billows of the Atlantic’ and feeling the ‘breeze that coursed over its surface’ (quoted in Yarborough 1990:173). But both Madison Washington and Frederick Douglass had to acknowledge that the ocean’s promise of freedom ends the moment they go on land. Once the swelling billows are left behind, the black rebel, like Nigger Jim, ran the risk of ending up in the realm of municipal legislation and colonial bondage—a consideration that makes the pirate protagonist of Maxwell Philip’s novel, discussed below, draw the unrealistic consequence to choose the ocean as his home. Douglass, who was aware of the exceptionality of the Creole passengers’ escape into freedom, therefore limits himself to evoking the symbolic significance of the ocean as the well of the American Revolution—a significance the contemporary reader was familiar with from Cooper’s Pilot and Red Rover. Washington shares with the Rover his ‘Byronic’ qualities: eloquence, chivalry, charisma, and heroism, while the ocean setting is rendered in terms of the romantic sublime. Douglass effectively makes the revolt take place during a storm, with nature mirroring the emotional turbulence of human action (see Sundquist 1993:118–19).16 In tapping the repertoire of various Anglo-American discursive registers, from the biblical discourse of judaea capta, through the sentimental style of abolitionist writings and the quest plot all the way to the romantic sea novel, Douglass’s text inscribes itself into the Euro-American discourses of freedom and natural rights philosophy. In fact we can observe a development, within the narrative, from an initial imitation of sentimentalism to a militant natural rights discourse. ‘The Heroic Slave,’ which speaks of the physical liberation from slavery, at the same time performs an intellectual emancipation from the dominant abolitionist ideology (best represented by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). A negative side effect of this strategy of reinscription is, however, that Douglass caters to the Anglo-American discourse of hero worship, silences the participation of other African Americans in the mutiny, and does not encourage the readers to feel sympathy for the average slave (Yarborough 1990:180). Various critics have found fault with Douglass’s rhetorical utilization of the myth of the founding fathers—a myth that also appears in William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel (1853) (see Yarborough 1990:171). Richard Yarborough and Russ Castronovo regret that Douglass could think of no other way of authorizing black resistance than by invoking the myth of the founding fathers, considering the fact that the venerable ancestors of freedom were slaveholders (Yarborough 1990:180; Castronovo 1995:224). However, Douglass’s appeal to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence should not be confused with the practice of its drafters. America’s foundational document contains no word that would


justify the practice of slavery, and its language of universal human rights and the natural right to rebellion was unequalled at Douglass’s time as a written state document. Having chosen America as his home—and thereby differing from Martin Delany who promoted the idea of African colonization— Douglass had no other choice but to produce a compromise vision of the future. Unlike Madison Washington, he did not want to disappear from the history books. William Andrews finds in Douglass’s novella traces of what Henry Louis Gates, following Mikhail Bakhtin and W.E.B.DuBois, has called doublevoicedness (Andrews 1990:25). Indeed Douglass’s fictional strategy resembles Bakhtin’s notion of intentional hybridity, which Bakhtin regards as a specific quality of novelistic discourse. Thinking of the work of Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin writes: [The] novelistic hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented (as in rhetoric) but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only…two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are two sociolinguistic consciousnesses, two epochs, that, true, are not here unconsciously mixed (as in an organic hybrid), but that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance. (Bakhtin 1981:360)17 Translated into the terms of Raymond Williams, ‘The Heroic Slave’ enacts an ideological conflict between a dominant discourse (the nationalistic discourse of the founding fathers; the Protestant discourse of spiritual calling and conversion) and an emergent African American discourse that seeks to initiate a ‘consciousness’ of racial solidarity and equality (Williams 1977:121–7). Robert Stepto has noted the similarities between the biographies of Madison Washington and Frederick Douglass himself. He accordingly reads Washington as a mythical version or revision of Douglass. Both began their escape attempt in 1835, gained public attention as free men in 1841, and possess great oratorical skill: However, while Douglass caulked ships in Baltimore (including, perhaps, a slaver or two such as the Creole), Washington led black slaves in a ship’s revolt. Similarly, while Douglass escaped from slavery wearing a sailor’s suit, Washington was, in both a literal and figurative sense, a truer and more heroic sailor. (Stepto 1982:359) His mocking undertone aside, Stepto hints at the interesting fact that Douglass had indeed won his own freedom by dressing in a sailor’s ‘red


shirt,’ ‘widebrimmed hat, and loosely tied black cravat,’ imitating a sailor’s talk and walk and borrowing a sailor’s papers which enabled him to board first a train from Baltimore to Maryland, then a ferry across the Susquehanna, a train to Wilmington, Delaware, and finally a steamer to Philadelphia into freedom (Douglass 1993:114n.). His masquerade was successful because he was familiar with the habits of sailors, having worked as a caulker in the docks of Baltimore between 1836 and 1838, where he may have helped fitting out slave ships, as at least four such vessels were under construction in Baltimore during his presence there (Douglass 1993:114n.). Like Olaudah Equiano before him, Douglass’s path toward freedom unavoidably led through a maze of complicity with the system of Atlantic slavery. Masquerade on the high seas The house of Douglass’s master Mr. Covey stood within a few rods of Chesapeake Bay, as Douglass relates in his Narrative (1845). The ‘broad bosom’ of the bay, Douglass writes, was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition (Douglass 1993:74) While Douglass was translating his oceanic longing into revolutionary fiction, a man named Theophilus Conneau (or Theodore Canot) was dictating his lifestory into the pen of the Baltimore journalist Brantz Mayer. In fact, Conneau, who tells adventurous yarns from his twenty years life as a slaver, may have been captain or master of one of the clipper ships which Douglass had caulked in the docks of Baltimore before his escape. While Douglass used the ocean as the imaginary site of freedom from slavery, Conneau, in his Slaver’s Log Book, associates a different kind of freedom with the ‘swelling billows of the Atlantic.’ He gives vivid descriptions of his cat and mouse games with British cruisers. Born in Alexandria, Italy, in 1804, Theophilus Conneau was one of the most illustrious personalities of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century.18 Of mixed cultural background (his mother was Italian while his father had been the paymaster-general of Napoleon’s army), Conneau, who called himself Theodore Canot in an Anglo-American context, was well equipped for transatlantic business. He came to New England as a cabin boy, spoke four languages, and spent most of his life between Africa, where he entertained a slave fort, and different parts of the New World. When his A Slaver’s Log Book, or 20 Years’ Residence in Africa, compiled with


Mayer’s help and containing many of Mayer’s ‘improvements,’ appeared in print in 1854, Conneau could look back to an adventurous career as a slave trader.19 He was finally caught by a United States cruiser and taken to New York for trial in 1847. While he was released on bail, the trial was dismissed due to a lack of evidence: the slaver on which he had been caught was on the way to Africa, carrying lumber. Conneau went to Brazil and witnessed the dissolution of the slave-trading fleet there. Shortly after that his factory in Rio Pongo was destroyed by the British, which forced Conneau to offer his services as supercargo on the American slaver Chatsworth. Although he escaped the capture of that ship as it was just preparing to take on board ‘several hundred negroes,’ he appeared in Baltimore, having apparently decided to exchange the trade in human beings for the trade with lurid tales (Mannix and Cowley 1962:237). After the publication of his memoirs, he went to France where his family connections with the Napoleonic court helped him to procure an appointment as port collector at Nouméa, New Caledonia. Mannix and Cowley remark that Theophilus Conneau, if he had lived in the Renaissance, would have been a famous condottiere. They trace his failure to become rich from the slave trade to the fact that he entered the business ten years too late—at a time when it had developed into a complex international contraband network operated by syndicates with connections on four continents and in control of large amounts of capital (Mannix and Cowley 1962:238). In the year 1860, when Conneau died at Paris, another report by a person involved in the illegal trade of the mid-nineteenth century was published in New York. Richard (or Philip) Drake, whose family background was much less illustrious than as Conneau’s—he was orphaned as a little boy and grew up in the workhouse of ‘Stockford’, England—came to the United States in an immigrant ship. Beginning with his description of early childhood, Drake’s account continues in Dickensian fashion with vivid portrayals of the terrible misery on the immigrant ship. Arriving at Boston in 1802, Drake cannot find his uncle, who presumably dwells in that city, and begins an apprenticeship as an apothecary. He accidentally meets his uncle in the street and learns that his relative had long been absent because he had been on a slaving voyage. Drake joins his uncle on a voyage to Brazil—then the country in the Americas with the largest slave imports—from where they take a typical slave coast cargo to the Bight of Benin in 1805 (Drake 1927:189–93). This is the beginning of a fifty-year career as a slave trader, during which Drake experiences African captivity, as well as an impossible number of violent adventures—one of the reasons why his text is avoided as a source by historians. Like Conneau, Drake ends up in the United States in poverty and dictates his recollections to the Reverend Henry West of New York’s Protestant Home Mission in 1856. His autobiography, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler: being the


Autobiography of Capt. Richard Drake, an African Trader for Fifty Years —from 1807 to 1857, was published in New York in 1860 (Mannix and Cowley 1962:232–4). What is perhaps most remarkable about these two texts is their complete lack of remorse. Both Conneau’s Slaver’s Log and Drake’s Revelations are devoid of moralizing reflections on the inhumanity of their business. Unlike the eighteenthcentury British slave trader John Nelson, for example, Conneau and Drake undergo no visible conversion experience, neither do their texts betray any regret for what they have done. Drake’s account, allegedly dictated on his deathbed, has none of the qualities of a deathbed confession but ends with the conventional phrase ‘May God forgive me for my crimes and have mercy on me hereafter’ (Drake 1927:254). Conneau even goes as far as to blame the ‘philanthropists’ for the violence of the slave trade (after all it is they who make it so difficult these days), and throughout his text he defends the cruelties of the middle passage as necessary auxiliaries to the trade (Conneau 1976:81–8). His obsessive selfimage as a benevolent slave-dealer strongly contrasts with Drake’s no less remarkable passion for dwelling on detailed accounts of the violence of the slave trade— though the sensationalist representations are certainly in part the result of the Reverend West who, on the eve of the Civil War, sought to exploit Drake’s experiences for abolitionist purposes. The texts also differ in the self-representation of their authors: while Conneau is the omnipresent hero, Drake does not foreground himself in his text but instead concentrates on the details of the trade. Without being able to discuss these texts at length, it is interesting to see what they have to say about the practice of the illegal slave trade and the role played in it by the United States. Both texts contain extended accounts of shipboard masquerades on the high seas. Drake learns quite at the beginning of his career, in 1808, that Britain has decided to discontinue the slave trade with its colonies and that ‘henceforth no slaver could sail under the British flag.’ His uncle tells him that, as their ship is now a ‘Spanish’ vessel, they both will have to ‘sink our English birthrights and resign all claims to our larger estates in “Stockford”.’ Richard laughs at the joke (of course there were no estates in England) and proclaims his readiness ‘to sail under the Spanish flag as any other.’ Meeting a British cruiser, he dissimulates a Spanish identity and is invited to share the captain’s dinner (Drake 1927:209, 217). The situation changes in 1836 when Britain enters a bilateral treaty with Spain to suppress the trade, with Spain allowing British cruisers to search Spanish ships. Conneau, accordingly, spotting a cruiser as his slaver is approaching Barbados, asks the captain what flag to hoist, whereupon the captain


pointed to one of the drawers of his bureau and told me to take out the contents. I unlocked it and took out three flags well bundled up. Each contained a set of registers and documents to suit the St. Paul. Asked by the captain to choose, Conneau chooses the Spanish flag (the other two being those of Denmark and Portugal). He prevents the cruiser’s crew from boarding his vessel by firing his gun, hoisting all his sail, and making off. Three days later, the St. Paul safely lands its cargo at Santiago de Cuba (Conneau 1976: 197–8). Another time Conneau is less lucky. Detected in 1828 by a ‘John Bull’ (i.e., a British cruiser) while on his way to Cuba with a hold full of slaves which he had previously stolen from another slaver, he forgets that he is flying the Portuguese flag which had served him to avoid a previous encounter. As the British board his ship in spite of the slave traders’ musket fire, Conneau quickly strikes the flag. But the British captain looking over his Spanish papers finds them not to correspond with the Portuguese flag. Conneau is put under custody in order to be sent to Sierra Leone to be tried for piracy by the Mixed Commission, but as he tells us he sneaks away at night (Conneau 1976:161–4). His most daring charade is enacted one year later on a slaving voyage to Mozambique on a ship masquerading as a French war vessel, including uniforms and military ritual. Meeting a real Frenchman, they pretend to be Portuguese and avoid being boarded by claiming that they had smallpox on board. At Mozambique they manage to get a cargo of 800 slaves, but on the return trip they really do catch smallpox and end up throwing half their captives overboard (Conneau 1976:190–4). All of these events are related in the comic style of a picaresque novel, with Conneau parading his ingenuity in escaping the authorities and landing the blacks within view and under the gunfire of British cruisers (Conneau 1976: 212–13).20 The tales in Drake’s account are no less hairraising in content but lack the self-congratulating style of Conneau. The most conspicuous trait of Drake’s text is the gory detail with which he relates the multiple acts of violence against the slaves. The text is brimming with accounts of disease, hunger, storm and shipwreck, as well as fire or explosions on board, with the slaves invariably suffering a terrible death. One of the most gruesome examples is that of the Brazilian brig Gloria, ‘a staunch, handsome clipper craft’ (i.e., American made) with a crew of ‘desperadoes of the worst kind.’ The sailors, Drake claims, are constantly drunk, and the slaves, tightly packed in the hold, quickly begin to die. Drake claims to see ‘pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed.’ The ship loses onethird of its cargo (Drake 1927:242). The next trip of the Gloria, this time from Liberia, Drake calls ‘a climax of horror.’ They steal a cargo of slaves from a Portuguese ship and get 600 more at Accoa and Papoe. On their way to America they notice that the ‘roystering crew’ had forgotten to


exchange the salt water in the casks for fresh water. The blacks soon begin to die of thirst until ‘at last Captain Ruiz ordered the hatches down,’ planning to take his chances: ‘That night we caroused and satisfied our thirst while the negroes suffocated below.’ But vengeance followed on their heels: the next morning some crew members suddenly fall ill, their tongues swelling and growing black and their flesh turning yellow. More and more sailors die of yellow fever, and by and by Drake begins to notice a strange, fetid smell pervading the vessel and a low, heavy fog on deck, almost like steam, and then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes under hatches had generated the plague and it was the death-mist that I saw rising. He and two other survivors abandon the death ship and escape with the longboat to the Leeward Islands (Drake 1927:243–4). Although both authors give lurid descriptions of African savagery, including human sacrifice, witchcraft, and cannibalism, Drake, in keeping with his emphasis on the violence inflicted on the blacks, also mentions their readiness to revolt. While residing in Rio after having delivered 850 slaves there in 1817, Drake, as he claims, witnessed a black revolt and finds the house of his host besieged by slaves. In one of the more improbable turns of the plot, Drake recognizes the leader of the revolt, a ‘gigantic negro,’ as an old acquaintance from Africa, the Ashantee Quobah. With hoarse voice and eyes like two balls of fire Quobah, who turns out to be the head of the insurrection, tells Drake that he ‘is ready to die, but he will be a slave no more.’ Owing to his good connection, Drake is able to escape the ensuing massacre. He then informs the reader that the years 1817 and 1818 were marked by many other negro insurrections. In Barbadoes, Trinidad and St. Thomas, the whites lived in constant fear of massacre. This was said to be due to the numbers of savage Africans that were smuggled into the British colonies from Spanish and Portuguese islands. Quobah, he adds, was never taken by the Brazilians but ‘fled to the wild plains, with a few followers, and was either killed or adopted by the Indians,’ and he continues with a short account of the maroon societies of Barbados and other West Indian islands, who had their own flag and were plotting a general uprising of slaves, probably instigated by ‘negro agents from Hayti’ (Drake 1927:224–6). Published in New York in 1860, one year after Harper’s Ferry, the text could not fail to stir its readers’ fear of a slave revolt. Drake, who is much more explicit than Conneau about the contribution of the United States to the illegal trade, frequently mentions American-built slavers (Drake 1927:209, 212, 214, 247, 249, 253, 254) and tells of the


smuggling going on between the Spanish Caribbean and the southern United States via Florida and Texas. In the years after the United States abolished the slave trade, he writes, Florida ‘was a nursery for slavebreeders and many American citizens grew rich by trafficking in Guinea negroes and regularly smuggled them, in small parties, throughout the Southern States.’ To help smuggling slaves from Florida to Georgia, he writes, ‘gave me an opportunity to study the practical working of slavery in a civilized and democratic country and compare it with Cuba and the Brazilian empire’ (Drake 1927:239) The remark is followed by a list of Southern states and their specialties in slave-breeding which for a modern reader raise the specter of the child-breeding farm in Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As in other cases, Drake’s text betrays the fact that it has been assembled in an abolitionist context. Drake finally relates his seven-year employment as superintendent on a ‘fattening farm’ for slaves on an island off the coast of Honduras in the 1840s. He writes that the slaves who were brought into this barracoon came directly from Africa to be seasoned and smuggled into Florida and Texas: ‘Here a slave depot and farm were located to which cargoes were brought in American clippers from slave settlements near Cape Mesurado, Africa.’ They receive ‘Bozal blacks’ and teach them some broken Spanish and English to turn them into artificial ladinos and make them ready for the internal market.21 The jointstock company operating the barracoon, Drake claims, ‘was connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile houses and our island was visited almost weekly by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia or New Orleans.’ The seasoned slaves were taken to Texas or Cuba in small consignments and others to the Florida swamps where they were held ‘till wanted for the market and hundreds were also sold as runaways captured in the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State and our coasters were built in Maine’ (Drake 1927:253–5). Clippers from Baltimore, coasters from Maine, syndicates in New York and Philadelphia: the message of the text, regardless how much of it is true, is clearly directed at those Northern readers who still believed that the institutions of slavery and the slave trade were purely a Southern problem. Historians disagree on the issue of the reliability of these two texts. Warren Howard calls them both untrustworthy, while Mannix and Cowley, writing at the same time, regard Conneau’s text as a ‘headlong adventure story, marred here and there by boasting and self-justification, but generally accurate; indeed, it has been confirmed at many points by naval and legal records, English, French, and American.’ At the same time neither do they nor W.E.B. DuBois have doubts about the faithfulness of Drake’s revelations about the role of the United States in the trade and the ‘fattening farms,’ saying that this part of his report is confirmed by other evidence (Howard 1963:320; Mannix and Cowley 1962:233–5, 204–5; DuBois 1986:114). Hugh Thomas, writing more recently, uses Conneau as


a reliable source, although he doubts the complete faithfulness of his text. He aptly describes Conneau’s adventures as ‘worthy of a picaresque novel’ (Thomas 1998:814, 692). Thomas acts similarly with Drake, using his account of the seasoning depot but regarding the text as a whole as untrustworthy (761). There is reason to assume that Drake’s text has been discounted because of its outspokenness about the ruses, masquerades, and illegal activities of American slavers. There was much concern in the United States, both in the abolitionist North and the slaveholding South, to ignore his revelations about their cooperation beyond the national boundaries of the United States. All of this suggests that we should read these texts as fictionalized accounts, without giving them up as historical documents. The reason I am introducing them here is that although they form part of the cultural field of antebellum America, they were never so far included in discussions of slavery and the slave trade in American literature. Of course the memoirs of Drake and Conneau are neither quite ‘American’ nor quite ‘literature’ (in the sense of belles lettres), and yet they were published in the United States at a very crucial time, in the heated 1850s. We may be justified in asking why they appealed to the American reading public at a time when the Union was approaching its bursting point: did Drake’s sensationalist account of the horrors of slavery, apparently addressed to an abolitionist public, fulfill its function? Did Conneau’s defense of the slave trade, including his evocations of the legality of the peculiar institution in the United States, cater to the desires of a pro-slavery readership? Were their stories taken at face value in the 1850s and 1860s or were they merely read for their adventure? We will not be able to answer these questions. What can be said, however, is that these two texts allow us a glimpse of the nature and the contents of sailors’ yarns that were swapped on ships and in taverns around the Atlantic world, infrequently disseminating into ‘literature’ as they did into Melville’s account of the diabolical slave trader Jackson in Redburn, and, in a more indirect way, into the high-seas horror of Edgar Allan Poe. There is one more document to be considered in our context, a text published in the same year as Conneau’s Slaver’s Log Book but which describes the slavers’ national masquerades from the other side. In fact Andrew H.Foote, commander of the American squadron at Africa in 1850 and 1851, narrowly missed the chance to end Conneau’s illustrious career by catching the vessel Chatsworth in which Conneau was shipping and from which he, as we already know, escaped. In 1854 Foote published his report of his cruise off the coast of Africa, Africa and the American Flag. As the title implies, his text, which runs to 350 pages, gives an account of the misuse of the American flag in the illegal slave trade from Africa to America. Foote had been sent to Africa on the cruiser Perry in fulfillment of the United States’ part of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.


Much more than merely a military report, Africa and the American Flag is a historical account of American relations with Africa which combines eyewitness experience with facts assembled from other documents, mostly official reports and personal letters. Thus Foote cites the British Governor Buchanan who reports from Monrovia in 1839 that the ‘proud banner of freedom’ had never been used ‘so extensively…by those pirates upon liberty and humanity as at this season.’ Foote adds the case of the American schooner Euphrates, which had been boarded fifteen times, and three times sent to Sierra Leone, and escaped condemnation on account of her nationality, was brought into Monrovia by a British cruiser, and instantly seized by Governor Buchanan, for the purpose of sending her to the United States for trial, on suspicion of being engaged in the slave-trade. (Foote 1970:152–3) Buchanan acts similarly with the American sloop Campbell. Foote emphasizes that Buchanan’s action ‘was in direct violation of our doctrine as to the inviolability of American vessels by foreign interference; and he had no right to authorize or connive at English cruisers interfering in any degree with such vessels.’ It is thus the purpose of his report, Foote writes, to show the extent to which the American flag has been used in the traffic; and to those who have patriotism and humanity enough to vindicate the rights of that flag against foreign authority, and resist its prostitution to the slave-trade, it will conclusively prove the necessity of a well-appointed American squadron being permanently stationed on the west coast of Africa. (Foote 1970:153) His purpose is to protect the American flag, as the United States ‘never has, and never will surrender, the inviolability of her own flag to a foreign power’ (Foote 1970:215–16). Only a few decades after the War of 1812 and the opening of the seas to free trade, Americans feared Britain’s intervention in its commerce. Foote therefore vehemently opposes the idea of a British right to search American ships or ships flying the American flag, fearing that in that case legal traders would be molested, and American commerce suffer materially from a power which keeps afloat a force of armed vessels, more than four times the number of the commissioned men-of-war of the United States. The deck of an American vessel under its flag, is the territory of the United States,


and no other authority but that of the United States must ever be allowed to exercise jurisdiction over it. (Foote 1970:300–1) This is precisely the argumentation which the United States government had used in the Creole case, and which had finally prevailed over the abolitionists’ natural rights argument. Thus the ‘postcolonial’ conflict between Britain and the United States considerably prolonged the age of the slave trade—a fierce irony considering the principles which the American flag ought to stand for. To be sure, the American squadron was small enough; it merely consisted of four or five ships which had to patrol the whole length of the African coast (Howard 1963:41). Once a slaver had passed them it was free to use the American flag on the high seas and on the coasts of Brazil and Cuba to fend off British attempts at search. In the years 1843 to 1853, as Foote reports, only nine slavers were taken by the American squadron, and none of them was condemned in a United States court; the ‘pirates’ were released on bail which they used for escape, or they were acquitted ‘because of technical flaws in the evidence against them’ (Soulsby 1933: 134). Foote describes in detail the masquerade carried out on the high seas: Every thing was reduced to a regular mercantile system in carrying on the slave-trade. We have the schooner ‘Hugh Boyle,’ from New York, with a crew of nine American citizens, coming to the coast, and having as passengers a crew of ten ‘citizens of the world,’ or from somewhere else. She is American, with an American crew and papers, until she gets her slaves on board; then her American citizens become passengers, and the ‘citizens of the world’ take their place as the crew, till she gets her slaves into Cuba. (Foote 1970:157) Foote also quotes extensively from communications of United States ministers in Brazil (the main destination of the slave trade in the 1830s and 1840s, until its suppression around 1850). Mr. Proffit, for example, reports in 1844 that the slave-trade is almost entirely carried on under our flag, in Americanbuilt vessels, sold to slave-traders here, chartered for the coast of Africa, and there sold, or sold here—delivered on the coast. And, indeed, the scandalous traffic could not be carried on to any great extent, were it not for the use made of our flag, and the facilities given for the chartering of American vessels, to carry to the


coast of Africa the outfit for the trade, and the material for purchasing slaves. (Foote 1970:221) By that time, as we know from other sources, New York had advanced to become the main harbor for fitting out slave ships, which were built in New York, Baltimore, and all the major ports of New England. One year later, Mr. Wise, United States Minister in Rio de Janeiro, becomes even more explicit in a letter to Secretary of State John Calhoun when he writes that the only mode of carrying on that trade between Africa and Brazil, at present, involves our laws and our moral responsibilities, as directly and fully as it does those of this country itself. Our flag alone gives requisite protection against the right of visit, search, and seizure; and our citizens, in all the characters of owners, consignees, of agents, and of masters and crews of our vessels, are concerned in the business, and partake of the profits of the African slave-trade, to and from the ports of Brazil, as fully as the Brazilians themselves…. In fact, without the aid of our own citizens and our flag, it could not be carried on with success at all. (Foote 1970:222) The message must of course have been completely lost on Mr. Calhoun, one of the most passionate defenders of slavery. A general trait of Foote’s text is that most of his information is secondhand, derived from careful study of the extant diplomatic correspondence or from his conversations with the commanders of British cruisers whom he met during his stay in Africa. The British, being much more numerous, had a large repertoire of tales of high-seas masquerade. The stories also show that it was practically impossible to board a slaver without risking diplomatic difficulties. One British captain, for example, tells Foote of his visit to the slave barque Navarre, which had originally been seized under the Brazilian flag but was now flying the Stars and Stripes. The British boarding master informed the man who claimed to be master of the Navarre that it was his duty to send him to the American squadron to have his case investigated. Thereupon, the master immediately went on deck and ordered the mate to haul down the American ensign—to throw it overboard—and to hoist their proper colors. The American ensign was hauled down and thrown overboard by the mate, who immediately hoisted the Brazilian ensign. A man then came on deck from below, saying that he was


captain of the vessel; that she was Brazilian property, and fully fitted for the slave-trade. (Foote 1970:265) Foote extensively demonstrates the legal difficulty involved in boarding a foreign vessel, even if it was full with slaves—unlike the Navarre which was readily equipped for the slave trade, with a slave deck, water casks, and shackles. He relates the case of the Veloz Passageira, a Spanish slaver apprehended by a British cruiser and boarded after a thirty-hour chase. They found the ship filled with 562 slaves tightly stowed in the hold and ‘branded like sheep.’ As the British boarding party look down at them, they begin to shout and clap their hands, shaking and kissing the hands of the British. The mariners bring the slaves up on deck and give them water to drink. Nevertheless, the British have to let the slaver go because it claims Brazilian identity. At the time of seizure, Brazil had abolished the trade north of the equator but the southern trade was still legal according to Brazilian law. Although the slaves themselves state that they had originally come from parts of Africa north of the line, and although the British officers suspect the ship of carrying false papers, they have to let her go after nine hours of investigation. They leave the Veloz Passageira at night, followed by the cries and shrieks of the slaves who had been so close to liberation (Foote 1970:229–30). One of the few direct encounters reported by Foote is that with the ship Martha from New York. The Martha was Foote’s major catch, ‘the largest slaver that had been on the coast for many years’ (Foote 1970:292). In June 1850 the Perry gives chase to the Martha who, assuming the cruiser to be British (the Perry has no colors flying), hoists the Stars and Stripes. When the slaver’s crew detect their mistake, they quickly hoist Brazilian colors, and at the same time the boarding party see that something is thrown overboard. The object turns out to be the Martha’s writing desk, ‘containing sundry papers and letters, identifying the captain as an American citizen; also indicating the owner of three-fifths of the vessel to be an American merchant, resident in Rio de Janeiro.’ The Martha is found to be fully equipped for slaving, carrying large quantities of water, flour and beans for slave food, iron bars and spoons. Foote orders a prize crew on board the Martha to escort her to New York. There she was later condemned in the United State District Court, but the captain escaped while out on bail and the foreign crew members had to be discharged as they were ‘being regarded as beyond our jurisdiction.’ Only the American mate was sentenced to two years in prison but was released before completing his term (Foote 1970:286–90; Howard 1963:227). The writing desk, which Foote’s people fished out of the sea, contained ‘curious revelations of the agency of some American citizens engaged in the slave-trade. These papers implicated a number of persons, who are little


suspected of ever having participated in such a diabolical traffic,’ including a respectable ‘citizen of New York’ (Foote 1970:290). Andrew Foote ends his report with a gruesome vision of supernatural revenge for the crimes of the slave trade. The passage, which reveals the poetic qualities apparent everywhere in the text, reads like a response to Arthur Mervyn’s implicit crossover between the discourses of the Black Atlantic and yellow fever: Strange and frightful maladies have been engendered by the cruelties perpetrated within the hold of a slaver. If any disease affecting the human constitution were brought there, we may be sure that it would be nursed into mortal vigor in these receptacles of filth, corruption and despair. Crews have been known to die by the fruit of their own crime, and leave ships almost helpless. They have carried the scourge with them. The coast fever of Africa, bad enough where it had its birth, came in these vessels, and has assumed perhaps a permanent abode in the western regions of the world. No fairer sky or healthier climate were there on earth, than in the beautiful bay, and amid the grand and picturesque scenery of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. But it became a haunt of slavers, and the dead of Africa floated on the glittering waters, and were tumbled upon the sands of its harbor. The shipping found, in the hot summer of 1849, that death had come with the slavers. Thirty or forty vessels were lying idly at their anchors, for their crews had mostly perished. The pestilence swept along the coast of that empire with fearful malignity. Cuba for the same crime met the same retribution. Cargoes of slaves were landed to die, and brought the source of their mortality ashore, vigorous and deadly. The fever settled there in the beginning of 1853, and came to our country, as summer approached, in merchant vessels from the West Indies. At New Orleans, Mobile, and other places it spread desolation, over which the country mourned. Let it be remembered that it is never even safe to disregard crime. (Foote 1970:384–5) Conneau’s Slaver’s Log Book, Drake’s Revelations, and Foote’s Africa and the Americanw Flag are texts of the Black Atlantic, with much of their action taking place on the ocean, or within the triangle United StatesAfrica-Latin America/Caribbean; their themes include stories of drowning, of castaways, of slaves suffocating in the hold and dying in fires on ships, or of slaves being deserted by their potential rescuers because of a legislation that could not live up to the ruses and masquerades of the transatlantic slave trade. They represent the Atlantic as a site where history, a history of greed and human suffering, actually takes place—a history that remained


invisible to the American public and yet left its mark on the literary texts of the antebellum period, as the following sections will show. ‘Shaving Time’: Benito Cereno and the multiple uses of national symbols If a chart of the Atlantic is spread out, and a line drawn from the Cape Verde Islands towards the south-eastern coast of Brazil; if we then pass to the Cape of Good Hope and draw another from that point by the island of St. Helena, crossing the former north of the equator, the great tracks of commerce will be traced. (Foote 1970:14–15) This imaginary cross in the middle of the Atlantic is the area, Foote points out at the beginning of his history of oceanic masquerade, where vessels from different ends of the Atlantic world would meet. The ‘wide triangular space’ between the homeward bound line and the African coast, however, is the ‘region of crime, suffering, cruelty and death.’ Ships running out from the African coast travel within these lines on the chart: No one can tell what they contain from the graceful hull, wellproportioned masts, neatly trimmed yards, and gallant bearing of the vessel. This deceitful beauty may conceal wrong, violence, and crime —the theft of living men, the foulness and corruption of the steaming slave-deck, and the charnel-house of wretchedness and despair. It is difficult in looking over the ship’s side to conceive the transparency of the sea. The reflection of the blue sky in these tropic regions colors it like an opaque sapphire, till some fish startles one by suddenly appearing far beneath, seeming to carry daylight down with him into the depths below. One is then reminded that the vessel is suspended over a transparent abyss. There for ages has sunk the darkskinned sufferer from ‘the horrors of the middle passage,’ carrying that ghastly daylight down with him, to rest until ‘the sea shall give up its dead,’ and the slaver and his merchant come from their places to be confronted with their victim. (Foote 1970:16) Admiral Foote was evidently a well-read man. The above passage suggests that he may have picked up a copy of Moby-Dick between his return to the United States and the publication of Africa and the American Flag in 1854. Or it may be that he simply shared the same symbolic universe with his fellow mariner Herman Melville, who published his gigantic novel in 1851.


In the chapter entitled ‘Brit,’ Ishmael muses about the untamable power of the ocean which, [like] the savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs… dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. He goes on to consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure…as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. (MD 235–6) It is this half-known life, this ‘blackness of darkness’ lurking beyond the ‘pasteboard mask’ of the ocean’s bewitching surface which Ahab, and Melville’s novel itself, struggle in vain to encounter face to face. In the chapter ‘The Doubloon,’ moreover, the crew of the Pequod stare at the Ecuadorian gold coin, nailed on the mainmast by Ahab as a reward for the first sailor to sight the white whale. The mariners, who revere the coin ‘as the white whale’s talisman,’ read the symbols engraved on it in various allegorical ways: while Ahab regards the doubloon as mirroring back ‘his own mysterious self,’ Starbuck sees in it ‘Belshazzar’s awful writing,’ Stubb interprets it in terms of the zodiac and the Massachusetts almanach, and so on, until Pip approaches. Pip ‘has been watching all of these interpreters,’ and instead of reading the signs on the doubloon he comments on the others’ attempts to interpret them. In his crazy-witty way, he declines three times: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (MD 359– 62). Harold Beaver reads Pip’s talk as his ‘vindication of Kant, or rather of Berkeley’—of the philosophical principle esse est percipi: that it is the perception that counts, not the unattainable thing itself (Beaver 1972: 885 n.545). Michael Rogin, by contrast, who foregrounds the contemporaneity of Melville’s writings with those of Marx, suggests a relationship between the novel’s obsession with unreliable perception and bourgeois-capitalist society’s fetishization of the commodity as Marx describes it. Indeed the mariners do endow the material object of the doubloon ‘with magical, redemptive power, detaching [it] …from the human labor that produced’ it, just as Ahab fetishizes the whale, ‘assigning to it a power reserved (in the Calvinist view) to God’ (Rogin 1983:126).


The material reality masked by the spectacle of the gold coin is the colonial economy in which Spanish doubloons functioned as a major currency—a fact of which Defoe was as aware in Robinson Crusoe as Melville in Benito Cereno. Shortly after the revelation of the real state of affairs on the slave ship San Dominick, and in a moment that is revealing his own character, the Yankee Captain Amasa Delano orders his sailors to enter the enemy ship: The more to encourage the sailors, they were told that the Spanish captain considered his ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons. Take her, and no small part should be theirs. The sailors replied with a shout. (Melville 1970:286)22 Acting less as an honorable merchantman than a privateer and pirate (his chief mate had been a ‘privateer’s-man’), Delano, who had previously offered to buy Babo for ‘fifty doubloons’ (BC 248), invites his sailors to grab the foreign cargo ‘worth…a thousand doubloons,’ including the rebellious slaves: ‘All loose fish,’ Delano’s maritime codex seems to say. Ahab’s sailors, by contrast, stare at the doubloon in a purely allegorical manner, apparently having lost all touch with the historical realities of the colonial system of which it forms a part. Benito Cereno, as Moby-Dick before it, is concerned with the phenomenological problem of the limitations of human perception. Unlike Moby-Dick, however, Benito Cereno resists attempts to read it in purely philosophical terms. Published in 1855 at a period of mounting apprehensions about the possibility of slave revolt and civil war, the invisibility Benito Cereno speaks of not only is that of the slave trade itself but also refers to the widespread incapacity, even among abolitionists, to perceive the full humanity of Africans, including their capacity for selfdefense. Most negroes, Delano thinks, thereby expressing a widely shared belief, ‘are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction.’ Having watched ‘some freeman of color’ passing by his door many a time, and approving of the ‘docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of [the negro’s] limited mind,’ Delano ‘took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs’ (BC 264–5). The scene which excites Delano’s notions about the ‘natural’ qualities of the African race is the famous shaving scene, in which the Yankee captain witnesses what seems to him the domestic tranquility of the black servant Babo acting as hairdresser to his master Don Benito in the cuddy of Cereno’s ship the San Dominick. After announcing to his ‘master’ that it is ‘shaving


time,’ Babo flourishes comb, brush, and especially the shaving knife so skillfully that he accidentally cuts the skin of Don Benito’s throat and brings Cereno close to a heart attack. Delano, who watches Don Benito trembling under Babo’s razor, is peculiarly reminded of an execution, but as in other cases his association does not grow into an outright suspicion that something might indeed be amiss on the San Dominick. What disconcerts him more is the fact that Babo uses a flag as a shaving towel. Having previously observed the San Dominick’s disorderly flag locker, ‘exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled,’ Delano is not a little surprised to find that, as the agitation of the Spaniard had a little loosened the bunting from around him…one broad fold swept curtain-like over the chair-arm to the floor, revealing, amid a profusion of armorial bars and groundcolors—black, blue, yellow—a closed castle in a blood-red field diagonal with a lion rampant in a white. ‘The castle and the lion,’ exclaimed Captain Delano—‘why, Don Benito, this is the flag of Spain you use here. It’s well it’s only I, and not the King, that sees this,’ he added, with a smile, ‘but’—turning towards the black—‘it’s all one, I suppose, so the colors be gay;’ which playful remark did not fail somewhat to tickle the negro. (BC 266) As Delano and the reader are soon going to learn, Babo’s mirth is not excited by his ‘natural’ love of bright colors but rather by the sardonic symbolism of letting Cereno’s blood drop on the royal standard of Spain. The shaving scene is the climax of an extended masquerade, masterminded by Babo, in which the Africans, having taken possession of the slave ship but now confronted with the danger of reenslavement from Delano and his ship the Bachelor’s Delight, act the parts of slaves to deceive the American captain. Although the idea ‘flashes’ across Delano’s mind that ‘possibly master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out, both in word and deed, nay, to the very tremor of Don Benito’s limbs, some juggling play before him,’ Delano ‘speedily banished’ the notion as he cannot think of a reason why he should be the object of such a charade. He is easily deceived as he is incapable of thinking that Africans could master any more ingenious action than that of hairdressers and valets. The shaving scene, as Michael Rogin has argued, epitomizes the stage character of Melville’s tale (Rogin 1983:209–10)—of its first part, that is: the second part consists of a set of fictional legal depositions which promise to explain the action, while the third part relates the final conversation between Delano and Cereno, as well as Babo’s and Cereno’s deaths in Lima. As the reader (but hardly Amasa Delano) will recognize by the end of the narrative, Babo knows precisely what he is doing as he drapes the Spanish


captain in his national colors in order to carry out a mock execution on him. Cereno is fundamentally transformed by the experience: until his death in the Lima monastery three months after the court trial, he feels haunted by Babo’s shadow. He dies under the empty gaze of his African antagonist, whose head, ‘that hive of subtlety,’ has been ‘fixed on a pole in the Plaza’ after his execution by the Spanish colonial authorities (BC 307). Babo’s carnivalesque imitation of social relations, which fulfills all the requirements of Homi Bhabha’s definition of colonial mimicry, can only function because of Delano’s inherent racism and unsuspecting mind. As Delano realizes during his final interview with Cereno, a stronger mental ‘acuteness’ of the real situation on the San Dominick ‘might have cost me my life’ (BC 305). He is unable to ‘strike through the mask’ of Babo’s charade because he thinks that whites are ‘by nature...the shrewder race’ and that blacks are ‘too stupid’ to be complicit in a piratical scheme—of which he therefore suspects Don Benito. But he then revises this opinion and decides that not even a Spaniard, whether a ‘true hidalgo’ or some ‘lowborn adventurer, masquerading as an oceanic grandee,’ would be ‘so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes’ (BC 240, 254). Delano’s thoughts reveal his mind as being infused with the ideology of a ‘benevolent’ racism, a mind whose affection for a black man is based on the knowledge of his own racial superiority and whose ‘knowledge’ of Africans includes the polygenetic notion, circulated by the ‘scientific’ literature of Melville’s day, that Africans belonged to a different ‘species.’ The narrative frame within which Delano’s interior monologue is presented, as James Kavanagh has shown, functions to distance the reader from Delano’s racialist ideas. Like Delano, who, in the final denouement, sees the Africans, ‘with mask torn away,’ flourish their hatchets and knives ‘in ferocious piratical revolt,’ the reader may feel the scales dropping from his eyes in realizing that the Africans not only had been smart enough to carry out a slave ship revolt but were able to deceive the ‘shrewd’ American captain for several hours in an altogether spontaneous shipboard masque (Kavanagh 1986:357; BC 284). The greatest provocation of Benito Cereno, Kavanah writes (quoting Arvin Newton), lies in the fact that it does not remain a ‘discourse about savages,’ and the primitive ‘terror of blackness’ they supposedly represent. It becomes, rather, a discourse that parodies the ‘civilized’ mind itself, the mind of a specific social formation: the ‘straight-thinking’ Yankee mind with whose image our culture is so familiar. In this sense, ‘Benito Cereno’ can be read as a discourse about discourse. Expressed in terms Althusser formulated in Lenin and Philosophy, the novella ‘perceives ‘from the inside, by an internal distance, the ideology in


which it is held’’ (Kavanagh 1986:357). As a ‘readerly’ text that performs on the reader his or her own incapacity to look beyond the racial ideology of Euro-American culture, Benito Cereno represents an almost postmodernist narrative experiment. It exposes the reader to a narrative situation of ‘stream of consciousness’-like sequences, whose free indirect discourse interacts with highly symbolic representations of events outside Delano’s limited point of view. These events are rendered in terms of ambivalence, symbolized by the color ‘gray’ Mentioned four times in the opening paragraphs of the text, ‘greyness’ envelops the appearance of the mysterious San Dominick while announcing ‘Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come’ (BC 217). Melville’s double-voiced trickster narrative, which plays foul tricks on the reader while purporting to simply represent the historical event of a slave ship mutiny, contrasts Delano’s racism with a cluster of semantic references to African grandeur that is easily missed by the unattentive reader—and has been missed by many critics accusing the novella, and its author, of racism. In his metaphorical references to the blacks on board, as Gloria Horsley-Meacham and Carolyn Karcher have shown, Melville draws upon a discourse on the splendors of African antiquity that challenges antebellum culture’s prevalent racist dogma (Horsley-Meacham 1991:232). ‘While a rhetoric simulating Delano’s mental processes continually translates straightforward observations into racist stereotypes,’ Carolyn Karcher writes, ‘a complex of metaphors…simultaneously recreates an alternative reality, rooted in a very different understanding of African culture’ (Karcher 1992:197; cf. Karcher 1980:140–1). Thus the narrative voice of Benito Cereno produces a tension between the limited point of view of Delano and an imagery that sharply contrasts with Delano’s benevolent racism in comparing the blacks, whom Delano regards as primitive savages, with the sphinx, Nubian sculptors, and the sculptures guarding Egyptian tombs (BC 222, 269, 274). Benito Cereno’s discourse of African splendor reproduces a contemporary debate about the African origin of ancient civilization and counteracts the dominant racialism of white supremacists such as Samuel G. Morton or Josiah C. Nott with a ‘subterranean network of allusions to the age of African grandeur’ (Horsley-Meacham 1991:242 passim).23 Karcher concludes that a ‘close analysis of Melville’s narrative technique uncovers countless examples of the ways he challenges readers to resist Delano’s dangerous distortions and to reexamine Africans in the light of their native culture, as described in contemporary travel accounts and abolitionist tracts’ (Karcher 1992:199). In addition, Melville transforms the Africans of the real Amasa Delano’s original narrative into Ashantee warriors, who were considered particularly proud, warlike and mysterious (Horsley-Meacham 1991:228–9). Gloria Horsley-Meacham refers to this double-voiced narrative strategy as Melville’s ‘art of truth-telling’ (abstracted from Melville’s comments on


Hawthorne; Horsley-Meacham 1991:226). The truth Melville wants to tell aims beyond a subtle deconstruction of the contemporary racist mind. As various critics have shown, he manipulates the historical dates, as well as the names and events of his direct source, Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston 1817), for the purpose of a complex truth-telling about the interconnections of New World history. He renames Delano’s ship, the Tryall, as the San Dominick—a name that evokes a whole cluster of associations, from Santo Domingo, Columbus’s headquarters in the Caribbean and the first colony to receive slaves from Africa, all the way to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Saint Domingue (Franklin 1992:231). The ‘dark figures’ which Delano sees moving on board as he approaches the foreign ship look to him from the distance like ‘Black Friars pacing the cloisters’; the ship, similarly, ‘When made signally visible on the verge of the leaden-hued swells, with the shrouds of fog here and there raggedly furring her, appeared like a whitewashed monastery after a thunderstorm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees’ (BC 219). The reference is again to Dominicans, also called Black Friars, and more specifically to Bartolome de Las Casas, the Dominican friar who, in his attempt to save the Native American population from genocide, reputedly instigated the deportation of Africans to America (Franklin 1992:231–2; Sundquist 1993: 136).24 These allusions to the rosy dawn of American colonization in the sixteenth century have another semantic layer superimposed upon them, which is reinforced by Melville’s backdating of the event from 1817 to 1799—a period when Saint Domingue, the French half of Hispaniola, ‘became the vanguard of world revolution as the black slaves interpreted the message of the American and French revolutions precisely in the way most dreaded by the plantation owners of the South and the French Caribbean colonies’ (Franklin 1992:233; see also Adler 1992: 89–90). In addition to this, as Carolyn Karcher argues, Benito Cereno uses materials from the trial resulting from the capture of the Spanish slaver Amistad which had been apprehended off the coast of New York by the American Captain Gedney in 1839.25 Originally on its way from one Cuban port to another, the Amistad was redirected after a slave ship rebellion. While the Africans, led by a man called Singue, demanded to be brought back to Africa, the skipper secretly navigated the ship toward the North American coast at night. The uncommon capture of African slaves in New England in 1839 greatly excited the press and triggered a few spontaneous dramatic productions, such as a play called The Long Low Black Schooner26 and another one called The Black Schooner or the Pirate Slaver Armistad,27 which ran before packed audiences. But abdove all it initiated a series of court trials which lasted two years, and a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Spain, which lasted much longer. The courts were caught between the extreme demands of abolitionists for the


liberation of the Africans, on the one hand, and Spain’s for the return of Spanish ‘property’ (meaning the slaves), on the other.28 The key issues that were debated during the trials were, first, whether the United States courts had jurisdiction over the Africans at all; second, whether the Africans should be regarded as persons or as property; and, third, whether they were ladinos (i.e., born or resident in America since the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade), or bozales (i.e., imported directly from Africa). The United States Supreme Court finally decided that they had beyond a doubt come directly from Africa, that their capture by the Portuguese slaver Tecora (from which they were then transshipped to the Amistad) had been illegal according to Spanish law, and that they would therefore have to be returned to Africa. Carolyn Karcher argues convincingly that Babo, but especially his coconspirator, the gigantic Atufal, shares many qualities imputed to Singue in the popular press: his nobility, his intelligence, and his leadership qualities (Karcher 1992:202). Perhaps in implicit response to the popular heroization of noble Africans, which Douglass echoes in his representation of Madison Washington, Melville gave Babo a short stature, ‘a slight frame, inadequate to that which it held’ (BC 397)—as if to say that true heroism lies not in the body but in the mind. Benito Cereno’s allusions to the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, semantically fused with references to two successful black rebellions in the New World, betrays Melville’s recognition that slavery was hemispheric and that its fullest literary representation as well as its fullest political critique required a view that embraced several cultures, several nations, much as DuBois was later to recognize that the attack on American racial injustice and the reconstruction of African American cultural history had to be pursued in a diasporic Pan-African framework. (Sundquist 1993:136) If we add Benito Cereno’s discourse of African civilization (both Egyptian and Ashantee), Melville’s novella, whose action is set in the Pacific, can be seen to document the ‘rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation’ which Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993:4). Inscribed with the history of the triangle trade, the text can be identified as a counterpart to Douglass’s ‘Heroic Slave,’ published two years earlier. But while Douglass, like Stowe and in spite of his gradual emancipation from her abolitionist sentimentalism, partly employed the mode of romance in order to produce a fiction of empowerment, Melville’s novella remains strangely detached and coolly analytical. Eric Sundquist suggests reading the novella in terms of what Bakhtin calls a chronotope, an aesthetic site where time and space ‘thicken,’ ‘take


on flesh’ (Sundquist 1993:143).29 But with its very particular juxtaposition of different times and geographical spaces, a juxtaposition which violates and subverts the normal order of (realist or romantic) narrative, Melville’s method gets much closer to what Michel Foucault has called heterotopia: a radical disruption of conventional orders as is found, for example, in some modernist and postmodernist fiction.30 Read in terms of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Benito Cereno is a text that deconstructs the fables of utopian discourse, which ‘run with the very grain of language,’ by constructing a discursive ‘zone’ that ‘desiccate[s] speech, stop[s] words in their tracks, contest[s] the very possibility of grammar at its source.’ The novella’s rhetorical effect is, as in the postmodern heterotopia, to ‘dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences’ (Foucault 1973:xviii). As in the psychical function of overdetermination, then, the novella fuses past, present, and future until they seem, as they do to Delano in his moment of recognition, ‘one’ (BC 283). This fusion—or heterotopian play —is rendered in terms of what Melville calls ‘enchantment’—or what I will call, following Freud, the uncanny. As soon as the true character of the strange vessel is plain to Delano—he identifies the San Dominick, in a language that betrays his consent to the practice of the slave trade, as a ‘merchantman…carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another’—he is struck by the ‘woolly’ looking spars, ropes, and bulwarks of the ship. Determining that the ship’s mutilated state must result from long unaquaintance with the scraper, tar and the brush,’ it appears to him that ‘her ribs’ were ‘put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones’ (BC 219–20). The biblical reference, which Henry Dumas would pick up in an extraordinary rewriting of Benito Cereno,31 is structurally repeated by the revelation, at the end of the first part, of the San Dominick’s new figurehead, which was formerly hid by a white canvas. As the pseudolegalistic deposition of Part II of the novella reveals, the original figurehead of the San Dominick had been an ‘image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World.’ After subduing the Spanish crew, the Africans, in a spectacular symbolic act, had exchanged the figurehead for the skeleton of the slave-owner Don Alexandro Aranda, prepared for that purpose by the Ashantee warriors with the skill derived from traditional West African burial practice (BC 294, 300–1). The skeleton, together with the chalked comment ‘Follow your leader,’ is revealed during the agitation following Delano’s moment of recognition. As the fighting ends, and the Africans have either been killed or surrendered, the San Dominick, [with] creaking masts, …came heavily round to the wind; the prow slowly swinging into view of the boats, its skeleton gleaming in the horizontal moonlight, and casting a gigantic ribbed shadow upon the


water. One extended arm of the ghost seemed beckoning the whites to avenge it. (BC 287). The imagery of death, from the skeletal hull of the slave ship to the skeleton of the slave trader, hovers over the action of Babo’s masque like a Gothic stage device—again a reminder of the stage-like character of the first part of the novella, and perhaps a distant echo of the popular Black Schooner plays Melville may have seen in New York on his return from Liverpool in 1839. As Eric Sundquist argues, the display of Aranda’s skeleton at a site formerly inhabited by an image of Columbus joins the bones of the discoverer—which were concurrently the object of an extended series of displacements—with the ‘millions of slaves who had sailed to their deaths in dark cargo holds or, if they survived the middle passage, under a brutal regime of field labor in the New World. Of them is built Benito Cereno’s decaying ship’ (Sundquist 1993:138). The first and longest part of the novella, whose action begins with a skeletal hull and ends with the revelation of the slave trader’s skeleton, is rendered in the metaphorical terms of ‘enchantment’—Melville’s aesthetic realization of the uncanny. Large and populous ships like the San Dominick to Delano generally ‘hoard from view their interiors.’ To this is added the fact that ‘the living spectacle’ they contain, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave. (BC 221–2) Delano continues to be wrapped in apprehension when he observes the ‘black wizards of Ashantee’ enigmatically striking up with their hatchets (actually a warning to a Spanish sailor who tries to communicate with Delano). Even the San Dominick’s sails seem ‘enchanted’ to Delano now, and he feels a ‘ghostly dread’ of Don Benito and the other ‘phantoms’ (BC 244). Pacing the mossy and damp deck of the Spanish ship, Delano feels enchanted again as a chance phantom cat’s paw—an islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed— as this ghostly cat’s paw came fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights—all closed like coppered eyes of the coffined—and the state-cabin door, once


connecting with the gallery, even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid. (BC 252) The narrative consistently translates Delano’s dreamlike thoughts, his imaginary condensation of past and present, into the language of the literary Gothic, with the effect that the whole narrative is dominated by a sense of gloom—of ‘[shadows] present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come’ (BC 217). More precisely, the temporality which Melville’s narrative produces is the temporality of the uncanny—which Freud describes as the frightening return of old and long familiar knowledges. Once familiar, but now partly forgotten, historical knowledges make their return through the multiple semantic layers of Benito Cereno’s narrative. Benito Cereno’s ‘thick’ or complex temporality, in which the past can never be quite superscribed by the present, in which ‘past, present, and future seem one,’ is thus less the aesthetic equivalent of a view of history as a continuum, as Joyce Sparer Adler argues (Adler 1992:91), than a quite astounding literary translation of Walter Benjamin’s view of history as a present ‘shot through’ with glimpses of past events, in which the past ‘flits across’ or ‘flares up in a moment of danger’—just as images of past Spanish splendor ‘flitted through’ Delano’s mind as he walks the San Dominick’s mossy deck (Benjamin 1977:253; BC 252).32 Anticipating Benjamin’s theory of history by more than eighty years, Melville’s art of historical truth-telling is futureoriented, its images of the past conjured up in a moment of danger. Like John Brown’s ‘gaunt shadow’ on the green of Shenandoah, Aranda’s skeleton, whose ‘gigantic ribbed shadow’ falls upon the surrounding ocean, functions as a premonition of the Civil War—which identifies Benito Cereno as a postcolonial text as much as an antebellum one. Delano, of course, sees none of all this. Struggling to maintain a reality that confirms his own racial and social power and authority, he strives, ‘by ignoring the symptoms, to get rid of the malady’ (BC 255; Adler 1992:85). During their last meeting in Lima after the execution of the conspirators, Delano spreads Yankee optimism in trying to cheer up the melancholy Don Benito: ‘the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.’ But Cereno dejectedly replies, ‘Because they have no memory…because they are not human.’ With increasing astonishment about Cereno’s stubbornness, Delano finally cries out, ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?,’ to which the Spaniard replies, The negro’ (BC 306). Delano not only is blind to the dangers of impending race conflict; unlike Cereno, who dies a broken man, he also seems able to forget that he has just witnessed a portentous display of Africans’ capacity to plot and carry out their own liberation. But like the blue sea and the blue sky, Delano has


‘no memory’ and no sense of history: his sense of history resembles that of Nietzsche’s cattle who ‘do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,’ who ‘leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn to night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored’ (Nietzsche 1967:115). As Michael Rogin has argued, Delano instantly translates his traumatic experience into violence, which functions to protect him from being affected by what he has seen (Rogin 1983:218). As we have seen above, Delano spurs on his men with promises of a rich prize, including African slaves and Spanish doubloons. He has no scruples to lie to his men in his desire to get hold of the ‘first class’ Spanish merchantman ‘carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight’ (BC 219; my emphasis).33 Delano thus unthinkingly participates ‘in a system that exploits human life for profit by capturing the escaping slaves’—a trait that reveals as much about the practices of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘privateers’ as about those of the year 1799, in which the story is set (Nelson 1992:116). Delano’s attack on the San Dominick reveals him as a figure that spans the period from the history of seventeenth-century buccaneers to the more subtle piracies of the 1850s. As Bruce Franklin has found out, the actual Amasa Delano ‘precisely matched Melville’s description of his mate.’ Referring to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Maritime History of Massachusetts (1941), Franklin reveals that the real Delano had indeed been a privateer and was regarded as a pirate by his enemies, an allegation that the real Benito Cereno shared in court (Franklin 1992:237). Morison further reveals that Delano had been a privateer’s man by the age of 16 and that he and his brother later sailed ‘as far as Tasmania, where they matched rascalities and exchanged brutalities with one of the British convict colonies’ (quoted in Franklin 1992:246n.). The English buccaneer William Dampier did not quite reach Tasmania on his cruise to East India and New Holland in 1699 but one of his ships, the Bachelor’s Delight, would bequeath its name to the fictional Delano’s ship.34 In 1683, Dampier sailed the Bachelor’s Delight to Africa and ‘spent several months taking prey along the Guinea coast’ He then went round Cape Horn and into the Pacific where the pirates pillaged the coast of South America and hunted for Spanish silver galleons bound from Peru to Panama (Sherry 1994:247–8). It is not clear whether the ‘prey’ which Dampier took off the coast of Guinea included human beings (Karcher 1992:228n.). For Captain Delano, the San Dominick’s ‘freight,’ in any case, does. Moreover, as Carolyn Karcher suggests, Delano’s expectation to make a prize of the Spanish slaver resembles the motive of the American Captain Thomas Gedney of the USS Washington, who had captured the Amistad and subsequently filed a libel suit in court ‘for salvage of the Amistad, its cargo, and the black passengers’ (Jones 1987:30). Singue even claimed, through the interpreters James Covey and Charles Pratt who could speak


Mende, that two trunks full of doubloons had disappeared from the Amistad after its ‘rescue’ by Gedney: another turn to the kaleidoscopical question of who was the real pirate (Jones 1987:44). Melville tops his game on ships’ names and Spanish currencies with his ironical christening of Delano’s longboat —which Delano confidentially calls his ‘household boat’ and which he compares, as he does Babo, to a ‘Newfoundland dog.’ Delano’s boat, symbol of domestic familiarity, is called Rover (BC 256). Its allusions to the mental, as well as practical, indeed ‘piratical,’ involvement of New England in the transatlantic business again reveals Benito Cereno as a text that, while superficially dealing with an event in 1799, is ultimately concerned with writing a history of the present—a history that shows up the subtle connections between the iniquities of the past and those of the present. As Ronald Bailey has shown, New England’s complicity with the slave trade and slave-based Atlantic economy was mostly indirect in the nineteenth century; it consisted of the profits gained from building and fitting out ships for the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba. In addition, the rum and textile industries of the Northern states were completely dependent on the slave-based plantation economy in the American South and the Caribbean. As Bailey establishes in his recent assessment, the cotton textile industry, the shipbuilding industry, and the spermaceti candle industry were among the branches of New England manufacture that most depended on the slave trade (Bailey 1992:206–7). A combination of factors, like the increasing incomes from raw cotton exports to Europe, expansion of commercial and manufacturing activities in New England, and rapid migration to and settlement of the West…gave rise to sustained growth in the domestic market for the products of New England’s cotton textile industry for many decades…. In this way, southern dependency moved from Britain to New England, to the great advantage of the latter’s commerce…. The contribution of the slave trade and New World slavery to the entire process is hard to exaggerate. (Bailey 1992:234–5) Thus it was possible for the citizens of Boston, New York, or Baltimore to behold the ‘graceful hulls,’ ‘well-proportioned masts,’ and ‘neatly trimmed yards’ of the ships lying in their harbor without seeing the Violence,’ the ‘crime,’ the ‘theft of living men,’ and the ‘charnel-house of wretchedness and despair’ acted out on them on foreign coasts (Foote 1970:16). They could ‘look’ without seeing—just as Pip sees the Pequod seamen looking at the doubloon without seeing in how many slave-trading transactions it has partaken and which iniquities may be hidden behind its imperial spectacle.


As various scholars have emphasized, Melville wrote Benito Cereno in what might be called his ‘radical’ phase, which also saw the publication of the short stories ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ ‘The Bell-Tower,’ and the diptych ‘The Paradise of Bachelors’ and ‘The Tartarus of Maids,’ all of which trace the rhizomorphic connections of industrial capitalism and its disastrous impact on the lives of working people (see Rogin 1983:207; Franklin 1992: 240–1). In fact, Benito Cereno shows Melville as the foremost EuroAmerican analyst of American slavery equaled only, on the African American side, by Frederick Douglass himself (Sundquist 1993:22). But although it is a radical text, Benito Cereno remains locked in a state of ideological stasis. Unlike ‘The Heroic Slave,’ it produces no fiction of empowerment; it remains without a vision of the reformability of the EuroAmerican racist mind. The novella’s analytical acuteness leaves no room for a ‘romantic’ ending: the Africans are taken to court in Lima, of which the reader is informed by way of a series of pseudo-legal depositions (based on the court documentation of the Tryall case). Babo, who ‘uttered no sound’ during the trial and ‘could not be forced’ to give his version of the events, is condemned and ‘dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule’ where he meets ‘his voiceless end’ (BC 307). His body is burned to ashes; ‘but for many days, his head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites.’ The depositions inform us that Babo had been ‘the plotter from first to last; he ordered every murder, and was the helm and keel of the revolt’ (BC 301; see also 296–7). Not only do the depositions present Babo as the mastermind of the master-and-slave masque; they also mention that he forced Cereno to sign a paper in which Cereno obliged himself to sail the Africans to Senegal, in return for which the Africans would refrain from killing any more Spaniards (BC 295). The text informs us that Babo, unlike most of the sailors, can write. Babo’s ‘Voiceless end’ contrasts with his ingenuity as a playwright and actor. He emerges as a composite figure of the historical characters Singue, leader of the Amistad revolt, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the revolution on Saint Domingue, mixed with traces of African trickster figures.35 As such, he comes to represent not just one individual leader of a slave revolt but ‘a historical epoch…. Generations of slave experience seem joined in a single life’ (Leslie and Stuckey 1982:297). Benito Cereno has often been criticized for its aporetic stasis, its neglect to furnish the Africans with more authenticity and agency, as well as its lack of producing a feeling of sympathy with the Africans. In fact the representation of the blacks remains as analytically detached as that of the white figures, while their intellectual qualities and Melville’s knowledge and appreciation of their civilizations only become apparent to a skilled reader. As Eric Sundquist suggests, the novella gives a psychologically precise diagnosis of the discursive regime of American culture: ‘Babo will


not speak within the language of a law that does not apply to him’ (Sundquist 1993:182). What the representational strategies of Benito Cereno have in common with many postcolonial thinkers is the theoretically acute, if morally disappointing, position that the colonized cannot be represented in any culturally authentic way, as the power of representation rests exclusively with the colonizer. Thus Babo’s voicelessness only seemingly contrasts with Madison Washington’s eloquence: both display their eloquence and theatrical skill while acting outside the reach of municipal law. Once they reach the shore, both their voices vanish from the historical record. Both texts likewise demonstrate that the slave, even while acting on the juridically ‘free’ high seas, can only imitate the master discourse; they remain true to the painful insight of today’s postcolonial critics that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1988: 308). Babo’s ‘imitation of the master-slave relation keeps him…a slave,’ which means that he could not have used the blade against Benito Cereno in the shaving scene (Rogin 1983:217). Thus Melville’s novella ingeniously points forward to, and exhibits the political paralysis of, a postcolonial theory that seeks to locate the germ of resistance exclusively within the internal contradictions of the dominant discourse itself. African dreams: Pym’s view from the hold Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837) has at various points been regarded as a failure, a hoax, a philosophical allegory, and a cultural document whose subject is slavery. As Leslie Fiedler writes, thereby echoing Benito Cereno, Poe discovered ‘that the proper subject for American gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged’ (Fiedler 1984: 397). Toni Morrison joins in by reading Arthur Gordon Pym as an example of the antebellum Gothic romance which she regards not, as many others do, as an evasion of history but as a ‘head-on encounter with very real, pressing historical forces and the contradictions inherent in them’ (Morrison 1992:36). As probably no other writer at his time, Poe articulates the fear ravaging the American South after the black rebellions of Haiti and Nat Turner, as well as the anxiety, among pro-slavery and antislavery circles alike, about the growing racial hybridization that the peculiar institution produced. Arthur Gordon Pym which, until quite recently, has mostly been read in purely aesthetic terms, may superficially be regarded as a ‘hoaxical’ novel of high-seas horror.36 Taking its materials from real and imaginary travel narratives, its plot involves mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, and a series of weird discoveries on board the rescue ship. The action culminates with the most spectacular discovery of all—that of the Antarctic island Tsalal, whose inhabitants are as black as pitch (down to their teeth) and whose phobia of everything white mirrors, and ridicules, scientific racism’s


obsession with the cultural meanings of the shades of skin color and cranial bumps. The plot ends with treachery, live entombment, and a hairbreadth escape in a native boat which takes the two survivors, Pym and Peters, toward the abyss of the South Pole. As they rush, Ulysses-like, into the cataract, a chasm throws itself open to receive them: ‘But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow’ (Poe 1983:239).37 Here Pym’s narrative ends, but it is supplemented by a ‘Note’ of the ‘editor,’ Mr. Poe himself, which informs the reader that Pym suddenly and distressingly died before being able to complete his narrative and that Peters has vanished in Illinois (Pym 240). Its parodistic aspects notwithstanding, Pym can be seen to explore the contradictions and resulting anxieties of the racist and pro-slavery mind— which is to some extent an auto-analysis as well. Pointing out that the black cook Seymour who leads the mutiny on the Grampus uses the same weapon as Nat Turner (both strike their victims on the head with an axe), John Carlos Rowe writes that ‘Poe’s own repressed fears regarding slave rebellions in the South and the deeper fear that Southern aristocratic life itself might be passing are the psychic contents that provoke the poetic narrative’ (Rowe 1997:53).38 Moreover, Pym translates the racial fears of antebellum culture into a fantasy of victimization. Stowing away in the hold of the Grampus, Pym settles down in his coffin-like hiding place and falls asleep over Lewis and Clark’s narrative of their expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River (Pym 63). When he awakes, he realizes, from the stiffness of his limbs and the putrefied state of the leg of mutton which his friend Augustus had placed in his little hideaway, that he must have slept for an excessively long period of time (Pym 64). Suffering from thirst and hunger, from the ‘close atmosphere of the hold’ as well as a ‘multitude of gloomy feelings,’ he is ‘overpowered…with a desire to sleep, yet trembled at the thought of indulging it, lest there might exist some pernicious influence, like that of burning charcoal, in the confined air of the hold.’ The roll of the brig tells him that the ship must have reached the ‘main ocean’ and that ‘no ordinary gale was blowing’ outside. Pym finally falls into a kind of ‘stupor’: My dreams were of the most terrific description. Every species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries, I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye


could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and, swaying to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair. (Pym 65–6) The hybrid scenery undergoes a change, ‘and I stood, naked and alone, amid the burning sand plains of Zahara. At my feet lay crouched a fierce lion of the tropics’ which inevitably attacks him—only to turn out, upon awaking, to be Tiger, Pym’s Newfoundland dog (Pym 66). Arthur languishes on in the hold until his faithful dog turns aggressive and attacks him. Having managed to defeat man’s best friend, Pym hears Augustus calling out for him but realizes that he is unable to utter a syllable. Only at the very last moment is he able to extract himself from his paralysis and is saved from live entombment (Pym 79). As Wilson Harris realizes in his reading of Poe’s ‘schizophrenic sea,’ Pym’s imprisonment in the hold of the Grampus resembles the ‘drowning at sea within the black hold of a slave ship’ (Harris 1983:21). In a quite extraordinary act of unconscious empathy, the Nantucket boy Arthur Gordon Pym slips into the skin of an African, locked into the slave deck, suffering from thirst and hunger and haunted by dreams of Africa. The aesthetic language in which the novel articulates its culture’s political unconscious is that of Gothic horror. Moreover, Pym’s nightmare, which may be seen to encapsulate the guilty conscience of Southern culture, is triggered by his reading of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814) —one of the classic discovery narratives of his day Having experienced symbolic death in the hold of the Grampus, Pym emerges from his metaphorical hell disguised as the ghost of a dead sailor—a stage trick which instills enough horror in the mutineers to bring about their surrender (Pym 115–17). As we shall see, these scenes are two of several spectacular inversions with which the novel, whether intentionally or unwittingly, unhinges the ideological value system of slave society. Drifting on the Atlantic on the wreck of the Grampus, the few survivors of the counter-rebellion soon revert to a state of primeval savagery by cannibalizing a sailor named Parker. They also have a Kafkaesque encounter with a ghost ship which, instead of offering the expected rescue, displays a scene worthy of Richard Drake’s slave ship horrors. After smelling a ‘suffocating’ and ‘insufferable’ stench, they discover twenty or thirty human bodies scattered on the deck ‘in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction.’ Pym assumes that the passengers must have died of ‘yellow fever, or some other virulent disease’ (Pym 132–4).


Tsalal, whose friendly pitch-black inhabitants turn out to be the ‘most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe’ (Pym 205), offers no relief from Pym’s oceanic horrors. After the natives’ treacherous assault on the Euro-American landing party, Pym and Peters turn out to be the only survivors. While they are exploring the complex system of subterranean caves, Peters, in spite of his occasional semantic affinity with the Tsalalians, turns into a courageous and servile Chingachgook (Pym 233). When first introduced, he is hardly distinguished from the ‘revolting’ black cook. But his demonic and ‘fiendish’ features notwithstanding, he becomes Pym’s protector during their subsequent travels. Arriving at a precipice after a long subterranean quest, Pym suddenly feels overcome with vertigo, a mental paralysis that structurally repeats his speechlessness in the ship’s hold. Peters, whom Pym, looking down, perceives as ‘a dusky fiendish, and filmy figure,’ saves the swooning melancholic by catching him in his arms. When Pym recovers from both his fall and his symbolic marriage to Peters, he feels like ‘a new being’ (Pym 229–30). While Pym is indebted to his dark companion for his new identity, Peters’ identity slides as well in the Tsalal episode: initially introduced as a multiracial ‘hybrid,’ he is here referred to as one of the ‘only living white men upon the island’ (Pym 212; emphasis added). The cave episode is of some importance to my discussion of Poe’s novel, as the recognition of being ‘entombed alive’ fills Pym with an ‘intense agony and despair’ that structurally repeats his condition in the ship’s hold. Finding himself and Peters locked in the bowels of the earth, Pym muses on the agonies of live entombment: I firmly believed that no incident ever occurring in the course of human events is more adapted to inspire the supremeness of mental and bodily distress than a case like our own, of living inhumation. The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, unite with the ghastly considerations that we are beyond the remotest confines of hope, and that such is the allotted portion of the dead, to carry into the human heart a degree of appalling awe and horror not to be tolerated—never to be conceived. (Pym 208) What is perhaps most interesting about this passage is the fact that Poe included a slightly altered version of it in his 1844 short story ‘The Premature Burial’ (Poe 1965:263).39 The cataleptic protagonist of ‘The Premature Burial’ suffers from similar fears as Pym and uses almost the same words to describe them. In one of his nightmares a shadowy figure shows him the graves of all mankind thrown open and asks him ‘How canst thou tranquilly sleep? I cannot rest for the cry of these great agonies.


These sights are more than I can bear.’ The horror-stricken dreamer realizes that ‘many millions’ of sleepers did not slumber at all but had been buried alive. But suddenly the graves are closed and the dream ends. Later, the dreamer is cured of his fears and becomes ‘a new man’ when spending a night in the tiny cot of a boat on the James River (Poe 1965:267–8). The Premature Burial’ ends with the sentences: ‘There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell—but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern.’ The ‘grim legion of sepulchral terrors,’ though not ‘altogether fanciful, …must sleep, or they will devour us—they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish’ (Poe 1965:273). Repeating Updike Underhill’s call for forceful amnesia at the end of Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, the short story’s call to forget the living dead’ shuts the door on Arthur Gordon Pym’s ambivalence and openendedness. Unlike Pym, who becomes ‘a new being’ in the arms of the ‘mongrel’ character Peters, the protagonist of ‘The Premature Burial’ escapes his neurosis without a colored midwife; he gains his new identity while following in the tracks of Captain John Smith. If ‘Premature Burial’ is read as a working-through (in the sense of durcharbeiten) of the problematic of colonial anxiety articulated in Pym, we could say that the dreamer’s birth as a new self in the narrow hold of a coastal sloop exorcises Pym’s agonies in the ship’s hold seven years earlier, demonstrating imperialism’s ability to cure its own diseases.40 Against the narrative of Pym’s neurotic identification with the victims of Euro-American colonialism, Pym deploys a narrative of colonial encounter and conquest. The South Pole island Tsalal is inhabited by an absolutely barbarous race of people who exhibit a strong phobia toward anything white. The Tsalalians are ‘jet black, with thick and wooly hair’; they are afraid of the Fane Guy’s sails, of eggs, of an open book, or a pan of flour (Pym 189, 192). But not only do the human beings of Tsalal live in a completely dualistic world; nature itself adheres to the same principle. The explorers observe several domestic animals, all of which, including albatrosses, are black (196). The strangest thing, however, is the multicolored water on Tsalal which, as Pym the self-appointed natural historian quickly perceives, consists of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; …these veins did not commingle; and…their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins,


a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. (Pym 194) Tsalal, Poe’s symbolic ‘world in black and white,’ ‘replicates,’ in Dana Nelson’s words, ‘the natural apartheid evidenced in the water’ (Nelson 1992:96). But in taking water as a ‘natural’ example for demonstrating the polygenetic theory of mankind, the novel also parodies and ridicules those racialist theories. The notion of Tsalal as a place of primeval savagery, which is established by the description of its ‘treacherous’ inhabitants, is called into question by the possible signs of advanced civilization that Pym and Peters encounter during their trip through the wilderness. Searching for an exit from the system of caves, they are intrigued by the shape of the caves, as well as certain inscriptions on their walls. While Peters favors the view that the hieroglyphics were indeed manmade, Pym determines that they were ‘the work of nature’ (Pym 225). Shortly after Pym’s symbolic rebirth, they find themselves in a place which reminds Pym ‘of those dreary regions marking the site of degraded Babylon.’ They behold what seem at first sight the remnants of ancient buildings, ‘huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some gigantic structures of art’ But at a second glance Pym decides that ‘no semblance of art could be detected’ (Pym 230). The evocation of Babylon, which—standing here for the impossibility of human communication— is in keeping with the description of the individual veins in the water, reinforces the symbolic function of Tsalal as a place of racial apartheid. The presence of human writing would turn Tsalal into a place of civilization —a kind of artificial Africa where, it was believed, the present rule of savagery had likewise been preceded by an ancient civilization. The defenders of the African origins thesis claimed that writing itself originated in Africa (Horsley-Meacham 1991:234).41 The nature of the stone structures and the inscriptions remains ambivalent within Pym’s narrative— after all, Pym rejects the notion that they were man-made (Pym 225, 230). But as Benito Cereno, Pym’s narrative has its internal contradictions. In the Appendix, ‘Poe’ (the editor) implicitly contradicts the rash conclusion of his protagonist and states that after extensive philological examination the inscriptions must be identified as the product of humans, consisting of the Ethiopian verbal root ‘To be shady,’ the Arabic verbal root ‘To be white,’ and the Egyptian word meaning ‘The region of the south.’ The editor further muses on the striking color antagonism on Tsalal and wonders whether the appellation ‘Tsalal’ may not be found, ‘upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their windings.’ He ends his comments with the enigmatic words ‘I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance is upon the dust within


the rock’ (Pym 241–2).42 As Dana Nelson remarks, the editor’s acceptance of the inscriptions and stone formations as the work of human beings destabilizes Pym’s colonial self-image (Nelson 1992:104). In this conflict between his two narrators, Poe reveals the arbitrariness of racial theory’s color symbolism. The editor’s deciphering of the cave inscriptions suggests the (former) existence of a civilized ‘black’ culture in the novel’s geographically displaced Africa and turns Pym’s womb-like cave into the cradle of human civilization—an Egyptian tomb decorated with prophetic murals. But far from celebrating the Ethiopian origins of classic civilization, as some of his enlightened contemporaries did, Poe’s text neutralizes their historical theories in a phantasmagoric play on geography and culture. In fact, as Jared Gardner claims, Poe seems to view Tsalal as a place of origins inscribed with the ‘inextricable relationship between writing and racial difference’ (Gardner 1998:149). The hyperbolic character of the color antagonism in Arthur Gordon Pym, as Rowe reminds us, transforms the opposites ‘black’ and ‘white’ into an uncanny relation, in which ‘black savagery’ would be little other than the repressed violence of the Euro-Americans (Rowe 1997:57). What is uncanny about the relation between black and white is the suspicion that the meanings attached to these colors (savagery, civilization) are in fact less attached than they may seem (see Dayan 1991:108). As has often been noted by critics, meanings and identities constantly slide in this text— which could indeed be taken as a confirmation, or a parody, of structuralist theories. The most interesting figure in this context is Pym’s companion, Dirk Peters, at whom we shall therefore take a closer look. For the defenders of scientific racism, the Vengeance’ of colonialism was of course the miscegenation of the ‘master race’ with African American slave women (much less frequently of African American men with white women). As Robert Young points out in his study of ‘scientific’ theories of racial hybridity, the widespread claim that ‘hybrids’ were infertile can be read as a sign of anxiety about the disquieting result of the occidental desire for world dominion: Colonialism…was not only a machine of war and administration, it was also a desiring machine…with [an] unlimited appetite for territorial expansion…for making…disparate territories, histories and people to be thrust together like foreign bodies in the night. In that sense it was itself the instrument that produced its own darkest fantasy—the unlimited and ungovernable fertility of ‘unnatural’ unions. (Young 1995:98) Dirk Peters, the son of a fur trader and an Upsaroka woman, is the product of such an ‘unnatural’ union. Pym describes Peters as


one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever beheld. He was short in stature—not more than four feet eight inches high—but his limbs were of the most Herculean mold. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner…. His head was equally deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most Negroes), and entirely bald. With a mouth that extends ‘nearly from ear to ear’ and his exceedingly long and protruding teeth ‘never even partially covered…by the lips,’ Poe’s picture of an orangutan is complete (Pym 84–5). Nominally a descendent of Native Americans and Europeans, Peters has features that identify him as a creature somewhere between an ape and a particularly vicious caricature of a black man —which means that he unites within himself the features of all three of America’s races. His monstrosity may be a sign of the polygenetic ideologeme that the mixing of different races—that is, different ‘species’—would ‘really’ be impossible. In keeping with his grotesque figure, Dirk’s demeanor is ‘capricious’ and ‘grotesque’—resembling that of the vengeful Hop Frog in Poe’s short story, who repays the humiliation inflicted upon him by his master by ‘playfully’ dressing his antagonist and various other members of the aristocracy in tar and feathers and burning them to death in a horrible masquerade. According to his ‘grotesque’ behavior and mixed-ethnic ancestry, Peters is referred to as ‘the hybrid’ (Pym 93, 102, 106, 124). The portrayal of this antebellum Caliban reflects much of the scientific racism of the 1830s. Dirk Peters’ ‘Negro’ skull recalls the then popular proto-Darwinist theories of phrenologists and craniologists like Samuel G. Morton, one of whose functions was the legitimation of enslavement and dispossession on ‘natural’ grounds. The obtrusive black-and-white symbolism of the novel, then, is cut across by the figure of this racial ‘hybrid’ whose hybridity Poe has difficulties dealing with. Presented to us in a constantly shifting perspective, Peters appears as a split personality: sometimes fiend and sometimes savior, Peters is also both specter and survivor. In leaving Peters as the only survivor, and in portraying him as a superior human being who repeatedly rescues Pym, Poe seems to lose control of his ‘mongrel’ character. The abrupt and symbolically ambiguous ending of Pym’s racist narrative is superscribed with a narrative of ‘hybrid’ survival. Poe’s novel in fact consists of two narratives and two endings, neither of which is very satisfactory. The plot of Pym runs counter to the semantic dualism in the description of Tsalal, revealing race ‘as a strategic interpretive construct governed by political motives’ (Nelson 1992:98). The adventure plot, perhaps because of its traditional deployment of carnival twinships, is


unable to support the essentializing imagery established in the Tsalal episode (see Nelson 1992:101). In his analysis of Arthur Gordon Pym, Wilson Harris has emphasized the novel’s concern with symmetry and dualist constructs (above all the exaggerated color symbolism) but also its simultaneous ‘carnivalesque’ unsettling of this symmetry, represented by the unstable relationship between Pym and Peters, Pym’s ‘hybrid’ alter ego (Harris 1983:22–3). While Poe’s white protagonists in Pym, as well as in ‘Premature Burial,’ can only endlessly regenerate their own colonialist selves in acts of imagined self-victimization or in fantasies of conquest, Dirk Peters personifies the horror of the racist mind. Theoretically an impossible biological construct, he disappears into the Western wilderness with a knowledge of practical survival which the white ‘new men’ have yet to acquire. Dance on the volcano: Martin Delany’s Blake Martin Delany’s novel Blake or The Huts of America, published in serial form in 1861 and 1862 and for the first time printed in book form in 1970, spells out many of the fears which Arthur Gordon Pym could only articulate in the Gothic mode. Written in Canada in 1859 and published during the outbreak of the Civil War, Blake is actually set in the mid-1850s —a time when Cuba became the major importer of African slaves after the termination of the trade to Brazil (Thomas 1998:744). Blake counters the dominant literary discourse of its time with the revelation of subjugated knowledges of America’s complicity in the transatlantic slavebased economy and the resistance against it.43 The subject of the novel is the plotting of a slave revolution that would span the whole New World. Divided into two parts, the first half of the novel describes Henry Blake’s secret journey through North America, in the course of which he is initiated into his messianic role in a rather parodistically rendered voodoo ceremony in the ‘dismal swamp’ and in which he brings his revolutionary message to every ‘hut’ of America.44 In the second part we meet Blake in Cuba, where he is elected ‘General-inChief of the army of emancipation of the oppressed men and women of Cuba’ and plans, but fails, to take possession of a slave ship which he intended to use as an operation base against the colonial rulers (Delany 1970:241).45 The novel, which is technically unfinished, ends in a general expectation of impending black revolt. As Paul Gilroy points out, Blake directly incorporates the topography of the Black Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993:27). The novel mixes domestic themes, known to the reader from novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Clotel, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’ with the theme of transnational colonial relations and transnational, indeed mixed-ethnic, anticolonial rebellion. At the same time the narrative of black revolt interacts with a second narrative strand


which discloses, sometimes in barely fictionalized fashion, the multiple relations between American economic interests and the Cuban slave economy. The ‘domestic’ first part shares many of the themes of the related fictional texts just mentioned. Henry Blake, though a free-born black from West India, is enslaved on the Natchez plantation of Colonel Franks, one of the major slave dealers in the Mississippi valley who entertains barracoons in all major states of the American South (Blake 55, 59). Blake, whose name echoes an ‘earlier, explicitly Atlantic radicalism’ (Gilroy 1993: 27),46 escapes from the plantation after raising his hand against his master who has ordered the sale of Blake’s wife, Maggie, to the wife of the Massachusetts Judge Ballard. After spreading his revolutionary message around the United States (he even visits Native American ‘huts’), Blake takes his relatives to Canada and leaves for Cuba to where Maggie has been resold by her Northern owner. The Cuban part, which is the more interesting one in our context, is linked to the domestic part not only by Blake’s search for his wife but also by the transnational activities of Franks and Ballard. These two figures, the Southern plantation owner and the Northern judge, represent the common economic interests north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line in that they are both dabbling in the Cuban slave trade. The novel opens in the city of Baltimore where Franks meets with his business partner Major Armsted and the sea captains Richard Paul, George Royer, Juan Garcia, and Jose Castello in order to complete ‘arrangements for refitting the old ship ‘Merchantman,’ which then lay in the harbor near Fell’s Point’ The Americans regard Baltimore as ‘the place best suited for the completion of their arrangements,’ as that city had ‘done more for the encouragement and protection of the trade than any other known place’ (Blake 3). Later the reader learns that the Massachusetts Judge Ballard also has a share in the venture (Blake 59).47 Contrary to ‘The Heroic Slave,’ then, Blake emphasizes the good relations and the complicity between Northern jurisprudence and Southern economy. The Boston judge, loosely based on Judge Lemuel Shaw, not only entertains a cotton farm in Mississippi but is also the proprietor of a ‘countryseat’ near Havana (Blake 59, 7). In conversations with Franks and Major Armsted, Ballard and his wife point out the North’s ‘fidelity to the South.’ A clear token of allegiance is the fact that ‘the Judge himself tried the first case under the Act…by which the measures were tested’ (Blake 4). The ‘measures’ to be tested are the recent passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, declared constitutional by Shaw who in April 1851 ruled that the fugitive slave Thomas Sims ought to be returned into slavery (Rogin 1983: 107). In Delany’s parodistic representation of Shaw’s formalistic interpretation of the law (which, as we shall see, was one of the key targets of Melville’s critique as well), his juridical cooperation with Southern


interests now also entitles the judge to become a business partner in the Merchantman venture.48 The ship, fitted out in Baltimore, registered in Cuba, renamed the Vulture, and furnished with two sets of officers, will be sent on a slave-trading journey to Africa in the second part of the novel. As no other novel before or after, Blake exposes the complicity of American businessmen and the American justice system in the illegal slave trade to Cuba. Its political and historical insight, certain weaknesses in literary execution notwithstanding, qualifies it as a counterpiece of Benito Cereno. The ironical Major Armsted, for example, viciously exploits Judge Ballard’s Northern ignorance of economic relations in a conversation about the differences between the slaveholding society of Cuba and the ‘free’ but racist Yankee country To Ballard’s complaint that in Cuba you can never be quite sure that ‘the most stupid and ugly Negro you meet in the street may ask a ‘light’ from your cigar’ and that he would consequently ‘invariably throw away my cigar,’ Armsted replies: Did ever it occur to you that black fingers made that cigar, before it entered your white lips! —all tobacco preparations being worked by Negro hands in Cuba—and very frequently in closing up the wrapper, they draw it through their lips to give it tenacity. (Blake 62–3) The vision of such a long-distance ‘kiss’ of a black man shocks the judge, and the major continues his little lesson in capitalist market relations: I’m sure the victuals you eat is cooked by black hands, the bread kneaded and made by black hands, and the sugar and molasses you use, all pass through black hands, or rather the hands of Negroes pass through them; at least you could not refrain from thinking so, had you seen them as I have frequently, with arms full length immersed in molasses. (Blake 63) Armsted’s lesson in ‘seeing’ (rather than ‘looking’) at the same time describes the political project of the novel Blake, whose main purpose is to uncover the rhizomorphic structure of the slave-based Atlantic world. Armsted and Ballard’s exchange about the invisible history of luxury goods takes place within the context of a debate about American plans to annex Cuba. The judge, who likes ‘Negroes well enough in their place,’ regards Cuba, ‘where the blacks enter largely into the social system…a moral pestilence, a blighting curse.’ He is of the opinion that ‘Cuba must cease to be a Spanish colony, and become American territory. Those mongrel Creoles are incapable of self-government, and should be compelled to submit to the United States’ (Blake 62).


The novel’s various allusions to American interests in Cuba and internal Cuban conflicts condense a number of political events from the 1840s and 1850s. While the Spanish colonial government and the planter class lived in constant fear of a slave rebellion, apprehensions about an ‘EthiopicoCuban republic,’ or a second Haiti, were widely spread throughout the American South (Thomas 1998:748). Southern plans for extending the domain of the slavebased economy by an annexation of Cuba culminated in the Ostend Manifesto of 1854 in which leading Southern politicians formulated a concrete plan for an invasion of Cuba lest the colony should ‘be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race’: thus writes James Buchanan, one of the authors of the Ostend Manifesto (quoted in Franklin 1992:234). In the late 1840s and early 1850s several so-called filibustering expeditions were sent to Cuba from the Southern United States in attempts to annex the island. These were aided by members of the Cuban planter class, now living in American exile. The most notorious of these filibusters, Narciso Lopez, was caught and executed in 1851—an event that is mentioned in Blake (Blake 306, 321). Blake ‘telescopes’ or condenses these events into the much shorter time frame, thereby producing a mythical atmosphere not altogether dissimilar from the one in Benito Cereno (Sundquist 1993: 184).49 In doing so, Sundquist points out, the novel displays a profound understanding of the interlocked histories of the two countries and offers ‘an anatomy of slaveholding that compresses the triangular relations of Africa, the West Indies, and the United States over a broader historical period into a single moment’ (Sundquist 1993:199).50 Delany entwines this first transnational plot line, a quasi-documentary account of Cuban-American relations, American filibustering, and Northern complicity with illegal slave trade ventures, with a second transnational narrative strand, the more dramatized description of Henry Blake’s conspiracy. From this Cuba emerges as the ideal stage for carrying out a pan-African rebellion against the colonial system. Together with his cousin, the popular poet Placido (another historical character), and a group of educated free Cubans, Blake establishes a conspirational ‘Grand Council’ whose aim it is to agitate the suffering slave population, as well as free blacks, to a general uprising against both the Spanish colonial government and the American residents. The group, which includes members of the Creole merchant class and meets in quasi-masonic fashion in the back-chambers of luxurious mansions, defines for itself an identity that transcends the limits of nation, religion, or race. The action of the novel stops at a point of political crisis: the wives of the Spanish CaptainGeneral Alcora and a rich plantation owner are haunted by prophetic dreams of a slave insurrection (Blake 266, 296–7), the British consul is arrested and deported because of his criticism of the American role in the illegal slave trade (Blake 294–5), and the antics of the black dancers during


the carnival celebrations at the Día de los Reyes suddenly appear unplayful and frightening (Blake 299–300). On this specific day, as an American newspaper report informs us, the blacks ‘are allowed to use their own language and their own songs, a privilege denied them on other days, lest they might lay plans for a general rising.’ The report continues: As it is the sights, the sounds, the savage shrieks, the uncouth yells suggest very uncomfortable thoughts of Negro insurrection. One cannot help thinking of the menace of the Spanish Government that Cuba shall be either Spanish or African, and when we see these savages in their play more like wild animals than human beings, the idea what their rage would probably be, makes the boldest shudder. It would be easy on King’s Day for the Negroes to free themselves, or at least to make the streets of Havana run with blood, if they only knew their power. (Blake 301) As Eric Sundquist shows in a fascinating reading of the carnival scenes, Delany fully exploits the subversive potential of such ritualistic occasions at which the normal social order was suspended or inverted and which offered the slave population a unique chance for articulating their contempt for their masters—just as it functioned as a political barometer for the dominant class (see Sundquist 1993: 212–16). Delany’s condensation of various moments in the history of Cuba, as well as his use of the political potential of popular festivals, has the effect of producing a mythical narrative of colonial resistance against an unjust regime which culminates in an atmosphere of white fear and impending insurrection. As if in response to the dark premonitions of Arthur Gordon Pym and Benito Cereno, the narrator informs us: Few people in the world lead such a life as the white inhabitants of Cuba, and those of the South now comprising the ‘Southern Confederacy of America.’ A dreamy existence of the most fearful apprehensions, of dread, horror and dismay; suspicion and distrust, jealousy and envy continually pervade the community; and Havana, New Orleans, Charleston or Richmond may be thrown into consternation by an idle expression of the most trifling or ordinary ignorant black. A sleeping wake or waking sleep, a living death or tormented life is that of the Cuban and American slave-holder. For them there is no safety. A criminal in the midst of a powder bin with a red-hot pigot of iron in his hand, which he is compelled to hold and char the living flesh to save his life, or let it fall to relieve him from torture, and thereby incur instantaneous destruction, nor the


inhabitants of a house on the brow of a volcano could not exist in greater torment than these most unhappy people. Of the two classes of these communities, the master and the slave, the blacks have everything to hope for and nothing to fear…whilst the whites have everything to fear and nothing to hope for, ‘God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.’ (Blake 305) Ending with the well-known quotation from Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, the passage presents a powerful instance of writing back to the EuroAmerican Gothic discourse of fear, showing up the material reality from which the cultural discourse of the Gothic has enabled American society to flee. Blake’s rebellion has its origins in his experience of the transatlantic slave trade as a young man. As the reader gradually learns, Henry Blake, who calls himself Carolus Henrico Blacus in Havana, is the son of ‘a wealthy black tobacco, cigar, and snuff manufacturer’ in Cuba.51 As he tells Placido, he left his home at the age of 17 (nineteen years previous to the action). What follows is a Robinson Crusoe-like tale of a young man who, believing himself hired on a Spanish man-of-war, finds himself an ‘apprentice’ to a slave trader. The ship is loaded with Africans in the Bight of Benin and returns to America to dispose of its cargo in Key West. Offended by Blake’s expression of dissatisfaction with these events, the commander sells him to Colonel Franks. Franks in turn hires him out to the very same commander, and Blake mutates from a descendant of Crusoe to a copy of Olaudah Equiano: he continues crossing the Atlantic three times, making as many cargoes, once to Brazil, once more to Key West, and once to Matanzas, Cuba, each of which times I was put in irons on landing, and kept in close confinement during the vessel’s stay lest I ran away. His temporary confinement while near the coast notwithstanding, Blake is promoted from common seaman to first mate and prides himself in his superior navigational skill in African waters (Blake 193–4). Fashioning himself as a messianic figure (a ‘messenger of light and destruction’; Blake 101), he now intends to turn his nautical expertise into an instrument of revolution, highjack the Vulture, and turn the slave ship into the base for piratical military operations (Blake 198). He accordingly hires on the Vulture as a sailing master. It is here where he meets the black shipboard community which represents an important counterpart to his own social group, the cultural elite in Havana. Far from depriving the ‘simple’ blacks of their voice,


Delany gives a rich display of African American folk culture—expressed in the frequent use of black vernacular and especially in the subversive songs sung by the black sailors. As they leave Havana, the black sailors begin to chant ‘with cheerful glee’ a ‘merry sea song of the blacks’: My country, the land of my birth, Farewell to thy fetters and thee! The by-word of tyrants—the scorn of the earth, A mockery to all thou shalt be! Hurra, for the sea and its waves! Ye billows and surges, all hail! My brothers henceforth—for ye scorn to be SLAVES, As you toss up your crests to the gale; Farewell to the land of the blood-hound and chain, My path is away o’er the fetterless main! (Blake 207) The American mate at once feels alarmed and orders the blacks to stop singing, but his sailing master convinces him that ‘the right to sing’ is ‘a privilege allowed seamen the world over,’ upon which the Black Jacks lustily intone another (rather non-nautical) song: O Cuba! ’tis in thee Dark land of slavery, In thee we groan! Long have our chains been worn, Long has our grief been borne, Our flesh has long been torn, Even from our bones! The white man rules the day, He bears despotic sway, O’er all the land; He wields the tyrant’s rod, Fearless of man or God, And at his impious nod, We fall or stand! O, shall we longer bleed! (Blake 208) These parodies of patriotic songs52 are topped by the rather threatening lines sung by a youth called Gascar: I’m going to Afraka,


Where de white man dare not stay; I ketch ’im by de collar, Den de white man holler; I hit ’im on de pate, Den I make ’im blate! I seize ’im by de throat— Laud!—he beller like a goat! (Blake 210)53 Overhearing such ominous recitations of Cuban ‘folklore,’ which anticipate the threatening carnivalistic dances on King’s Day, the American mate correctly concludes that ‘these Negroes are determined on mischief’ (Blake 208). As I mentioned above, it is the voyage of the Merchantman renamed Vulture that connects the two groups on which the novel centers, slavedealers and black insurrectionists. The account of the middle passage, which occupies four chapters, reads like a novelistic version of Foote’s or Conneau’s narratives. Flying Spanish colors when it leaves the harbor of Havana, the Vulture runs up the Stars and Stripes upon reaching the high seas ‘as protection against the British West India cruisers, it being a disputed point that they have a right to search American vessels for slaves, however suspicious the vessel’ (Blake 203). As it is a Baltimore clipper, one of the fastest ships in the trade, the Vulture outruns several British cruisers on her way to Africa. The climax approaches on the return trip to Cuba when the slaver, now filled with 1800 slaves,54 spots a sail in the distance. Spying the national colors of Britain, the American mate commands the Stars and Stripes to be run up and the hatches opened. Six hundred dead and dying slaves are thrown overboard ‘into the mighty deep, and sunk to rise no more till summoned by the trump of Heaven’ (Blake 229). Having lost this ‘ballast,’ the Vulture ‘dashed through the water at fourteen knots an hour, with American colors up and Spanish spirits down.’ She again outruns the cruiser ‘by the speed of a superior Baltimore-built slaver, rigged and fitted out in New York for the trade’ (Blake 230–1). The mutiny, which had already announced itself on the outward trip, is finally about to take place during a storm on the return voyage. The ‘black and frowning skies and raging hurricane above; the black and frowning slaves with raging passions below’ produce a situation that is ‘dreadful without, fearful within, and terrible all around’ (Blake 234). But surprisingly, the mutiny, after so much planning, ultimately fails. The white crew screw down the hatches of the slave deck, and as they are only twenty-four hours distant from Matanzas, they can put into port without any further disturbance.


The failure of the slave ship rebellion in Blake, together with the general open-endedness of the novel, have been a matter of critical debate. In thwarting the oceanic revolt and truncating the Cuban one, Delany clearly followed the dictates of realism. Because no matter how free the hired-out black sailors may feel on board ship (Blake 209), their freedom ends once the ship reaches port. Like Douglass, who terminated the narrative of ‘The Heroic Slave’ with the Creole slaves’ march into Nassau, thereby preferring a politically satisfactory closure to a generically satisfactory one, Delany resisted the temptation of a ‘romantic’ ending.55 Blake’s open-endedness, like that of ‘Heroic Slave,’ reflects the actual open-endedness of divided America’s future. Delany’s fictional vision of that future is in this regard not very different from that of Douglass: both envision a solution to the problem of slavery outside the national boundaries of the United States. But unlike Douglass, who counteracts his non-domestic ending by introducing the positive white Americans Listwell and Grant, Delany, that ‘early architect of pan-Africanism’ (Gilroy 1996:23), saw no realistic chance at all for a domestic settlement of racial conflict. His vision of a multi-, or rather post-racial revolutionary army, with its main seat in Cuba but eventually spreading out to the whole New World, is perhaps closer to today’s notions of a transnational African diaspora but hardly less utopian than Douglass’s dream of racial harmony on the national territory of the United States.56 Thus the truncated narrative of Blake may seem incomplete in a literary sense (it lacks a conventional novelistic solution, either a tragic or a happy ending); yet in lacking a conventional ending, the text remains true to its historical trajectory. Preferring historical plausibility to narrative closure, Blake functions like a dark mirror to the ‘white’ non-ending of Pym, turning Poe’s neurotic and repressive tale of a hybrid survival back on its historical feet. ‘Habitat all over the world’: Emmanuel Appadocca and the right of revenge The Trinidadian writer Maxwell Philip undertook the dangerous plunge into romance which Delany had avoided and imagined a ‘black’ revolution carried out from aboard ship. His novel Emmanuel Appadocca, or, Blighted Life. A Tale of the Boucaneers, first published in London in 1854, was recently rescued from oblivion by Selwyn R.Cudjoe and William E.Cain.57 Written when the author was aged 24, it features a noble Caribbean pirate who carries out a private war against the exploiting classes, mixed with his revenge against his father. Plying the waves of West India, Emmanuel Appadocca and his crew have made it their duty to redistribute, like a band of oceanic Robin Hoods, the wealth of the colonies.


The novel opens as the pirate ship, a ‘low, black, balahoo schooner’ of ‘dispro portionate length,’ prepares to hunt a British merchantman lying in the harbor of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. After a sea chase and ensuing battle, the pirates capture the merchant ship and divide the spoils. Appadocca, the mysterious pirate captain, identifies a passenger as his father who had deserted Appadocca’s mother and their illegitimate child after a brief liaison. Appadocca takes his belated revenge in tying his father, a wealthy British planter named James Willmington, to a barrel and leaving him adrift in the open sea. But Willmington mysteriously reappears a little later as Appadocca tries to sell his prize in the Danish colony of St. Thomas. The pirate is taken captive and imprisoned in a British Navy ship commanded by Admiral Hamilton. There Appadocca meets the admiral’s son Charles, his friend from study days in Paris. In a long and crucial conversation Appadocca informs Charles about his plight after having been forced to leave Paris after his mother’s death. Close to starvation in London, Appadocca decides to take revenge on his father, returns to the Caribbean, and after spending some time in Haiti, forms his pirate crew from the boucans he met there. Appadocca later manages to flee from the British warship by plunging into the ocean and swimming to land in Venezuela. After recovering from near death at a farmer’s house, he is able to rejoin his pirates, pays a well-staged ‘ghostly’ visit to his father’s opulent plantation, takes his father prisoner, and puts out to sea again in spite of his precognition of a terrible hurricane. His ship is wrecked on the coast in the storm, and while Willmington sinks with her, Appadocca, convinced that his mission is fulfilled, commits suicide by jumping into the waves. This spare outline of the plot (which in reality comprises a number of comic and romantic subplots not essential to my discussion here) would not necessarily characterize Emmanuel Appadocca as a novel related to the Black Atlantic. Its only black characters are the fisherman Jack Jimmy, a comic stereotype of dwarfish but Herculean build, who ‘adopts’ Appadocca as his master, and the black servants of the Willmington mansion who provide comic relief by their seemingly stupid incapacity to comply with the wishes of their mistress. Appadocca himself, however, is not outrightly identified as black. He is described as young, beautiful, slender, almost femininely delicate, and of a light olive complexion which showed a mixture of blood, and proclaimed that the man was connected with some dark race, and in the infinity of grades in the population of Spanish America, he may have been said to be of that which is commonly designated Quadroon. (Philip 1997:23–4)58 Yet at other times, his skin color is uniformly described as pale or very light —at least in part the result of his habit of spending most of his time in his


cabin (EA 91–2, 223). If it was not for the West Indian colonial context, Philip’s novel might easily pass off as a text not concerned with the issue of race. Without the initial reference to his olive skin color, Appadocca’s revenge may easily be regarded as a project completely unrelated to the issues of slavery and race. Neither would the novel deserve attention in our context of American Atlantic texts: the action is set in the Caribbean, France, England, and the mainland of Venezuela but has no reference to the United States. All of this is changed by the Preface of the novel where Philip claims that this work has been written at a moment when the feelings of the Author are roused up to a high pitch of indignant excitement, by a statement of the cruel manner in which the slave holders of America deal with their slave-children. Not being able to imagine that even that dissolver of natural bonds—slavery — can shade over the hideousness of begetting children for the purpose of turning them out into the fields to labour at the lash’s sting, he has ventured to sketch out the line of conduct, which a high-spirited and sensitive person would probably follow, if he found himself picking cotton under the spurring encouragement of ‘Jimboes’ or ‘Quimboes’ on his own father’s plantation. (EA 6) Written in London four years after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, Emmanuel Appadocca was published there only one year after William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, with which it shares the crucial subject of disavowed white parentage and whose protagonist likewise passes as white. It is not known whether Philip had met Brown in London, but as William Cain clarifies, the papers in London and in Trinidad were saturated with information on the Fugitive Slave Law and discussions of slavery in the wake of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Cain 1997:252–3). Taking as its key issue the sexual exploitation of black women and the destruction of families and human lives under the sway of the plantation system, Emmanuel Appadocca presents a highly romantic protagonist and problematic. Appadocca is modeled on the Byronic figure of the charismatic leader, two of whose manifestations we encountered in The Red Rover and ‘The Heroic Slave,’ and which culminated in the figure of Ahab three years prior to the publication of Philip’s novel. Appadocca has ‘large tropical eyes that seemed to possess the power of the basilisk’ and a great power of eloquence which, combined with his good education and his habit of keeping himself in mysterious seclusion, contributes to keeping his crew in check:


Like the priests of yore, who swayed mankind, he was no doubt apprehensive, that if he exhibited himself too frequently to vulgar view, the sailors, in getting familiar with his person, should lose much of the veneration and awe which they unquestionably entertained for him, and which seemed to crush their wills to an implicit and blind obedience to his. (EA 34) By studying mathematics and astronomy at Paris, he acquired a knowledge of cosmic and technological processes which would greatly assist him in his later career as a pirate. His ship, for example, is a highly technologized vehicle with long winding pathways in the inside and a set of mirrors on the top masts which allows the seamen to see beyond the horizon, proving them technologically superior to their enemies. When he is taken prisoner on board the British warship, Appadocca scribbles a series of mathematical formulas on the cabin wall and later explains to Charles that they served him in predicting the hurricane that will eventually destroy both ships. Indeed the observation of celestial constellations occupies a central place in Appadocca’s life. It is during a starlit night on the Thames, surrounded by both the beauty and the despair of England’s capital—he saves the life of a girl who wants to commit suicide with her illegitimate child—that he determines to take revenge on his father. Touched by the parallel between the girl’s fate and his mother’s, he exclaims that he will ‘Vindicate the law of nature which has been violated in me, and in your child’ (EA 101–6). Transforming the law of nature that guides the planets above into a right that entitles him to strike out against the ‘false systems’ of mankind, he explains that his deed was justified because his father has violated ‘the natural contract between parent and child [which] is based on the condition that, as the former has loved the latter, and protected its infancy, the latter will yield obedience, honor, and respect’ The theme of filial revenge is thus central to the plot of Emmanuel Appadocca. Explaining his breach of municipal law to his friend Charles while a prisoner on the British man-of-war, Appadocca claims that if he were guilty of piracy, ‘the whole of mankind’ was guilty of it as well: ‘the whole of the civilized world turns, exists, and grows enormous on the licensed system of robbing and thieving’ (EA 113). This statement is followed by an eloquent indictment of colonialism in both its forms of territorial dispossession and slavery. This system, Appadocca elaborates, can only be sustained by the forced removal of ‘a certain race, whose power of bodily and mental endurance, renders them the likely objects’ for heavy labor: The coasts of the country on which nature has placed them, are immediately lined with ships of acquisitive voyagers, who kidnap and


tear them away from the scenes that teem with the associations of their own and their fathers’ happiness, load them with irons, throw them into the cruel ordeal of the ‘middle passage,’ to test whether they are sufficiently iron-constituted as to survive the starvation, stench, and pestilential contagion which decide the extent of the African’s endurance, and fix his value. This my dear friend is an abstracted idea of the manner in which the world turns. (EA 113–14) Appadocca then asks his friend whether he would call it piracy to rob a merchant whose property very likely consists of the accumulation of exorbitant and excessive profits [of] the sugar which by the vice of mortgages he wrings at a nominal price from the debt-ridden planter, who, in his turn, robs the unfortunate slave of his labour. (EA 115) To deprive someone of goods that are not rightfully his, Appadocca insists, cannot be called robbery or piracy. The stupefied Charles weakly responds that after all ‘commerce, and the voyages’ were ‘the proper stimulants to civilization and human cultivation,’ but his statement only elicits another passionate rejoinder from Appadocca: The human mind does not require to be pioneered by Gog and Magog in order to improve. It is not in the busy mart, not at the tinkling of gold, that it grows and becomes strong; nor is it on the shaft of the steam-engine which propels your huge fabrics to rich though savage shores that it increases. No: there it degenerates and falls into the mere thing whose beginning is knack, whose end is knack. The mind can thrive only in the silence that courts contemplation. It was in such silence that among a race, which is now despised and oppressed, speculation took wing, and the mind burst forth, and, scorning things of earth, scaled the heavens, read the stars, and elaborated systems of philosophy, religion, and government: while the other parts of the world were either enveloped in darkness, or following in eager and uncontemplative haste the luring genii of riches. Commerce makes steam engines and money—it assists not the philosophical progress of the mind. (EA 116) Appadocca significantly returns twice to the theme of Africa during his speech, first as the place of departure for the middle passage, and again as a place of ancient knowledge and civilization. It is in Africa that ‘a race… scaled the heavens, read the stars, and elaborated systems of philosophy,


religion, and government’ Appadocca’s own expertise in the science of astronomy acquires another meaning in this context, as the secret knowledge which he shares with the ancient magi of Egypt and Ethiopia. In evoking the trope of Ethiopian splendor (which we could witness before in Benito Cereno, ‘The Heroic Slave,’ and Arthur Gordon Pym), the text clearly marks Appadocca as a person of African descent fighting for his right of personhood and universal citizenship. Whenever he speaks of his admiration for the cosmic order, scribbles an astronomical calculation on the ship’s cabin, devises instruments that endow his men with seemingly supernatural powers of vision, sits on the starlit banks of the Thames musing on the injustice of capitalist society, or mourns the loss of his telescope which an unfeeling London landlord takes from him in place of the rent, Appadocca speaks and feels as an African. In its disguise of astronomy (representing ancient civilization), then, the theme of Africa is central to a novel which almost completely bypasses the topic of race. The ethnic dimension of Appadocca’s revenge is complicated by the fact that we learn next to nothing about his mother. As the action is set in the early decades of the nineteenth century we can assume that his mother is of part-Spanish descent.59 This would imply that his rebellion against the representatives of England takes place from two subaltern positions at once: that of a ‘Quadroon’ and that of a descendant of the displaced Spanish colonizers. Appadocca’s name in fact combines the name of Jesus with that of the Spanish Vice-Admiral Don Sebastian Ruiz de Apodaca who surrendered Trinidad to the British in February 1797 by burning the Spanish fleet without attempting to give battle (EA 3n., 217). In spite of its anticolonial stance toward Britain, the novel cannot be called postcolonial in the sense of articulating a nationalistic stance. Rather than voicing any nationalistic sentiment, the text betrays a strong sense of the Caribbean as an imaginary homeland, illustrated by descriptions of its sublime tropical nature. William Cain and Selwyn Cudjoe accordingly identify Emmanuel Appadocca as the first Anglo-Caribbean novel (EA 252). Appadocca’s post-nationalist identity is strongest when confronted with the nationalism of his friend Charles. When the latter, during their long and crucial conversation, asserts that ‘I am an Englishman, and an English officer,’ Appadocca replies: ‘And I …am an animal,—subkingdom, vertebrata, genus homo, and species,— “tropical American”: naturalists lay my habitat all over the world, and declare me omnivorous’ (EA 122).60 As we have seen, Appadocca’s understanding of cosmic laws at the same time provides him with a philosophical legitimation for his action. As other revolutionaries before him, he appeals to the law of nature as he cannot find justice under municipal (colonial) law. Like the Red Rover and Ahab before him, he takes the law into his own hands; like them, he is endowed with supernatural qualities. His actions follow an Old Testament doctrine


of vengeance, a lextalionis whose confidence in the justice of God is replicated in Appadocca’s premonition of his own fate (Cain 1997:xlii). Like Captain Ahab, Appadocca carries out his retribution on the high seas.61 The ocean, which once again represents a realm of freedom beyond the reach of municipal law, also becomes the setting for a fantastic masquerade—only that in this case the protagonist is the ship itself (rather than its passengers). The black schooner, whose long low hulk allows us to trace her lineage to the Amistad and the San Dominick while her quasianimated movements turn her into a relative of the Rover’s ship Dolphin, is at once a guarded castle with long secret passages and a carnivalesque ship whose power of disguise plays havoc with the unsuspecting Britons. In a truly amusing scene the large warship spots the schooner but, being too large to keep up with her, loses her again. The next day the Britons behold a beautiful black brig with white portholes which, flying the flag of Mexico, passes by and disappears without heeding British threats and cannon balls. The third day a similar ship, now a brigantine with white stripes along the hull, mocks the warship in a similar way. The Britons begin firing their guns at the brigantine, with the effect of receiving the signal message ‘You are too far, your guns don’t carry/followed by a display of the Jolly Roger. The pirate disappears signaling Au revoir,’ and indeed we witness a third rendezvous, this time with a barque hoisting the British ensign upside down as a token of distress. But as the warship sends a boarding party the ‘skeleton ship’ suddenly comes to life, a midshipman is taken hostage to be exchanged for Appadocca, and the ‘Wreck’ metamorphoses into the black schooner which disappears ‘with the rapidity of lightning’ (EA 141–9). Appadocca’s assertion of a postnational, indeed ‘oceanic,’ identity, coupled with the fact that he and his pirates never reside on land and ‘sought no other shelter than that which was afforded us by the high and wide seas’ (160), characterizes Emmanuel Appadocca as a ‘multicultural, polyphonic, Atlantic’ book that challenges, even as it capitalizes upon, traditional notions of what a ‘national’ literature is and includes’ (Cain 1997:ix). This statement is reinforced by the fact that about one-half of the novel is set on the ocean. William Cain accordingly argues that Philip’s novel splendidly fulfills Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic as a diasporic, rhizomorphic ‘counterculture of modernity’ (Gilroy 1993:4). The conspicuous absence of the United States as well as the topics of race and slavery, which the text literally marginalizes but which nevertheless form its raison d’être, qualifies this novel to become not another colonized addition to an ever-expanding American Studies canon but a representative of a new category of texts that take the Atlantic (Red, Black) as their defining criterion (Cain 1997:xvii). Mixing the radicalism of Delany’s Blake with that of William Blake—who famously illustrated John Stedman’s narrative of the suppression of the Surinam maroon revolt with


scenes of Caribbean plantation torture—Philip inscribes the Atlantic Ocean as a site of ‘natural’ resistance against all forms of oppression, exploitation, and paternal disavowal. The addressees of his critique live in the world of slavery and the world of industrial poverty, both of which are inhabited by victimized women, abandoned children, and ruthless wealthy fathers. Philip’s story of a ‘blighted life,’ of a man ‘consumed by the quest for justice’ which imprisons him, is measured by the conspicuous absence of another narrative that would have illustrated the person whom he should have become. This conjunction of written and unwritten life stories suggests Appadocca’s personal tragedy and elicits for us the tragic tale of loss that Atlantic slavery endlessly repeated. (Cain 1997:5; Cudjoe 1997:liv) This chapter began with the story of a young man who is in search of his father and discovers the horrors of the Black Atlantic, and it ends with the story of a young man whose revenge against his unfaithful father is carried out in the terms of a general revenge of the disfranchised against their colonial masters. Redburn’s bilateral Atlantic is disturbed by memories of the middle passage; Appadocca’s Atlantic has ceased to be bilateral and has instead turned into the natural habitat of the ‘wretched of the earth’ ready to shake off their fetters. None of the texts discussed in this chapter conceive of the Atlantic ocean as an empty space to be traversed but rather as a multicultural contact zone which witnessed the most intense experiences of horror while holding the no less intensely felt promise of human equality and freedom which was unattainable on land. Both of these historical and symbolic qualities of the Atlantic have combined in producing what Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic—a transnational space that, as I have tried to show, is part and parcel of American history, culture, and literature.

5 Metaphorical Atlantic Antebellum fictions of the Pacific

In 1947, the American poet Charles Olson outlined Melville’s ‘oceanic’ setting of American history. The Pacific, he claims, meant to Melville an experience in space as well as a comprehension of the past; it ‘turned out to be his Atlantis, the buried place.’ It was the American destiny, Olson writes, to ‘go over space, or we wither,’ and Melville understood the ‘relation of the two geographies’ which formed the arena of America’s spatial quest. He knew that the clipper ship crossing the Pacific Ocean to Canton was but the continuation of the Spanish caravel that first landed on American shores (Olson 1947:114–15). Writing more than thirty years after Olson in the light of the Vietnam War, Richard Drinnon has a slightly different but not uncongenial view of the historical dynamic that inspired the ‘relation of the two geographies.’ He sketches the racial and imperial ‘metaphysics’ of the historical force identified by Olson. For Drinnon, Melville had the ‘unsettling gift of seeing that when the metaphysics of Indian Hating hit salt water it more clearly became the metaphysics of empire building’ (Drinnon 1990:215). Olson’s and Drinnon’s views of Melville as the American writer who understood the ‘relation of the two geographies’ as well as understanding the Pacific as an imaginative reservoir for ‘buried’ Atlantic memories, pretty well catch the theme of this chapter. Having witnessed the direct or metaphorical presence but also, in some texts, the rhetorical disarticulation, of the Black Atlantic in antebellum fiction, we will in this chapter follow American literature’s move into the Pacific, discovering that the fictional Pacific of Melville and Poe frequently functions as a metaphorical Atlantic. Bearing the ideological luggage of Atlantic history, their fictions can be seen to inscribe the Pacific as a utopian space that is already fallen—a place haunted by the experience of colonial violence imported from Europe in an earlier ‘Age of Discovery’

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Disenchanted isles: the Atlantic legacy of Pacific encounters In his masterful analysis of Columbus’s journal, Peter Hulme has traced the ideological conflict arising from Columbus’s attempt to reconcile his medieval geography with the quite different geographical reality he encountered in the Caribbean (Hulme 1986: chapter 1). By the same token, early European explorers of America can be seen to integrate the unfamiliar reality into a ready-formed ideological archive consisting of medieval and classical narratives of cultural encounter. Such ideological translations are never innocent; they never exclusively function to familiarize an unfamiliar reality but rather carry narratives of domination from one cultural realm to another.1 The discursive translation from an Atlantic to a Pacific colonial context in the nineteenth-century United States took various forms. The most obvious one is the extension of the discourse of Manifest Destiny and continental expansion to the colonial encounter in the Pacific—a discourse wonderfully deployed, for example, in Melville’s Typee (1846) which draws a direct line between the continental and insular exploits of the Anglo-Saxon Hive’ (Melville 1983:266). Similarly, the Pacific islanders of Cooper’s dystopian novel The Crater (1847) are consistently referred to as ‘lndians,’ and Cooper imaginatively displays all the registers of early modern justifications of conquest—from a Lockean theory of possession through labor all the way to a theory of legitimate resistance against unprovoked invasion.2 As Cooper’s South Seas fantasy shows, the Pacific encounter was frequently articulated in the language of the early modern colonial encounter on the Atlantic seaboard. Here and elsewhere, this early modern register often mixes with the discourse of continental expansion. I will provide an example for this semantic nomadism in my reading of David Porter’s journal below. The bulk of this chapter, however, will be dedicated to a third strand within the larger project of discursive translation —a strand perhaps less formative of the future discourse about the Pacific (I would agree with Drinnon that the priority ultimately belongs to the frontier ideology) but nevertheless significant for its aesthetic solution of an ideological problem. That problem consisted of antebellum America’s desire to move into the Pacific while having yet left unsolved the consequences of Atlantic slavery at home. American ventures into the Pacific had been rather disenchanted from the start. Little interested in scientific exploration or romantic idealization, American merchant ships had rounded stormy Cape Horn and plowed the Pacific since the 1780s. Their object was purely commercial; they were trading furs, sealskins, and sandalwood to Canton, returning with tea, spices, textiles, and chinaware. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the city of Philadelphia and its merchants like Stephen Girard had pioneered the

ANTEBELLUM FICTIONS OF THE PACIFIC 165

China trade since 1783. The intellectual father of an American Pacific empire was none other than Thomas Jefferson, who supported John Jacob Astor’s trade fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River, as well as the Lewis and Clark Expedition and John Ledyard’s ambitious plan to walk from Europe eastward through Siberia to the Pacific Northwest and then onward cross-country to Virginia. Many of these monstrous geographic projects remained unfulfilled: Astoria, whose history is preserved in a book-length account by Washington Irving, was destroyed in the War of 1812, and Ledyard’s journey was thwarted by the Russian Empress Catherine who had him imprisoned as a spy.3 These setbacks notwithstanding, American entrepreneurs in the early decades of the nineteenth century continuously expanded their activities in the Pacific which took a leap forward with the development of the fast clipper ships. The first official American Pacific Exploring Expedition, however, would not be mounted until 1838. Led by Charles Wilkes, this expedition comprised six ships and conducted a painstaking survey of the Pacific; Wilkes’s maps remained definitive until World War II. The scientific exploit of this gigantic venture was collected in twenty-three mostly unread volumes. The expedition’s return in 1842 coincided with the official French occupation of the Marquesas and with Herman Melville’s arrival there in July of that year. Jefferson’s dream of a Pacific empire finally found its poet in Walt Whitman who celebrated it in the 1860s and 1870s, stylizing the opening of the transcontinental railway into the fulfillment of the Columbian dream to ‘marry’ continents, climates, and oceans and as the inauguration of a global empire (‘Passage to India,’ 1871; cf. Smith 1978:44–8). David Porter’s sojourn on Nukuhiva in 1813, which is said to have inaugurated American imperialism in the Pacific (Goetzmann 1986:264), is perhaps the most quixotic attempt of an American to turn the script of his predecessors’ colonial encounters into action. Porter, whose text has left its traces in antebellum American fictions on the Pacific, was a veteran of the Tripolitan War against the Barbary ‘pirates’ (1801–15); his career thus bridges the three maritime contact zones under discussion in this book: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.4 Commanding the United States warship Essex in the War of 1812 against Britain, Porter left his position in the Atlantic on a private extension of his commission, rounded the Horn, and successfully raided British commerce in the Pacific. He put into port in Nukuhiva with the Essex and three British prizes in order to repair and refit his ships and, although his trip was unofficial, take official possession of the island in the name of the United States. He based the claim of possession on the previous ‘discovery’ of the Marquesas by the Americans Joseph Ingraham and Josiah Roberts, both of whom had touched on Nukuhiva in 1791 (Strauss 1963:85). As these discoveries had had no permanent results—not even the name with which Nukuhiva was


endowed by Ingraham and Roberts stuck to it—Porter decided to lay the basis for a permanent American occupation of the Marquesas.5 In his Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (first published in 1815), Porter gives an account of his ritualistic act of taking possession, including a salute of seventeen guns, the reading of a declaration of the act of taking possession, and the burial of a copy of his written declaration in a bottle (Herbert 1980:102). Porter also writes that he took care to explain the situation to the inhabitants of the island and he claims that they freely agreed to become members of the ‘great American family’ in return for the offer of American protection against their enemies (Dening 1980:28). But the subsequent action leaves doubts as to whether the tribes who witnessed the ceremony—the Teii and the Haapa—actually understood the full implications of Porter’s symbolic adoption. After performing a colonial theatrics which combines a reminiscence of early Atlantic conquerors like Hernán Cortés with an anticipation of the Jackson era’s paternalistic rhetoric of Indian treaty making, Porter’s troops became quickly involved in intertribal rivalries between the Teii and the Haapa. Right from the beginning, Porter had a difficult situation in Nukuhiva, whose inhabitants were well acquainted with European ‘superior’ technology. In fact, Porter had to cope with frequent verbal onslaughts against his civilized self-image, as the Teii and Haapa mocked his incapacity to defeat the Typee by calling the Americans braggarts and cowards (Dening 1980:27; Herbert 1980: 92– 5). After having to report so much humiliating slander, Porter’s recollection of his temporary victory against the Haapa makes him slide into biblical rhetoric. Assuming the role of a superior being, Porter explains that the Haapa had nobody but themselves to blame for drawing the Americans’ ‘vengeance’ upon them (Herbert 1980:96). The desired result of his brutal killing of five Haapa was that the two tribes resumed their earlier practice of supplying the Americans with an abundance of food—a practice that Porter insistently clads in the rhetoric of friendship and gift-giving As Walter T.Herbert and others have noticed, Porter’s rhetoric of reciprocity and paternalism is a thin disguise of the real situation, which required acts of colonial violence to ensure further services from the recalcitrant natives. Preparing himself for a preventive blow against the Typee (who inhabited a more remote part of the island), Porter assumes the role of a supernatural being. Claiming that members of the ‘friendly’ tribes, who were shocked by the uncommon violence which the Americans had unleashed against the Haapa, called him a ‘demon of destruction’ and a ‘hekai’ (haka-iki, the title of a tribal chieftain), Porter sends messages to the Typee confronting them with the choice between either entering into a relation of ‘friendship with the Americans (i.e., to start paying tributes) or facing destruction from their superior weapons. As Porter admits in his defense for eventually firing the villages of the Typee, the well-being of the Americans in their newly acquired colony hinged on being regarded as


invincible (Porter 1822:99). But the Typee were far from surrendering to the conditions dictated by the Americans. Through the translation of a British beachcomber named Wilson, who had lived on the island for ten years and on whose own contribution to the communication between Porter and the Typee we can only speculate, they sent word that they did not understand why they should enter into friendship with the Americans and supply them with hogs and fruit. In reply to Porter’s threat that he might chastise the Typee as he had the Haapa, they replied that the Haapa were cowards, ‘and as to myself and my people, we were white lizards, mere dirt; and as the most contemptible epithet which they could apply, said we were the posteriors and the privates of the Teiis’ (Porter 1822:69). Porter, together with his native allies, undertook a first unsuccessful assault on the Typee but was unable to break through their fortifications. He nevertheless assumed ‘the air and language of a conqueror (although I confess I felt little like one)’, threatening the Typee with death and injury from the superior American firearms. The reply of the Typee betrays the extent of Porter’s dilemma: They said they had counted our boats; they knew the number that each would carry, and were as well acquainted with my force as myself. They knew their strength, and the numbers they could oppose; and held our bouhies [firearms] in more contempt than ever; they frequently missed fire, rarely killed, and the wounds they occasioned were not as painful as those of a spear or stone. They added, they knew they would prove perfectly useless to us should it come on to rain. (Porter 1822:92) It cannot be determined to what extent this remarkable instance of the natives ‘talking back’ to the American would-be colonizers is the work of the British gobetween Wilson (who openly turned against the Americans toward the end of their stay) or indeed a preventive measure of Porter himself with which he sought to mitigate toward his readers his more than dubious victory against the Typee, as well as excuse the violence deployed during his campaign. In any case, Porter’s second attack against the Typee, in which he emulated earlier conquerors in ignoring the international jus gentium and ventured forth against civilians, left several villages in ashes and crops destroyed. However, Porter’s defeat of the Typee remained one of the more impermanent victories of colonial history. As soon as he had left the island, the Teii and Haapa demolished his village and fort (both named after President Madison). Porter himself was captured a little later by the British warship Phoebe off the coast of Chile and returned to the United States without much honor to his name (Dening 1980:30).6 David Porter’s report about his failed attempt to conquer Nukuhiva illustrates the practical and rhetorical dilemma of the colonizer, who has to


couch imperial desire in the language of friendship and reciprocity and blame the natives themselves for the violence that is used against them. Porter’s claim that the Teii and Haapa voluntarily submitted to his rule— voluntary submission being the magic formula with which the acquisition of a foreign territory could be justified against the claims of other nations— is diametrically opposed by his recording of their contemptuous language toward him.7 And yet, Porter’s view of the natives is surprisingly romantic, which is what mostly distinguishes it from that of the early modern conquerors. Taking an Enlightenment position, Porter refuses to call the natives savages and expresses his admiration at their moral code and cultural achievements. His narrative is accompanied by a series of very skilled drawings of the inhabitants of Nukuhiva and their cultural artifacts. But at the same time he echoes Thomas Hariot on Virginia when he emphasizes the Marquesans’ readiness to give up their own beliefs in exchange for the superior European religion—an opinion which seems to subvert his earlier insistence on the moral stability of Marquesan society. With Hariot, whose account of the short-lived English colony in Roanoke in 1585–6 inaugurated a new, ethnographically inflected, discourse on ‘primitive’ peoples, Porter shares an attitude that combines scientific fascination with a strong desire to ‘civilize’ and ‘improve’ the ‘savage mind.’ True to Enlightenment doctrine he couples a belief in the natural grace of Marquesan culture with a desire to control and alter that culture (see Herbert 1980:83–92).8 Porter’s ethnographic discourse, in itself ambivalent enough, stands in dialectical tension with the discourse of Porter the imperialist, whose language is that of chastisement and retribution.9 The conflict between the romantic primitivist strand of the Journal and its descriptions of ‘self-inflicted’ colonial violence increases in the chapter on Porter’s war against the Typee. It is in passages like the following where the image of Porter the Enlightenment humanist violently clashes with that of Porter the Jeffersonian imperialist. His ethnographic description of the Typee village precedes his military venture and shows the place in pastoral harmony: The valley was about nine miles in length, and three or four in breadth, surrounded on every part, except the beach, where we formerly landed, by lofty mountains. The upper part was bounded by a precipice of many hundred feet in height, from the top of which a handsome sheet of water was precipitated, and formed a beautiful river, which ran meandering through the valley, and discharged itself at the beach. Villages were scattered here and there, the bread-fruit and cocoa-nut trees flourished luxuriantly and in abundance; plantations laid out in good order, enclosed with stone walls, were in a high state of cultivation, and every thing bespoke industry,


abundance, and happiness. Never in my life did I witness a more delightful scene, or experience more repugnancy than I now felt, for the necessity which compelled me to make war against this happy and heroic people. (Porter 1822:98–9) Porter’s tone of sorrowful inevitability soon merges into the technical dictum of the military leader. Unable to defeat the Typee warriors in open battle due to their guerilla tactics, Porter resorted to the same means as his Atlantic predecessors in Virginia, New England, and elsewhere, laying fire to the villages of the Typee. In the account of his march of destruction, the textual conflict between the language of the romantic travelogue and the discourse of conquest reaches a grotesque climax. Continuing their march up the valley, Porter writes, we…met in our way several beautiful villages, which were set on fire, and at length arrived at their capital, for it deserves the name of one. We had been compelled to fight every inch of ground, as we advanced, and here they made considerable opposition; the place was, however, soon carried, and I very reluctantly set fire to it. The beauty and regularity of this place was such, as to strike every spectator with astonishment, and their grand site, or public square, was far superior to any other we had met with. Numbers of their gods were here destroyed, several large and elegant new war canoes, which had never been used, were burnt in the houses that sheltered them; many of their drums, which they had been compelled to abandon, were thrown into the flames, and our Indians loaded themselves with plunder, after destroying bread-fruit and other trees and all the young plants they could find. (Porter 1822:102) Looking back at the scene of destruction from a hill-top, Porter muses: When I had reached the summit of the mountains, I stopped to contemplate that valley which, in the morning, we had viewed in all its beauty, the scene of abundance and happiness. A long line of smoking ruins now marked our traces from one end to the other; the opposite hills were covered with the unhappy fugitives, and the whole presented a scene of desolation and horror. Unhappy and heroic people, the victims of your own courage and mistaken pride. While the instruments of your own punishment shed the tears of pity over your misfortunes, thousands of your countrymen (nay, brethren of the same family) triumphed in your distresses! (Porter 1822:105)


Porter’s language here echoes the doctrine of Manifest Destiny just as it anticipates the sentimentalist comments on the ‘inevitable’ destruction of the Native Americans in the Removal era (see Rogin 1975; Mackenthun 1998a). The rhetorical ambivalence of Porter’s text—contained in its ‘imperial sentimentalism’—testifies to a larger conflict within the American imperial project itself, which in Nukuhiva was taught the difference between the book and the beach, as well as the incompatibility of the Jeffersonian dream of a Pacific empire with the tenets of enlightened humanism. Chartless voyaging: geographical ambivalence in Arthur Gordon Pym As we have seen, David Porter was lucky to escape a similar fate as Captain Cook, that icon of the Enlightenment spirit of cultural superiority, killed as a result of cultural misunderstandings on Hawaii in 1779.10 He was also luckier than the fictional crew of the Jane Guy in Poe’s novel Arthur Gordon Pym who, as we learned in the previous chapter, is buried underneath an avalanche of earth by the treacherous natives of Tsalal island —whose seemingly unmotivated action resembles Porter’s (from a native point of view) similarly incomprehensible attack on the Typee. Read alongside Porter’s Journal, Pym can be seen to perform a mythical inversion of victim and aggressor. But Poe’s novel also functions as a bridge between the imaginary maritime geographies of antebellum America, by inscribing itself into the discourses of both Atlantic colonialism and Pacific geographic exploration. In its blending of these two imaginary geographies, Arthur Gordon Pym’s concern with Pacific exploration can be further subdivided into two geographical contexts, the exploration of the Antarctic and the increasing presence of American ships in the Pacific. The Antarctic island Tsalal, inhabited by black, woolly-haired savages who either represent the lowest stage of human development or possibly belong to a wholly separate creation, is semantically overdetermined with allusions to practically all the ‘dark places’ in America’s imaginary geography, extending from Haiti and the American South (with their threat of black government and slave rebellion) to New Zealand and Australia (evoked by the Tsalalians’ features), all the way to Hawaii and the Marquesas. Its geographical location, moreover, aligns Poe’s fantastic island with the contemporary discoveries in the Antarctic region. Worked into the fictional texture of Poe’s novel are the voyages of Captain Edmund Fanning who, ‘poring over ancient Spanish and Dutch charts,’ believed he had located the Aurora Islands in 1799, as well as various other trips to the South Shetlands (located south of Tierra del Fuego), and Nathaniel Palmer’s encounter with two Russian Navy vessels in 1821. Emerging like ghosts from a foggy stretch in the Antarctic Sea (and


possibly appearing to Palmer like two superhuman shrouded figures), the Mirny and the Vostok, under the command of the Baltic Captain Fabian von Bellingshausen, were likewise on the lookout for uncharted territory and were almost certainly the first to reconnoiter the Antarctic continent (Goetzmann 1986:250–4; Beaver in Pym 260). As is well known, Poe strongly supported the idea, most prominently propagated by Jeremiah N.Reynolds, of a United States Exploring Expedition to the South Sea and the Antarctic—a project that finally took shape, against a strong antiscientific mood among American politicians, in 1838 when Charles Wilkes steered his six ships into the Pacific. Poe’s description of the Tsalal episode, according to the available criticism of Pym, is mainly based on three sources: Captain Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages, to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean, first published in 1832, which contains the description of the massacre and cannibalization of thirteen crew members on the ‘Massacre Islands’; the novel Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery (1820), published under the pseudonym ‘Captain Adam Seaborn’ but possibly authored by John Cleves Symmes, author of the theory that the earth was hollow at the poles and that both the Arctic and Antarctic regions had a warm climate and were habitable; and the archaeologist J.L.Stephens’ recent publication Arabia Petraea, or Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, and the Holy Land (1837), which Poe had reviewed while working on Pym (Beaver in Pym 11, 266). The diverse geographical areas covered by these texts—from Morrell’s global travels and the fictional interior world of Symzonia, to Stephens’ description of his exciting discovery of the stone monuments of Arabia and the Holy Land—are virtually condensed in one polysemantic site in Pym. The Antarctic island Tsalal, with its black and treacherous inhabitants, its strange stone structures and cave inscriptions, and its location in an ocean of milk-white water, may be seen as an allegorical representation of ‘the color line of the antebellum South’ (Nelson 1992:96), but by virtue of this intertextual condensation of different geographies its ideological significance also transcends the limits of national allegory. As Dana Nelson has demonstrated in some detail, the events on Tsalal follow in general outline the events recorded in a great number of colonial texts. The Jane Guy is greeted by the ugly, thick-lipped, and woolly-haired blacks who come rowing out to the British ship with loud exclamations. On boarding the Jane Guy, the Tsalalians are very excited about white things which they regard with great awe and fear. As the natives of countless colonial narratives, they are amazed by European weapons, mirrors, and especially the huge ship with its fear-inspiring white sails. The Europeans, on the other side, soon find out ‘what were the chief productions of the country, and whether any of them might be turned to


profit’ (Pym 199), and they begin to barter the gewgaws they had brought with them for tortoises, biche-de-mer, and supplies: ‘We established a regular market on shore, just under the guns of the schooner, where our barterings were carried on with every appearance of good faith’ (Pym 201). The Jane Guy’s commission, as Dana Nelson notices, remains somewhat mysterious: its cargo suggests that it is an exploration vessel but its crew does not include any scientists; her aimless course raises the possibility that it is a privateer ready to accept any cargo that offers itself (Nelson 1992: 95). Though not comparable to the scientists of real eighteenth-century exploring expeditions, Pym presents himself in his narrative as the Jane Guy’s Banks, Solander, Forster, and Menzies, giving descriptions of the land, its otherworldly fauna and flora, the strange appearance of its water, and the primitive customs of its human inhabitants. After a few days of peaceful coexistence, however, the whites are lured into a narrow gorge and buried underneath an earth slide by the treacherous natives. The Tsalalians subsequently attack the ship, overwhelm the remaining crew members, and accidentally cause the vessel to explode while trying to carry off their booty. As so many narratives of colonial encounter, Pym’s report is dominated by the image of the treacherous native. Even while he describes the generosity and amiability of the Tsalalians, he announces that [a] very short while sufficed to prove that this apparent kindness of disposition was only the result of a deeply laid plan for our destruction, and that the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem, were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe. (Pym 205) Enjoying the advantages of a fictional text, Pym’s narrative does not give any indication of the natives’ motivation for destroying the whites. Unlike the texts of Cook, Porter, Morrell, and others that form Pym’s historical blueprint, the novel contains no information that would counter the colonial fictions of the natives’ capriciousness and inborn evil. A look at Poe’s textual source for his account of the explosion of the Jane Guy may serve to fill the gap: Poe borrowed the idea from Washington Irving’s recently published Astoria (1836) which contains the account of the explosion of the American gunship Tonquin off the coast of John Jacob Astor’s trade fort in 1812. The Tonquin had been blown up by one of the American survivors of a previous massacre of the crew by Native Americans. That conflict had in turn arisen from the American captain’s aggressive and contemptuous behavior toward an Indian elder named Nookamis, whom Captain Thorn had pushed overboard because


Nookamis would not submit to Thorn’s trade conditions (Irving 1964: chapter 11; cf. Beaver in Pym 264–5; Pollin 1981:338). Irving blames Captain Thorn himself for the destruction of the ship, which proved a heavy blow to the infant colony at Astoria. Had Thorn’s deportment been properly regulated and had he practiced the necessary self-command, Irving writes, the catastrophe would not have happened. The American commander’s fault lay in combining a contemptuous and insulting attitude toward the Indians with a dangerous underestimation of their power—a familiar story which Poe’s novel, thanks to its in-built generic regulations, can leave untold (Irving 1964:115). As Dana Nelson has suggested, the novel’s narrative organization (its division into the editor’s frame and Pym’s inner narration) produces a certain distance to Pym’s colonialist perspective (Nelson 1992:99–104). Although the colonial fable enacted on Tsalal contains all the typical ingredients of cultural encounters between Europeans and non-European people, Pym’s narrative can be seen to reveal the internal contradictions of the colonialists’ self-image as members of a superior culture. Pym’s account, Nelson suggests, reveals a discrepancy between Europeans’ claims of their civilized superiority and their actual defeat by the natives (whose chief is named, appropriately, ‘Too-wit’); between their rhetorical assertion of fair trade conditions and their glee at the natives’ ignorance of the rules and value of the market; as well as between their belief in their natural and technological superiority and their unwillingness and incapacity to read the cultural code of the people they encounter, which might have prevented their destruction in the rockslide (Nelson 1992:98–100). The image of the crew marching into destruction, ineffectively ‘armed to the teeth’ with muskets, pistols, cutlasses, and long Bowie knives, evokes David Porter’s quixotic mission against the Typee, their disrespect for the Americans’ magic technology, and their actual superiority in battle, which forced Porter to violate the code of civilized warfare (Pym 205). In short, the narrative of Pym, whether consciously or (more probably) unwittingly, deconstructs many of the assumptions underlying the Western colonial project in articulating the Europeans’ latent recognition of their own powerlessness in a cultural contact situation which they only insufficiently understood. As I mentioned, the intertextual references add a kaleidoscopic quality to the Tsalal episode by linking it to such diverse cultural encounters as Morrell’s oceanic travels, the unlucky end of the Tonquin, ‘Seaborn’s’ fantastic Adamites, and Stephens’s highly celebrated encounter with the sublime remains of the ancient cultures of Egypt and Arabia. At a closer look, these intertexts, as well as the semantically overdetermined nature of the Tsalal episode, subvert the superficial color symbolism of Poe’s novel. The fictional Symzonia of Adam Seaborn’s’ satire, for example, is inhabited by a people whose skin has the color of snow and lets the skin of their


‘white’ visitor appear dark in comparison. The hyperbole, as Teresa Goddu has argued, exposes the artifice and constructedness of race. Poe’s novel, Goddu writes, ‘reproduces racial fantasy even while pointing out that it is merely a representation’ (Goddu 1997:86). The most fascinating aspect of Pym’s racial discourse, already mentioned in the last chapter, is the ambivalent state of the stone monuments and inscriptions which Pym and Peters discover on the island. Marking the difference between savagery and civilization, these seeming traces of architecture and literacy must necessarily be the ‘work of nature’ for Pym, whose dualistic system of racial difference would be upset if they were man-made. But Pym’s version is contra dicted by the philological exercise of his editor who, in his postscript to Pym’s truncated narrative, explains the Ethiopian, Arabic, and Egyptian character of the cave inscriptions. His reading of these inscriptions as marks of a superior civilization, which confounds Pym’s assertion that they revealed ‘no semblance of art,’ gestures beyond the text toward the contemporary debates about the origin of mankind (Pym 241, 225, 230; cf. Nelson 1992:104 and Gardner 1998:148–9). The editor’s translation of the inscriptions (‘to be shady,’ ‘to be white,’ and ‘the region of the south’) not only challenges the Manichaean logic of both Pym’s mind and the color symbolism of the Tsalal sequence; it also suggests that the Tsalalians, contrary to Pym’s assertion of the complete difference of Tsalalian nature, are really descendants of the same ancient tribes to whom ‘civilized’ Americans trace their descent. If the Tsalalians descended from ancient Ethiopians, or perhaps from the tribe of Ham or the ten lost tribes of Israel, they would, in a cultural sense, have the same ancestors as Pym himself and their cultural difference from the Europeans would not be as absolute as the text makes us otherwise believe. On one level, the human origin of the cave inscriptions and tumuli raises the problem of what Goddu calls ‘racial convertibility’: ‘the fear that the self can easily become the other’ (Goddu 1997: 84). On another, it negotiates the contemporary debates between defenders of a monogenetic theory of the origin of mankind (which is suggested by the human origin of the cave inscriptions) and those of a polygenetic theory (represented by Pym’s implication that Tsalal was a separate creation). While the monogenetic thesis, which might be regarded as the secularized version of the account of Genesis, is the legacy of enlightenment anthropology, the notion of separate creations, one of whose central tenets is the thesis that the Nordic and African races formed separate species, was espoused by the defenders of slavery and racial segregation. It provided intellectual grounding for the ongoing disfranchisement and exploitation of Africans in America and justified the denial of an education to blacks.11 If the human origin of the cave inscriptions and stone monuments of Tsalal contradict Pym’s assertion of Tsalal as a separate creation, they furthermore raise the specter of the African origins of civilization. As editor


of various magazines Poe was of course familiar with the work of contemporary anthropologists and travelers like Vivant Denon, C.F.Volney, James Cowles Prichard, or the illustrious John Ledyard, all of whom referred to the Negroid features found on many Egyptian monuments and were convinced of the African origins of Egyptian culture. ‘How are we astonished,’ writes the French traveler and revolutionary Volney in 1798, ‘When we reflect that to the race of Negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.’ And Alexander Hill Everett, Editor of the North American Review, followed suit in 1827 in concluding that ‘[while] Greece and Rome were yet barbarous, we find the light of learning…emanating… out of the midst of this very wooly haired, flat nosed, thick lipped, coal black race’ (quoted after Horsley-Meacham 1991:235–6). The racial identity of the ancient Egyptians was thus an essential bone of contention between monogenists and polygenists, with the latter group spending the rest of the nineteenth century measuring skulls in trying to prove that Egyptians were Caucasians (Young 1995: 128; cf. Stocking 1968). Arthur Gordon Pym, then, can be seen to respond to the troubling theory of the African origin of civilization which would inspire the writings of Douglass, Delany, and Philip a few years later. As I suggested before, Poe’s novel in fact consists of two narratives, one of which cancels out the other: a narrative of unsurpassable racial antagonism, which ends in a vision of whiteness (Pym’s narrative) and a narrative of racial and cultural hybridity, which suggests the common history of all mankind and ends with the survival of the ‘hybrid’ Dirk Peters (the editor’s narrative). Peters’s survival may be seen to express a foreboding sentiment that America’s ‘hybrid’ population may indeed be less infertile than was suggested by contemporary scientific racism—that it may indeed be America’s destiny to become a nation of ‘hybrids.’ Pym’s inscription into both Atlantic and Pacific discourses of colonialism becomes evident from the resemblance of the stone structures which Pym discovers on Tsalal and the stone monuments of Nukuhiva described by David Porter. Porter greatly admires the masonic skills of the Marquesans, who have erected their ritual sites, the tohua, on 6 to 8 feet high platforms of large stones, neatly hewn and fitted together, with as much skill and exactness as could be done by our most expert masons; and some of them are one hundred yards in length and forty yards in width, surrounded by a square of buildings executed in a style of elegance, which is calculated to inspire us with the most exalted opinion of the ingenuity, taste, and perseverance of a people, who have hitherto remained unnoticed and unknown to the rest of mankind. (Quoted in Herbert 1980:83–4)


Noticing the absence of iron on Nukuhiva, Porter is even more amazed about the architectural ingenuity of the islanders: Our astonishment is raised to the highest, that a people in a state of nature, unassisted by any of those artificial means which so much assist and facilitate the labour of the civilized man, could have conceived and executed a work which, to every beholder, must appear stupendous. (Quoted in Herbert 1980:84) It is important in this context to consider the cultural significance of masonry and architecture, traditionally regarded—especially under the influence of the ideas of freemasonry—as the most elevated arts next to the art of writing and as indicators of the mystery of the divine spirit. The discovery of such exact stone structures in apparently ‘uncivilized’ and hitherto unknown parts of the world must have shaken the dualistic foundations of Western knowledge, just as the ‘Africanization’ of the Egyptian past challenged the kabalistic symbolism of Enlightenment discourse, in which the Egyptian pyramids represented the greatest mystery and highest perfection of geometry and masonry (see Schick 1942:295). But Pym also denies the thesis of cultural dualism on the level of narrative itself: Poe’s polysemantic method—the overdetermined intertextuality of the cultural encounter on Tsalal—narrativizes the repetitiveness and the continuity of a colonialism that cannot shake off its Atlantic past as it passes into the Pacific. In projecting the dangerous legacy of Atlantic slavery into the future of America’s maritime expansion, Arthur Gordon Pym situates itself between the two oceans and their symbolic baggage. It inhabits an imaginative Tsalal, or ultima Thule, where the two oceans meet, and where their discursive cross-fertilization reproduces American fears of the dissolution of racial and cultural boundaries. Shaving time in Moby-Dick Poe’s polysemantic juggling is not altogether unlike Melville’s method, discussed above with regard to Benito Cereno, of condensing the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The same heterotopic method can be gleaned from Melville’s South Seas fictions Mardi (1850), The Encantadas’ (1854), and Typee (1846). While ‘Encantadas’ symbolically inscribes the Galapagos Islands with the imperial myths of Europe (especially the early modern colonial allegories of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s The Tempest), Melville’s ten sketches on the ‘enchanted’ islands likewise amount to a micro-history of colonial hubris and failure which parodies Europe’s monumental myths of imperial expansion.


Mardi, written between Redburn and Moby-Dick, even more selfconsciously employs the mode of allegory in presenting a very disturbing fable of imperialism. During their ‘chartless voyage’ in search of the abducted white maiden Yillah, Taji and his companions travel through an imaginary Pacific archipelago, but their sojourn is at the same time an allegorical circumnavigation of the British Empire and its postcolonial offshoot in America. Their Swiftean flight takes them from England (called Dominora) and other places in Europe to the United States (alias Vivenza), South America (Kolomba), round Cape Horn and on to China, India, and Africa (Hamora). The journey, which gives them occasion to observe and philosophize on the multiple instances of social inequality in the capitalist world, ends abruptly when their ship, having been blown back from West Africa into the Mediterranean, spins around its own keel ‘Zand from that inland sea emerged’ (Melville 1990:487, 404–86). But before taking off for their space flight (with ‘[the] universe…before us’) the travelers have occasion to apprehend the ‘great pointed masses’ of the Egyptian pyramids; ‘Granite continents’ which, they think, were ‘not built with human hands’ (486). It is interesting, within the larger context of the Africanization of Egypt discussed above, that it is off the coast of Africa where Taji and his Laputian friends are blown off course by a storm and transported back to Egypt by a strong current. Their magical return to the Old World and the pyramids is preceded by their eloquent condemnation of the African slave trade which tears ‘Hamora’s’ children from its soil ‘to till a stranger’s.’ ‘Oh, tribe of Hamo!’ Yoomy exclaims, ‘thy cup of woe so brims, that soon it must overflow upon the land which holds ye thralls.’ And the philosopher Babbalanja, ‘bowing to the blast’ of the storm that has risen, is driven to the quasi-Jeffersonian statement: ‘Thus, oh Vivenza! retribution works! Though long delayed, it comes at last— Judgment, with all her bolts’ (Melville 1990:485–6).12 Evidently, the themes of conscience and retribution dominate the sea fiction of Poe and Melville. Shipwrecked in a tempest, the anonymous author of Poe’s short story ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ (1833) encounters hovering on a wave high above him a ‘gigantic ship’ ten times the size of his own: ‘For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled, and tottered, and—came down’ (Poe 1986:104). The hulk of the ship, to which the narrator is transferred during the crash, is extremely porous and rotten and made of ‘Spanish oak’; the cabin floor is ‘thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts,’ and the crew ‘glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries’ (106, 108). Evidently, the gigantic ship with which the traveler has fallen in, with its black hulk, ‘decayed charts of navigation,’ and ancient crew, is a sort of Flying Dutchman ‘doomed to


hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss’ (105, 107). Shortly before going down with the specter ship, the letter writer senses a collapse of accustomed temporality: I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. (Poe 1986:106) The sensation which Poe’s narrator describes answers to Freud’s definition of the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 1993:160–1; transl. Jackson 1981: 65). At the same time, the ghost ship’s reappearance from the distant past is rendered in the aesthetic terms of the sublime which we have already encountered in Cooper’s Red Rover. The ship is enwrapped by ‘a dull sullen glare of red light,’ and the narrator’s irrepressible feelings of awe, reverence, and wonder only gradually give way to straightforward terror as the maelstrom opens itself up to swallow ship and crew. Poe’s tale uncannily recognizes the history of colonialism inscribed in the legend of the Flying Dutchman; it even transfers the ship’s original nationality to imperial Spain. Hiding on board the specter ship, the narrator is engaged in an act of automatic writing: after he thoughtlessly touches a folded sail with a tarbrush, the letters on the unfolding canvas read ‘DISCOVERY’—which is also the name of Cook’s ship on his third voyage (Poe 1986:106). But almost at the same time as the colonial past is remembered, it is translated into a metaphysical struggle, in which the geographical site of the southern pole comes to stand for ‘some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction’ (109). The discourses of the sublime and of the uncanny of Cooper’s and Poe’s high-seas fantasies are developed further in Moby-Dick, a novel that is clearly indebted to these earlier texts. As I will argue, Melville further links the oceanic sublime with his very particular temporality in which, to recall Delano’s thoughts, ‘past, present, and future seem one.’ At the same time, Moby-Dick anticipates Benito Cereno’s vision of doom. One of the multiple apprehensions of doom occurs to the crew of the Pequod as the ship, deviating from the usual whaling route round Cape Horn (Goetzmann 1986:245), is rounding the Cape of Good Hope on her way into the Indian Ocean:


But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before. Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable searavens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred. (MD 201) Having steered through the black sea of conscience, the Pequod, unlike Poe’s Flying Dutchman, does not rush into the abyss at the southern pole but has its fatal encounter with Moby-Dick in the middle of the Pacific. It goes down roughly in the middle between the Gilbert Islands in the west and the Fanning Islands in the east and about 1,300 miles southwest of Hawaii (Feidelson in Melville 1964:xxviii–xxix). Though the reason for its journey—it is on a whaling voyage—seems to differ from that of Poe’s narrator, Ahab’s transformation of the economic motive into his personal quest for vengeance and for superior knowledge is not altogether dissimilar from that of Poe’s unnamed narrator, who finds himself on a quest for a knowledge ‘whose attainment is destruction.’ In keeping with the text’s evocation of the black sea of conscience, the Pequod, named after the presumably extinct New England tribe, is figured in Africanist terms. It was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpannelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins. (MD 67) Her ‘long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles


depended from the bows’ (MD 95). Moreover, the ‘Ethiopian’ ship and her multicultural crew, which represents all races of mankind, seem to form a living organism: They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. (MD 454–5) Melville’s use of the Pequod as an allegorical ship of state, representing the e pluribus unum of American democracy—to be repeated in the chapter ‘Forecastle.— Midnight’—has frequently been pointed out. In a less obvious way, however, the Pequod is a ghost ship and a slaver. In its ghostly existence, it belongs to the novel’s pervasive critique of the authority of imperial knowledge. Having killed a whale, the crew proceeds to boil its meat in the tryworks in order to store the oil in casks under deck. Ishmael describes the faces of the sailors at work, ‘all begrimed with smoke and sweat’ and strangely reflecting the red heat of the fire: As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul. (MD 353–4) Infected with the ghostliness of the scene, Ishmael almost capsizes the ship by confusing its bow with its stern and turning the tiller in the wrong direction— one of many inversions of the dominant order that is committed on board. As we shall see, order is inverted and subverted in a number of ways in this novel.


In 1953, C.L.R.James read Moby-Dick as a history from below, in pointing out the centrality of the crew in Melville’s novel and in insisting that Moby-Dick is one of the earliest novels featuring members of the working class—the ‘mariners, renegades, and castaways’ of the maritime world (MD 104; James 1978b). It moreover contrasts the world of maritime workers with the intellectual universe of natural science. On one of its many levels, Melville’s novel is a meditation on the authority of scientific knowledge which confronts the twenty-three volumes of unread texts growing out of Wilkes’s oceanic surveying expedition with the local counter-knowledge of sailors. The Pequod not only symbolizes the American ship of state but is also a literal Nantucket whaler, or what William Goetzmann has called a machine of nautical knowledge which by far exceeds the official knowledge gathered in scientific charts and books. Using Melville’s own frequent analogy between mariners and frontiersmen, Goetzmann writes: The whalers and sealers were the mountain men of the sea. They blazed trails across the world’s vast oceans and into the frozen polar regions that had eluded the great navigators of Cook’s generation. And in so doing, they added a great deal to the world’s body of knowledge. As a consequence, they must perforce be counted as a significant factor in the development of modern science. (Goetzmann 1986:233) As a knowledge-producing engine, the Pequod exceeds for Ishmael all the learning of Harvard and Yale (MD 101). In keeping with this insight, Ishmael writes of the whale ship that she has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed…. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. (MD 99–100) Ishmael’s passionate speech in favor of the unknown mariners and their achievements is part of a larger implicit argument on the authority of knowledge, in which the book knowledge of the classics, from Pliny to Linneaus, is countered with the subjugated knowledge of maritime practice. In the chapter ‘Cetology,’ for example, Ishmael, in spite of his knowledge deployed in later chapters that whales have lungs and nurse their young, rejects the theory of Linnaeus that whales were mammals and ought to be separated from the fish. Ishmael counters in saying that ‘down


to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.’ As he confronts two of his messmates with Linnaeus’s finding that whales, besides having a ‘warm bilocular heart,’ possess lungs, movable eyelids, hollow ears, and, most importantly, ‘penem intratem feminam mammis lactantem,’ his sailor friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin plainly reject the theory and call it humbug (MD 119). The burlesque tone of Melville’s ‘carnivalesque parody’ of the Linnaean system-thinking may conceal the fact that Ishmael offers a serious alternative to Linnaeus’s taxonomy in giving priority to the concept of whales as inhabitants of an ecosystem.13 Ishmael aptly critiques the static classification systems of the natural histories, whose book-centeredness he parodies in dividing whales into folios, octavos, and duodecimos and subdividing those into books and chapters. Speaking with Foucault, our man of practice resists the authority of the classical episteme and its ‘rational’ system of ordering the world, which distinguishes itself by a separation of words and things in the representation of reality (Foucault 1973: 39–42, 74). He rejects the notion of many of his contemporaries that the new system was more realistic than the pre-classical episteme. As Foucault shows, the form of the scientific table, by only admitting those data which fit the categories defined by the observer, reveals less about the nature of things than did the former accumulative histories of nature. The essential difference between the two models, according to Foucault, lies in what is missing in the latter: The words that had been interwoven in the very being of the beast have been unravelled and removed: and the living being, in its anatomy, its form, its habits, its birth and death, appears as though stripped naked. Natural history finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between things and words—a silent gap, pure of all verbal sedimentation…. Natural history did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely. One might say…that the Classical age used its ingenuity, if not to see as little as possible, at least to restrict deliberately the area of its experience. Observation, from the seventeenth century onward, is a perceptible knowledge furnished with a series of systematically negative conditions. (Foucault 1973:129–30, 132) The new scientific language which Ishmael shuns contains a set of formal and generical preconditions that do not sharpen its gaze on reality but that, conversely, superimpose their own logic of selection and exclusion on that reality. In this process of reduction the ‘living being’ of the things to be observed is even further removed from textual representation than in the earlier episteme: a retreat of text from reality which, Foucault argues,


leaves a ‘silent gap.’ Against the clear delimitations of the classical episteme Ishmael shores up an untamable bulk of folklore and sailors’ yarns. He counters the written knowledge of the scientists with the oral tradition of seaports, just as he rehabilitates the knowledge of non-European cultures which has frequently been silenced by the imperial authority of European science. Extending its critique of book knowledge into an inquiry into the limits of representation itself, Moby-Dick is crucially concerned with the incapacity to read. The probably most famous case in point is the chapter ‘Doubloon’; another example is Ishmael’s description of Queequeg’s tattoos, which he transfers from his body to his coffin when sensing the approach of death: Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining the truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. (MD 399) The inscriptions, which Queequeg transfers from his book-like body onto his coffin in a desperate attempt to preserve a record of his existence in the face of impending death, will be the only other ‘text’ besides Ishmael’s to survive the catastrophe—actually the ‘text’ (or empty book) that ensures Ishmael’s survival. The fate of Queequeg, whom most critics read as a composite figure between a South Seas islander and a Native American, recalls the Manifest Destiny image of the vanishing American. Born as the son of a chief on an uncharted Pacific island, he voluntarily joined an American whaler. Although he quickly discovered the hypocrisy of Christian culture and decided to ‘die a pagan,’ Queequeg has become too accustomed to a roving life to return to his native island: ‘an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish’ (MD 57). He teaches Ishmael important lessons in cultural tolerance and reciprocity, true to his motto that (says Ishmael) ‘[we] cannibals must help these Christians’ (MD 61; see Karcher 1980:67–74;


Berthold 1994:142). Being at home neither in the culture of his birth nor in the Euro-American one, Queequeg leads the life of what David Chappell has called a’double ghost’ Heirs to the epic voyages of their ancestors, these Oceanic gobetweens, from the famous Tahitian Omai brought back to England by Captain Cook, to the Fidji islander Vedovi taken hostage by the Wilkes expedition for murdering a seaman, ‘helped to mediate between indigenous custom and the encroaching world economy’ (Chappell 1997:xiv). Their histories remained for the most part unrecorded, leaving a fragmented memory of them as ‘double ghosts, fleeting shadows in the tombs of time.’ They frequently shared Queequeg’s fate, meeting a premature death due to being insufficiently inoculated against the physical and psychic diseases of Western culture.14 Ishmael survives on Queequeg’s book-like coffin turned lifebuoy. The telling of his tale is enabled by this device inscribed with an écriture sauvage which nobody not even Queequeg himself, is able to read: a powerful image of how the narrative of a dominant culture is established on the ruins, or within the hollowed-out space, of other narratives and cultures which it displaces. The ‘bosom friendship’ between Ishmael and Queequeg is doubtless one of the best known cross-cultural friendships of world literature. Its message of mutuality and equality serves Melville for an extended critique of the scientific racism of his contemporaries, as when he compares Queequeg’s head with that of George Washington. His friend’s head, Ishmael observes, is ‘phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him…. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed’ (MD 52). Melville’s parody of the pseudo-scientific ‘readings’ of heads by phrenologists like Lothar Gall and Spurzheim or craniologists like Samuel G.Morton here expands into a sacrilegious leveling of the cultural difference between America’s founding father and an unknown South Seas savage: an assault on American national pride that would be repeated by Frederick Douglass two years later in his fictionalization of Madison Washington.15 Ishmael’s narrative of cultural relativism has one of its epitomes in the chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand,’ in which Ishmael, joining the other sailors in squeezing sperm, is seized by a ‘strange sort of insanity…an abounding, affectionate, friendly loving feeling’ which makes him look up ‘sentimentally’ into the eyes of his fellow men and causes him to ejaculate (so to speak): ‘Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness’ (MD 348–9). Politically, this Whitmanesque reverie of what we might call cosmic corporeal love is repeated in the image of the Pequod as a multicultural space, an ‘Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth’ (MD 108).16


This plot of cosmic corporeal love, which stresses the unity of mankind and the equality of different cultures, is dialectically opposed by Ahab’s plot of ‘promethean’ rebellion, mad vengeance, and imperial quest (MD 175; see Castronovo 1995:91). Like the Flying Dutchman, Ahab, according to the lore of the ‘prophet’ Elijah, has blasphemed God first by killing a man in a church and again by spitting into a silver calabash, before becoming ‘dismembered’ by Moby-Dick (MD 87, 147). Having survived the attack with one leg and a stricken soul, Ahab is ‘branded’ with a ‘slender rod-like mark’ which threads its way ‘out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing’ The sailors give different origins of Ahab’s mark but they generally agree that he incurred it during some mortal combat. The superstitious Manxman asserts that Ahab’s ‘birth-mark,’ emblem of his divided mind, would reach from crown to sole’ (MD 110). Ahab asserts his authority toward the crew not in the familiar terms of the naval code but as a pagan conjurer. Possessing all the traits of a primeval civilizer —eloquence, a charismatic character, a penetrating eye— Ahab forecloses any resistance to his violation of the Pequod’s official charter by involving the seamen in a series of shamanistic rituals. Subduing them to the ‘Leyden jar of his own magnetic life,’ he appoints, Tarotfashion, the three harpooneers as lancecarriers and the three mates as cupbearers and makes them swear death to Moby-Dick (MD 146). As the encounter with Moby-Dick draws near, Ahab, making strategic use of what Rogin has called the ‘technological sublime,’ has the blacksmith fashion a special ‘branding-iron’ for him and tempers it in the blood of his three pagan harpooneers while howling deliriously, ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ (MD 404; Rogin 1983:138). And as the Pequod drifts further and further into mythical space and out of the jurisdiction of municipal law, Ahab gradually replaces its astronomical and mathematical instruments with self-made devices. Cursing Science, he furiously breaks the quadrant, ‘Foolish toy!’ and announces that he will henceforward determine the position by dead-reckoning and the log and line (MD 412). A little later, he tames St. Elmo’s fire with the superior power of his will, theatrically waving his lit harpoon like a torch and then blowing it out (MD 417–18). And when the compass fails, Ahab, pronouncing himself ‘lord of the level loadstone,’ contrives his own needle, much to his crew’s ‘servile wonder’ at this ‘magic’ and accompanied with many a mesmeric gesture to ‘augment’ the crew’s ‘awe’ (MD 418). These portentous events are followed by the snapping of the ship’s line, accompanied by Pip’s reverie that the Pequod is persecuted by his own drowned self. The following night the sailors are startled by ‘wild’ and ‘unearthly’ cries arising from the water, ‘like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents,’ which Manxman, the oldest sailor among them, identifies as ‘the voices of newly drowned men in the


sea.’ The ominous events are topped as a man goes overboard the next day and is swallowed by the sea, to be followed by the Pequod shortly after (MD 427–9). Both plots, that of Ishmael’s playful deconstruction of the colonial system of knowledge and truth,17 as well as Ahab’s quest for imperial truth, find their counterpart in the representation of whales: while Moby-Dick’s unreasoning wrath often appears as a mirror image of Ahab’s, Ishmael’s message of universal love is reiterated, for example, in the representation of whales as feeling creatures susceptible to human sympathy and pity (e.g., the whale nursery described in ‘The Grand Armada’). Ahab’s providential plot of metaphysical vengeance, related in the language of tragedy, stands in perfect opposition to the ‘Anacharsis Clootz’ plot of Ishmael, related in the tone of burlesque humor.18 Each plot, in turn, has its own ending, with Ishmael’s necessary survival functioning as an ‘Epilogue’ to the metaphorically overdetermined sinking of the Pequod. The potent image of the Indian Tashtego trying to fasten Ahab’s red flag to the main mast of the sinking ship, accidentally driving a nail through the wing of the sky-hawk who is pecking at the flag, leaves no doubt about the metaphorical message. It invites us to read the destruction of the multicultural ship, which goes down accompanied by the ‘archangelic shrieks’ of the imperial bird, as a prophetic symbol of doom, telling us that America’s imperial ambition will betray its ideal of freedom, democracy, and equality (MD 465–9). As a growing number of critics have noted, Moby-Dick was radically rewritten in the light of the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its enforcement by Melville’s father-in-law, Boston Judge Lemuel Shaw, who endorsed the hotly debated act in the infamous Sims ruling in April 1851.19Besides rewriting his own text in the light of recent political events, Melville also radically rewrites the foundationalist fiction of the nationalistic ending of Cooper’s Red Rover (whose red flag Ahab shares) as a prophecy of apocalyptic doom, with the hawk hacking at Ahab’s red flag just as the mythical eagle feeds on the heart of Prometheus.20 In doing so he employed much of the political symbolism of contemporary public rhetoric, which was full of references to leviathan monsters and sinking ships of state (Heimert 1963; Rogin 1983).21 The issue of slavery is negotiated in Moby-Dick in a number of ways— most emblematically perhaps in the image of the little mate Flask mounted on the shoulders of the gigantic African harpooneer Daggo, which criticism usually reads as a symbol of the dependency of the American economy on Southern slavery. One of the symbolically most overcharged items in MobyDick is of course the Pequod itself which at times resembles a ghost ship, a death ship, a pirate—and a slaver. In the chapter ‘Stubb’s Supper,’ for example, the sharks feasting on the whale corpse which lies alongside the Pequod are compared to those sharks ‘ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them’ and which invariably accompany ‘all slave ships


crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried’ (MD 249–50). Comic relief gives way to extended burlesque in the subsequent scene of Stubb’s supper. Relishing his whale steak, Stubb forces the black cook Fleece to courteously implore the sharks to be a bit more moderate and quiet in devouring the remains of the whale corpse. In other words, we have a black cook preaching moderation to sharks who are engaged in devouring the corpse of a whale that shares a discursive or figurative site with the corpse of a slave thrown overboard. Fleece, who quietly bears Stubb’s numerous humiliations, aptly mutters as he limps away, ‘Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ‘stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of a shark dan Massa Shark hisself’ (MD 249–54). Fleece’s ‘sermon’ to his sharky fellow critters,’ at once a parody of St. Francis’s sermon to the birds (Karcher 1980:88–9) and a grotesque repetition of Father Mapple’s sermon at the beginning of the book, also satirizes the voracity of the colonial-capitalist enterprise and society’s ‘genteel’ response to it. Frederick Douglass shared Melville’s appreciation of the shark metaphor when he compared American politicians to ‘hungry sharks in the bloody wake of a Brazilian slaveship’—and thereby probably sent shivers of horror down the spines of the genteel ladies of the ‘Lynn Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle’ to whom his speech was addressed (quoted in Castronovo 1995:81).22 The black cabin boy Pip in many ways forms the metaphorical center of Moby-Dick’s anti-slavery parable. Pip’s madness, which endows him with his mystical power of insight, is itself the result of an experience strongly reminiscent of a common practice in the international slave trade. Like the strange Cape Verdians of Melville’s parodistic sketch ‘The ’Gees,’ Pip has a tendency to jump overboard.23 Even though he is warned by Stubb that ‘[we] can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama,’ Pip, scared to death, jumps a second time. He goes overboard like the desperate, sick, and dying Africans of the Zong and other ships, who jumped overboard or were dumped into the ocean for an insurance sum. Abandoned in the middle of the sea, Pip, ‘another lonely castaway,’ turns his head toward the sun like a dying whale (MD 347; cf. 409). The experience through which he loses his mind at the same time causes an expansion of mind by allowing him an insight into the ‘horrors of the half-known life’ that lie beyond the visible world: The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the misermerman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps. (MD 346–7, 236)


Unlike the Zong victims, Pip makes his uncanny return and haunts the Pequod with his crazy-witty talk, mad laughter, and unintelligible power of perception (as in the ‘Doubloon’ chapter). Traumatized by having viewed ‘God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom,’ he walks the deck, estranged from his own self. As the Pequod’s line snaps after a whole series of similar mishaps, Pip exclaims: Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off—we haul no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again. (MD 427) At this point Ahab prevents a sailor from shoving Pip aside, calling out, ‘Hands off from that holiness!’ and he subsequently adopts him as his personal companion: ‘Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; Thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings’ (MD 428). Ahab’s acknowledgment of Pip as his own ‘thing of darkness’ takes place in the atmosphere of increasing forebodings of the disastrous end. Throughout the novel, Pip acts out the part of a prophetic fool who seems to know the future without being able to communicate his knowledge. When Ahab forges the harpoon for the ‘white fiend’ Moby-Dick and tempers his ‘branding-iron’ in the blood of Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, Pip comments on the hellish baptism with a wild laugh (MD 404– 5). His fate, which repeats the unnarrated prehistory of Ahab (who, like Pip, had gone overboard and subsequently lost his mind) at the same time prefigures that of Ishmael (Karcher 1980:86). Seeing through the blindness of his shipmates who try in vain to interpret the ‘empty cipher’ of the doubloon, Pip mutters, ‘Here’s the ship navel, this doubloon, and they are all on fire to unscrew it’ He tells the story of his father, ‘in old Tolland county,’ who ‘cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get there?’ A similar mystery would present itself to those who would one day fish up the Pequod’s mast with the gold coin sticking to it. ‘Oh, the gold!’ Pip comments, ‘the precious, precious gold! —the green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God comes ‘mong the worlds blackberrying’; and he ends his pun on ‘black-burying’ or ‘black-birding’ (i.e., kidnapping) with a tune from a minstrel song (MD 363). Besides bearing the historical traces of slaves thrown overboard during the passage to America, then, the figure of Pip evokes the fates of runaway slaves and the practice of slave hunting recently reinforced by the passing


of the Fugitive Slave Law. For instance, Pip quotes the language of fugitive slave handbills when he says, ‘Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by that’ (MD 427; see Heimert 1963:513; Karcher 1980:85). Ahab’s reaction to this can be read as an indictment of the practice of slave-hunting and the legislation justifying it in the land of individual freedom: ‘Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here, Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines’ (MD 427–8). But not long afterward he himself forsakes the weeping boy who subsequently soliloquizes: ‘Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip? —a little negro lad, five feet high, hangdog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once’ (MD 436–7). But in one of the novel’s many doublings and inversions, Ahab, too, although mostly acting like a fanatic slave master, bears the traces of slavery upon his body, which is ‘branded,’ like that of a slave (MD 110, 404, 444). He is compared to an artificial man, an automaton set on an ‘iron rail’ by a superior power, a victim of the Faustian will which he personifies and from which he most suffers (Rogin 1983:137–40).24 While Ahab’s mutilation of body and mind resembles that of Pip, Pip likewise seems to be in secret communion with Queequeg. Observing Queequeg contemplate his coffin, Pip asks a favor of him: where go ye now?…if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles. Starbuck, who listens to Pip’s talk, feels reminded of incidents when, ‘in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing.’ Pip continues to speak to Queequeg, and then adds, ‘base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a’shiver; —out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whaleboat!’ (MD 398–9). The Pequod had sailed straight for the Azores, from there to the Cape Verde Islands, the whaling grounds off the Patagonian coast, then straight to St. Helena and the Cape of Good Hope. On its zigzag course through the Atlantic, Ahab’s ship never touched on the Antilles. Clearly, therefore, Pip’s talk of having gone overboard in the Antilles must be understood metaphorically, or, as Starbuck suggests, in terms of forgotten childhood or collective memories. Pip has not gone overboard in the Antilles, but— like the baby ghost in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved—he seems to remember the fates of the Zong slaves and others who have. Pip’s mental condition endows him with a power of vision that transcends time, place,


and individual memory and conjures up the ‘black’ Atlantic past even while the Pequod meets its doomed end in the Pacific—an end that allegorizes America’s imperial future. Melville further engages his heterotopic method—which he would later bring to perfection in Benito Cereno—in endowing Pip with two geographical areas of origin. The Alabama boy’ is twice said to be a native of ‘Tolland county’ in Connecticut (MD 108; cf. 345, 363). Tolland County, as Harold Beaver has noted, is the territory formerly inhabited by the Pequot Indians, which links Pip’s origin and fate to that of the ship itself (Beaver 1972:872). The Pequot Indians were ‘exterminated’ by the Puritans in 1637 in the infamous massacre of their town Mystic. John Underhill’s report of the battle is accompanied by a strange illustration, whose air-view perspective of the oval-shaped Pequot village surrounded by palisades bears some resemblance to the description of the Pequod with its hull framed by ivory-tusks. The remaining Pequots were distributed among other tribes in the Hartford Conference of 1638, and the Puritans, in a vain attempt to subdue reality to their own script, prohibited them to call themselves Pequots from then on. Their aim was clearly to erase the remembrance of their former existence from the historical record (Mackenthun 1997a:292). A small remainder of the dissolved tribe, however, mainly consisting of women and children, were shipped to the West Indies, there to be sold as slaves—ironically in a ship called Desire (Salisbury 1982:222; Springer 1995:7). Another group of about twenty Pequots shared the fate of many African slaves. William Hubbard, in The Present State of New-England (1677), reports that the American Captain John Gallop ‘fed the fishes’ with them when throwing them into the Atlantic with bound hands and feet off Block Island (Jennings 1975:226; Drinnon 1990:44). Just as Benito Cereno—if in a less accentuated way—Moby-Dick condenses various historical moments. It geographically displaces the memory of the ‘Black Atlantic’ to the Pacific, thus suggesting a thematic link between America’s past (and present) involvement in the transatlantic slave-based economy and its Western future. Melville’s notion of history succinctly differs from the historical vision that governs Cooper’s The Red Rover, which tends to both domesticate and ‘romance’ (inter)national historical processes. Melville entertains a much more complex notion of historical temporality than Cooper or than claimed, for his own work, by Wai-chee Dimock who insists on the ‘relentlessly continuous’ temporality of Moby-Dick (Dimock 1989:122).25 In condensing various historical moments within one image (as in Benito Cereno’s merging of early modern Spanish colonialism with the more recent events of the Haitian Revolution), Melville’s narrative suspends linear time and the artificial divisions of geographical space and replaces it with a quite modern temporality—a temporality which Eric Sundquist, referring to one of the


key scenes of Benito Cereno, has called ‘shaving time’—in which the present is shot through with images from the past, and, in Moby-Dick, prophetic images of the future. In aesthetically subverting the determinist teleology of Manifest Destiny (Ahab) with a ‘modernist,’ complex temporality (Pip), Melville counters the logic of imperial history with the subaltern and heterotopic fragments of memory.26 Melville’s Pacific Ocean has both a literal and a symbolic presence: in its latter quality, it becomes a memory space or lieu de mémoire inscribed with the history of the Atlantic past (see Nora 1989). Thus the powerful image of the sinking Pequod, with Tashtego in the act of nailing Ahab’s red (rover’s) flag to the mainmast, remembers the failed realization of the ideals of the 1848 revolutions (see Rogin 1983), but it also contains a dark presentiment of the imminent destruction of the Union, of the genocidal war against America’s indigenous population, and of the imperial future of the United States. Ishmael is saved, floating along on his curious death ship inscribed with the symbols of a vanished culture. But his present will be haunted by the shadows of the colonial past and memories of unfulfilled revolutionary ideals. Like Edgar Allan Poe, with whose sea fiction Moby-Dick entertains a secret dialogue, Melville articulates his political concerns in the language of the uncanny. The multiple references to ghosts and invisible presences that inform the pages of his novel—most notably to the ‘existential dread’ (Spanos 1995: 128) of whiteness in the chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’—may be seen as the literary counterpart (or perhaps intertext) of Admiral Foote’s eloquent evocation of the ‘horrors of the middle-passage’ being rendered invisible by the ‘deceitful beauty’ of the ‘graceful hull, wellproportioned masts, neatly trimmed yards, and gallant bearing’ of the slave ships. Moby-Dick, too, if in a more oblique way, speaks of ‘the theft of living men, the foulness and corruption of the steaming slave-deck, and the charnel-house of wretchedness and despair’ (Foote 1970:16). In ‘The Funeral,’ Ishmael describes the spectacle of the ‘Vast white headless phantom’ of a whale, decapitated and stripped of its ‘blanket,’ which ‘floats further and further from the ship,’ accompanied by growing multitudes of fowl and sharks (MD 261–2). ‘Desecrated as the body is,’ however, ‘a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it’ to scare, for years to come, ‘some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel’ into the belief of encountering dangerous shoals (MD 262). Meanwhile Ahab monologizes, Hamlet-like and in perfect trochaic meter, to the whale’s (Babo-like) ‘black and hooded head,’ surmising that of all divers, this one has dived where ‘unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned’ (MD 264). While the whiteness of the dead whale, viewed from afar, leads to cartographic error, the whiteness of Moby-Dick’s hue fills Ishmael with


‘nameless horror.’ He accordingly reverses the conventional color symbolism, admitting that it was the ‘whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.’ In spite of its accumulated associations with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. (MD 163–4) Among the ‘accumulated associations’ of whiteness, Ishmael evokes its significance as the ‘imperial color,’ which symbolizes a ‘preeminence’ that ‘applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe’ (MD 163). Inverting the semantics of the (non-) color white, Melville implicitly critiques the scientific racism and white supremacism that views Anglo-Saxons as the race destined for imperial rule over the rest of mankind. More particularly, the frequent mention of ghosts and uncanny incidents in Moby-Dick, which reaches its climax with Pip’s announcement of his disembodied self trying to get on board again and the subsequent drowning of a sailor, tells ‘of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it’ (Goddu 1997:19). Thus Moby-Dick, endlessly evoking ‘the horrors of the half-known life’ while hardly ever naming them, wrestles with America’s ‘unspeakable’ and uncanny colonial past and imperial present. Melville would continue this project in Benito Cereno, but as we have seen the later text lacks Ishmael’s romantic vision of racial harmony—a vision that Melville found impossible to uphold six years prior to the Civil War. ‘There will occasionally flash across my mind a sensadon of familiar things,’ writes Poe’s fated narrator, thereby evoking a suspension of temporal linearity similar to that experienced by Pip and later aestheticized in ‘Benito Cereno.’ All three texts suggest the idea of a present continuously invaded by the colonial past, an idea that more recent ‘third world’ writers have spelled out as a characteristic of the postcolonial condition. Thus George Lamming emphasizes the ‘continuing psychic experience’ of the colonial past ‘that has to be dealt with and will have to be dealt with long after the actual colonial situation formally ‘ends’’ (quoted in Hulme 1993:120). The similarity between Lamming’s insight into the postcolonial psyche and the aesthetic procedures of Melville’s ‘art of truthtelling’ is certainly no evidence of the ‘postcoloniality’ of Melville’s fiction in the modern sense of the term. And yet, Melville’s—and in a grotesque sense Poe’s—emphasis on internal division, his mimicry of


colonialist fictions, his insight into the connection between colonial power and representation, his use of cross-cultural couples—whom Wilson Harris has called ‘carnival twins’—as well as his use of narrative doublevoicedness foreshadow some of the fictional characteristics of much more recent postcolonial texts (Harris 1983:15–26).27

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Photograph © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Moby-Dick, like Arthur Gordon Pym, has two endings, the first consisting of a vision of a gigantic and lethal whiteness and the second speaking of a ‘hybrid’ survival. The openness of the novel reflects an ideological openness of antebellum society—a society painfully aware of the ambivalence of America’s postcoloniality and of the impossibility of reconciling the political practice of the westward expansion of slavery with the democratic ideals of the founding fathers. In their different ways, the fictions of Poe and Melville look ahead to the immanent eruption of the conflicts with which the United States has been struggling since the very beginning and will continue to struggle in the future. Melville’s multiple images of snapping lines and minds anticipate his famous lines on John Brown in ‘The Portent’ which reads the ‘cut’ on John Brown’s ‘crown’— prefigured by Ahab’s white line running from crown to sole—as an emblem of national division and a prefiguration (‘meteor’) of Civil War. Accordingly, the cut runs through the narrative of Melville’s novel, forever


playing out against each other the opposing poles of America’s political legacy Ishmael’s plot of universal friendship and equality against Ahab’s plot of universal empire.

Epilogue

‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ writes Walter Benjamin. Perhaps no document of the cultural history of the Black Atlantic better illustrates this fierce ambivalence than J.M. W.Turner’s painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On. The painting was first exhibited during the Royal Academy Exhibition in London in 1840, only a few weeks before the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Its combination of the oceanic sublime with the representation of the horrors of the slave trade is said to have caused a sensation.1 The Slave Ship ‘aims directly for the sublime in its invocation of racial terror, commerce, and England’s ethico-political degeneration,’ writes Paul Gilroy (1993:16). It is variously believed to have been inspired by Turner’s reading of James Thomson’s description of a slave ship in a storm in his Seasons or by his reading of Thomas Clarkson’s recent republication of his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (1839), which contains a description of the case of the slave ship Zong. One of the Zong slaves was able to catch a rope—like Pip’s ghost—and crawl back on board in order to survive and tell the story. The entire foreground of the painting is filled with the bodies of the drowning Africans, their shackles (which, in defiance of the laws of physics, are bopping on the surface), and the monsters of the deep ready to devour the victims. John Ruskin describes the work in Modern Painters (1843) as containing ‘the noblest sea that Turner ever painted.’ If he would have to choose one work upon which to rest Turner’s immortality, Ruskin writes, ‘I should choose this’: Its daring conception, ideal in the highest sense of the word, is based on the purest truth, and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life; its colour is absolutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion; its tones as

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true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions…—the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable sea. (Ruskin 1987:160) Ruskin acquired the Slave Ship in 1844 and kept it for twenty-eight years before selling it, allegedly because he found it too painful to live with. Apparently the foreground increasingly blocked his view to an aesthetic appreciation of the execution of the seascape. In his description of the painting Ruskin banishes the historical practice to which the painting refers to a footnote. The footnote reads like an afterthought,’ writes David Dabydeen: ‘something tossed overboard’ (Dabydeen 1994:ix). And yet, Ruskin’s text cannot completely ban the history that gave rise to the painting, which makes its return in the metaphorical language of his aesthetic discourse—a language full with references to ‘blood,’ ‘death,’ ‘guilt,’ ‘sepulchral waves,’ and a sky filled with ‘horror’ (Ruskin 1987:159– 60). The ambivalence of Ruskin’s original text was shed by later art criticism, and indeed by the subtle choices of photographic reproduction, which generally obscures the foreground and highlights the background. If Turner’s ship was flying a flag at the time of its original exhibition, it would most likely be the Stars and Stripes. The appearance of this painting in the 1840s seems strangely belated. Not only had the British slave trade ended several decades before but Britain had declared the emancipation of all slaves in the British colonies in 1833. Turner’s painting, which combines the highest artistic achievement with the representation of the utmost historical horror, only makes sense in combination with the contemporary British efforts to end the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil— which, as we have seen, was thriving in the 1830s and 1840s thanks to the significant input—and ignorance—of American entrepreneurs and politicians. If, as critics claim, the painting was meant by Turner to articulate his protest against the slave trade, it must be understood as part of the ideological and military machine put in motion by the British government to suppress the illegal slave trade to Latin America. In 1874 the painting was aptly bought by an American citizen after having waited for a new owner at Christies for two years. In her novel Free Enterprise (1993), Michelle Cliff reimagines the introduction of the Slave Ship into Boston’s genteel society. The suffragette and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant, who attends the unveiling of the painting at the home of the rich Bostonian Alice Hooper, is shocked by society’s willful ignorance of the foreground and leaves the gathering. The following day she receives a letter from Miss Hooper in which she explores her own complicity with the violence of the odious commerce: ‘Too many New England fortunes,’ the fictional owner of the painting writes,

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rest in the enterprise of slavery, in one way or another…. Did the money, my money, paid to the art dealer on my behalf for the Turner constitute the dealer’s profiting off the trade? Even at this remove? Am I also, given the painting is an investment, guilty? Chastising herself for keeping silent about the historical meaning of the picture, Miss Hooper links the ‘white flash of typhoon at the center of the work’ with the ‘foreboding…whiteness’ of ‘Melville’s white whale and Coleridge’s albatross— emblems of that belief which allowed and supported something like the slave trade’ (Cliff 1993:77–8). The story of the drowned Africans remains untold. It is unspeakable within the limits of a ‘scholarly’ text with its demand for scientific verification and narrative closure. It is a story that must be reinvented. Focussing on the head of the African in the foreground of the painting, a body that ‘has been drowned in Turner’s (and other artists’) sea for centuries,’ David Dabydeen reinvented the drowned African’s body, biography, and imagined homeland. Desiring ‘to begin anew in the sea’ but being ‘too trapped by grievious memory to escape history,’ the disembodied soul of the drowned man becomes a symbolic archive for the memories of all the slaves that drowned on the middle passage. Like Pip, who harbors the collective memory of Africans drowned in the ‘sweet Antilles,’ or like Toni Morrison’s ghost Beloved, whose delirious stutterings reveal that she is more than just the ghost of a baby girl, the drowned man roams the bottom of the sea, collecting the scraps and fragments of personal histories and strings them together on an imaginary ‘jouti necklace.’ The old necklace of the storyteller Manu, each of whose beads stood for a tribal story, has been broken and the beads scattered like marbles. Weaving new patterns into the ‘loom of history’ formerly run by the ‘dark ships’ of the slave trade (Hayden 1985:51), the drowned African looks forward to the future when …each must learn to live Beadless in a foreign land; or perish. Or each must learn to make new jouti, Arrange them by instinct, imagination, study And arbitrary choice into a pattern Pleasing to the self and to others Of the scattered tribe; or perish. Each Will be barren of ancestral memory But each endowed richly with such emptiness From which to dream, surmise, invent, immortalise. (Dabydeen 1994:33)

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Postcolonial writers are beginning to assemble the scattered fragments of the traumatic history of Atlantic colonialism into new stories of cultural survival. ‘The slave ship that crossed the Atlantic,’ Wilson Harris suggests, now offers itself as a powerful symbol to a new generation of writers. It has been ‘profoundly reoriented in the waters of the maelstrom of history and new pilots are coming to the helm in the name of bitter, hard-won freedoms’ (Harris in Rowell 1995: xxvii). Its stories will be passed on.

Notes

1 Chartless narratives: ambivalent postcoloniality and oceanic memory in early American writing 1 This view is quite pervasive. To take only two examples: Daniel Boorstin (1991) divides his classical three-volume history of America into a volume entitled The Colonial Experience, one entitled The National Experience, and one on The Democratic Experience, with an according division of contents. D.W.Meinig’s The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1986), is divided into a volume, Atlantic America, 1492– 1800, which has a great deal to say on maritime relations, and a second volume, Continental America, 1800–1867, which ignores the ongoing importance of the Atlantic. Part of the reason is that Meinig’s history is written from a ‘geographical’ perspective, not an economic or political one. This, of course, does not mean that there are no expert studies on United States maritime relations. My point is that the Atlantic vanishes from the general knowledge of pre-Civil War history. 2 As Christopher Hill shows, the late medieval underground narrative of the Norman yoke developed into a powerful anti-feudalist rhetoric during the English Revolution to contest the prerogative of the English kings to property (Hill 1990: chapter 3). Jefferson, who, according to Gilbert Chinard, ‘painstakingly collected every scrap of evidence to reconstruct the history of his ‘Saxon ancestors’’ and to prove their superior political organization, also contributed to the romanticization of the myth (quoted in Hill 1990:98). His romantic Anglo-Saxonism, which paved the way for the Anglo-Saxon racial myth that would emerge in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, includes a fascination with the male virtue and fraternity of an earlier, bygone age as embodied, for example, by the highly popular Ossian fantasies of the time. Read in terms of Indian dispossession, that romantic narrative can be seen to function as a screen memory for accommodating the quite different, and less text-like, disappearance of America’s indigenous population. On Jefferson’s Ossianic passion see Isaac (1993). 3 I borrow the term ‘foundational fiction’ from Doris Sommer who applies it to early national romances in Latin America (Sommer 1991).

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4 Thus the studies of American imperialism by William Appleman Williams (1969), Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (1986), Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1987), and, most recently, Frank Ninkovitch (2001) all agree that the imperialist phase of the United States began after the Civil War and had its peak with the Spanish American War and the annexation of Hawaii in 1898. 5 Jefferson, too, considered annexing Cuba (van Alstyne 1960:88). 6 Thus Wolfgang Reinhard insists that American continental expansion posits a continuation with British expansionist politics (1985:215). He usefully refers to the American practice as ‘secondary colonialism’ (Sekundärkolonialismus) or ‘internal colonialism’ (Reinhard 1996:4). Hartmut Keil suggests another useful term in referring to the imperial rhetoric of the founding years as ‘anticipated imperialism’ (Keil 1991:69 passim). Keil gives a good and concise account of this whole issue. 7 Reinhard names as two of the key defining characteristics of colonialism the domination of a foreign people with the simultaneous exploitation of differences in the technological and economic development between the colonizing power and the colonized. He suggests using the term imperialism as a dynamic term to complement the static concept of colonialism (Reinhard 1996:1). Historians usually distinguish between settlement colonialism (as in North America and Australia) and exploitation colonialism, or what Reinhard calls, somewhat euphemistically, Stützpunktkolonialismus (as, largely, in Africa, India, and the Caribbean) (2). 8 It is interesting, to take just one example, that Philip Freneau is today remembered for his ‘frontier’ poems and at best for his nationalistic poems in which he joins his compatriots Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight in advocating Western settlement. What is less well known is that Freneau not only wrote more than fifty poems on the sea but also served as master of a vessel in the West Indian trade and, from 1778 to 1780, as a blockade runner against British navy ships (Philbrick 1961:15–16). One of his most powerful poems is ‘To Sir Toby,’ a passionate indictment of the practice of torturing slaves on a Jamaican sugar plantation—which he aptly uses to produce antiBritish sentiment. A more recent collection on the significance of the sea in American literature is Benesch et al. (2003). 9 This general notion is reproduced, for example, in the PBS television series Africans in America (1998) which treats the middle passage extensively but as a pre-revolutionary practice, without mentioning the considerable Rhode Island slave trade in the late eighteenth century. (On the latter see Coughtry 1981.) Another recent movie, Stephen Spielberg’s Amistad, nicely illustrates the structural invisibility at work, in representing the slave trade as an outdated practice of degenerate Iberian nations and the United States courts as morally empowered champions of abolition which render the selfishly motivated efforts of abolitionist fanatics politically dispensable. 10 Wolf has slightly different numbers: 1.9 million for Brazil between 1811 and 1870, and 550,000 for Cuba (Wolf 1982:316). 11 On the cotton exports to England see Wolf (1982:279) and Bailey (1992: 220).

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12 The participation of the United States is conspicuously absent from the work of Herbert Klein, who states that American subjects and American ships were involved without paying any more attention to the fact (Klein 1999:200). David Eltis likewise, in his account of the illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil, bans the American contribution to a footnote on shipbuilding costs, culminating in the sentence, ‘Though most slavers were built in the U.S. not all, even in the later 1830s, were Baltimore clippers’ (Eltis 1981:174 n.17). The sentence occludes a whole unwritten history. David Murray, in his essay in a recent encyclopedia of world slavery, emphasizes (as does Klein) the impact of British credit and commodities in the illegal trade but has nothing to say about the American shipbuilding industry. Murray nevertheless remarks that the only person ever executed for illegal slaving (in 1862) was the captain of the Cuban slaver Erie, who went by the not quite Spanish-sounding name of Nathaniel Gordon (Murray 1998:382–3). Mentioning the pro-slavery lobby in Spain and Portugal, Murray forgets to take account of the powerful proslave trade crusade in the antebellum American South (382; cf. Takaki 1971: chapter 3). In keeping with this visible absence, neither Klein nor the volume edited by Drescher and Engerman mention the important work of DuBois on this issue, which others necessarily rely on as the only book-length investigation of the role of the United States in the illegal slave trade (Bailey 1992:205–6; Thomas 1998:820). By the same token, no historian has so far put Warren Howard’s findings on the failings of the United States justice system in punishing illegal slaving on a more scientific footing (Howard 1963). To a large part this absence of scholarship is the result of the dominance of the quantification method in slave trade scholarship, which values numbers above analyses of complex economic and political relationships. 13 Jeffrey Bolster’s recent study (1997) on the world of African seamen should also be mentioned in this connection. 14 The concept ‘internal colonialism’ was keyed with specific reference to the relation between the United States and Native Americans by Robert K.Thomas in 1966 but also used by Michael Hechter in his 1975 study of the internal colonization of the Celtic fringe during British national development (Thomas 1966/67; Hechter 1975). 15 When speaking of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the term ‘internal colonialism’ will of course have to be used with care. Arguably neither the purchase of ‘Louisiana’ from France nor the conquest of further territories after the Mexican War later in the century turned the United States’ relationship to Native Americans into an ‘internal’ affair. In any case it was not perceived as such by the colonizers themselves, who kept up a complex legal discourse and legal practice (in the form of treaties) in order to convince themselves that indigenous peoples were merely ‘domestic dependent nations’ (as in Cherokee v. Georgia, 1831). A thoughtless use of the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ is in danger of imitating that troubled rhetoric while disavowing the fact that the colonizers were dealing with sovereign political collectives. 16 A turn that is registered, for example, by the 1998 American Studies Association conference and the September 1998 issue of the American

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Quarterly, both of which were dedicated to the topic of American Studies and the Question of Empire.’ For a critical comment on these see Gross (2000). Even Rowe, in his book-length study of literature and United States imperialism, does not mention Melville’s most important novel. Spanos dedicates a whole book to highly suggestive readings of Moby-Dick in a postwar and post-Vietnam context which evokes C.L.R.James’s much earlier, and quickly marginalized, reading of it in 1953 (Spanos 1995;2000). To date the most radical historical study is Michael Rogin’s fascinating contextualization of Moby-Dick with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law and the revolutions of 1848 (1983). A book-length study of Melville’s work that offers a’postcolonial’ reader-oriented analysis is Sanborn (1998). Similarly to Carolyn Karcher’s earlier work (Karcher 1980), Sanborn is mostly interested in Melville’s ambivalent ‘pedagogical’ discourse on savagism and scientific racism, in particular its manifestations in the trope of cannibalism. Such is the case in the recent essay collection Postcolonial America, edited by Richard King. In his preface, King describes the contributors’ view of ‘postcolonial America’ ‘in terms of change, decentering, and displacement,’ as ‘the intersections of local, national, and transnational formations, as specific articulations of histories, processes, and relations.’ The authors want to ‘disrupt prevailing understandings of America while describing a constellation of relations, structures, and conditions.’ ‘Postcoloniality,’ King claims, ‘permits us to speak of the forms of power, fields of discourses, and conditions of possibilities germane to the present’ (King 2000:7–9). With one exception, all essays collected in this volume deal with different ethnic relations, as well as issues of globalization and popular culture in the twentieth century. Given the extreme vagueness of King’s definition of ‘postcolonial’—a vagueness that is hardly ameliorated by the individual essays —it is hard to understand why there should be a need for the term postcolonial to describe complex situations in the present when the good old term ‘postmodern’ might serve the purpose much better. See my discussion of Redburn in Chapter 4. As a further effect, an inclusion of the history of the early United States in the study of postcoloniality adds a historical dimension to postcolonial studies which it often lacks. For a recent discussion of the concept of translatio imperii, see Cheyfitz (1991), and with special regard to American popular discourse, Freese (1996). In the context of colonialism and imperialism, Hawthorne’s territorial metaphor is interesting enough: writing from the Salem custom house he is aware of America’s commercial relations to distant places across the sea; the narrator of ‘The Custom House’ actually discovers Hester Prynne’s embroidered letter just as he ponders about Salem’s ‘brighter’ past, ‘when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither’ (Hawthorne 1970: 60). In keeping with the main thrust of nationalistic discourse, the story he relates has nothing to do with maritime commerce, but the fact that the letter burns on his breast like a ‘red-hot iron’ may allow us to conclude that The

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Scarlet Letter is framed by references to the (Black) Atlantic. Hawthorne was no stranger to the maritime world, having acted as ‘editor’ (probably ghost writer) of two accounts of navy officers, Horatio Bridge’s Journal of an African Cruiser (1845) and The Yarn of a Yankee Privateer, which appeared under Hawthorne’s name in 1846. His family included many seafarers, and he had even planned to join the Wilkes Pacific Exploring Expedition (Johnson 1966:105; Springer 1995:342). For a good discussion of the genealogy of the American romance as concept, see Fluck (1996:415–22). Winfried Fluck and Jonathan Arac remark that Richard Chase, Lionel Trilling, and other critics, in formulating the aesthetic grounds of the American romance, were particularly concerned about defining a separate literary tradition for the United States. In fact Hawthorne’s description of his concept of romance as a mode that mingles the marvelous with the real in order to articulate a moral truth is somewhat reminiscent of Alejo Carpentier’s claim for a different, more marvelous, American reality (lo real maravilloso), which consequently requires a different mode of representation. See Arac (1995:694–6). For lo real maravilloso, see Carpentier (1985). This commonplace of a separate aesthetic development in America is expressed, for example, in the statement of Frederic Frank, who writes ‘While the English Gothic has dealt with physical terror and social horror, the American Gothic would concentrate on mental terror and moral horror’ (quoted in Goddu 1997:8). Michael Rogin shares this view when he writes that Antebellum history suggests that the romance was not so much a flight from historical reality as a rendering of the distinctive American social facts of mobility, continental expansion, and racial conflict’ (Rogin 1983:16). I follow Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime, who names vastness of dimension, pain, danger, shapelessness, and terror as the sources of the natural sublime. Burke writes that ‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime,’ and he singles out the ocean as the most sublime site in nature (Burke 1990:53–4). The racial dimension of definitions of the sublime shows in Burke’s association of the sublime with ‘blackness and darkness’ and the example he uses, a young boy’s terror at seeing a mulatto woman (131). The anthropological subtext of Burke’s Inquiry, according to which the sublime is linked to savagery and the dark races, finds its counterpart in Kant’s assertion (in Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1763) that the darker nations were incapable of the sensation of the sublime. In the very act of the ‘romantic’ breaking up of the Judeo-Christian color metaphysics (by associating ‘blackness’ with aesthetic delight), the philosophy of the sublime introduces a hierarchy of cultural value based on aesthetic sensibility. See Doyle (1996:27– 9) and Gilroy (1993:8). I am inspired to this idea by Alan Heimert who, referring to the ‘imperial sublime’ of Moby-Dick, regards the sublime as the aesthetic articulation of imperial desire (Heimert 1963:506). Donald Pease argues that ‘despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has…always served conservative purposes’ (quoted in

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Doyle 1996:26). I think it is important to distinguish between the theorization of the sublime (in Kant, Burke, and others) and its aesthetic expression which can certainly be read as both conservative and subversive, depending on each case.

2 The emergence of the ‘postcolonial’ Atlantic: Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Tyler’s Algerine Captive 1 It is more likely that that benefit belongs to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. 2 ‘The Bell-Tower’ is the Frankensteinian story of the mad scientist Bannadonna who devises an intricate clock mechanism for a bell-tower, including mechanic life-size figures who would hourly strike the bell with a hammer. One of these artificial men, which Bannadonna calls Haman, apparently turns alive and kills his creator. 3 Jeffrey Bolster quotes a surprisingly high percentage of black seafarers. In the 1740s, for example, about 25 percent of male slaves in Massachusetts had shipboard experience (Bolster 1997:7). 4 On the Zong case see Walvin (1993:16–20). 5 As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker show, this pan-Atlantic liberation movement drew much intellectual capital from such widely circulated texts as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and a revolutionary treatise by the French savant Constantine François Volney, Ruins; Or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, ‘a learned, sensible, and rhapsodic work of religious anthropology and world history,’ which was distributed in various cheap editions throughout the Atlantic world between Wales and Brazil. Volney’s thesis of the African roots of civilization would have a lasting impact on the abolitionist rhetoric in the nineteenth century. 6 Subsequently referred to in the text as IN. 7 For a comparison of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative with Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe see Overton (1992). Overton reads Equiano’s description of being sold by Pascal to Doran as being prefigured in Crusoe by Robinson selling the boy Xury to the Portuguese captain (Overton 1992:309). 8 For a long discussion of the Interesting Narrative as a spiritual autobiography, see Costanzo (1987). 9 From the fifth edition onward he also appropriates the words of Othello in the announcement of his marriage to Susanah Cullen, an Englishwoman. 10 On the centrality of William Blake in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic, see Linebaugh and Rediker (2000:344–51). Equiano may have met Blake in London through their common friend Ottobah Cugoano (352). 11 On Equiano as picaresque hero ‘caught up on the cusp of the English novel between Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne,’ see Doherty (1997:573). 12 Gates, discussing the trope of the talking book as a key element of colonial writings about America, as well as in African American signifyin(g) on that discourse, recalls Pizarro’s encounter with Atahualpa. Presented with a Bible and instructed by a priest about its sacred nature, the Inca ruler leafs through the book, listens to it, and, telling the conquerors that the book did not speak

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to him, throws it to the ground (Gates 1988:149–50). Both Columbus’s son Ferdinand and Bartolome de Las Casas report Columbus’s prediction of the lunar eclipse in Jamaica on his fourth voyage. See Columbus (1988:II:134). His ‘magical’ trick recalls Equiano: the child’s perception of the white slave traders as powerful magicians and his persistent admiration for the magic technology of their ships and navigation. For ‘magical technology’ as a colonialist trope see Hulme (1985). On Equiano and Benjamin Franklin see also Costanzo (1987:51, 60) and Christadler (1999). Martin Christadler emphasizes that both authors lived in the same world of imperial England but with very different effects on the development of their respective individual personalities (201). At the time they wrote their autobiographies, part of Atlantic ‘imperial England’ had of course merged into the imperial United States. It is not surprising, therefore, that Equiano’s narrative had little impact in the United States (Doherty 1997:580; Ito 1997). The Heath Anthology (third edition) selects the description of Africa, his captivity and the middle passage, his first impressions of Euroamerican culture in Virginia and England, the account of his manumission, and the account of his spiritual conversion (I:1019–50). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature chooses the same chapters but leaves away the accounts of his juridical and spiritual liberation, thus selecting precisely those parts now believed to be spurious (138–64). Only the Norton Anthology of American Literature (fourth edition) gives a representative impression of Equiano’s seafaring life before his liberation; it furthermore shortens the description of Africa, leaves out the account of his conversion, and ends with the manumission document (765–97). Hereafter cited as AC. Tyler, himself a Federalist, uses the fictional text to oppose the Republicans’ attempt to reestablish, or retain, English culture in the United States (Watts 1998:74). Other contemporary fictions of oriental captivity include Susanna Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers; Or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794). On the popularity of Algerian captivity tales in the 1790s see Schöpp (2000) and Gardner (1998: 33–6). Gardner views the Algerians of these texts—especially of Tyler’s Algerian Captive—as composite versions of hostile European powers and America’s ‘domestic’ racial others (xv; 33–6). He reads the slave trade chapters as generically related to the Indian Captivity Tale, thus returning Tyler’s oceanic episode to a domestic setting (44–5). The Tripolitan War triggered an increase in stage versions on the topic (Philbrick 1961:24). The year 1788, in which Underhill sets out from London to Africa, is the publication year of Falconbridge’s report, as well as the year in which many American Northern states—among them New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut—prohibited the slave trade (DuBois 1986: appendices A and B). Cathy Davidson claims that Tyler took the description of the slave ship scenes from the American edition of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1791) (Davidson 1986:206). Both Equiano’s and Tyler’s texts demonstrate how Falconbridge’s testimony has disseminated into fictional discourse.

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Falconbridge would be fully developed into a fictional character by Barry Unsworth in Sacred Hunger (1992). It is hard to agree with Don Cook, the modern editor of Tyler’s novel, that the slave trade chapters were ‘peripheral’ to the plot of The Algerine Captive (AC 11). From a narratological and ideological viewpoint they are as ‘peripheral’ as the slave trade is to Benito Cereno (which was once also thought to be unrelated to the history of slavery). My own reading is closer to that of the critic William P. Trent who in 1903 claimed the aesthetic and rhetorical importance of these chapters ‘for the power with which [Tyler] described the horror of the slave ship’s voyage at a time when witnesses against the inhumanity of the traffic were sorely needed’ (AC 11). That these powerful descriptions (reproduced here at some length to give a sense of their descriptive intensity) were excluded from American literary history for being thematically peripheral proves one of the points of this book: that the United States has found it hard to come to terms with its ‘Black Atlantic’ past. On the trope of the savage critic in an American context, see Pagden (1983). The figure of the oriental sage became prominent with Montesquieu’s use of it in his Lettres Persanes (1721). My reading of The Algerine Captive differs from that of Edward Watts who reads Tyler’s novel as an ironical comment on Updike Underhill’s incomplete ‘decolonization.’ Watts’s main point is that Tyler seeks to expose Updike’s dependency on conventional (British) thought and his incapacity to think and act independently (Watts 1998:86). I find it problematical to read the novel, as Watts does, as a consistent authorial satire of Updike’s attitude. Especially the slave trade chapters and the nationalistic ending show no signs of authorial detachment or irony, while the burlesque description of rural America in part I or the conversation with the Mollah in part II certainly invite an ironical reading. The text is more hybrid than Watts seems to concede, and yet Tyler’s representational strategy should not be confused with the dialogical style of, for example, Herman Melville—to whom Watts’s claim that Tyler ‘disrupts’ a conventional reading experience and furthers the development of a ‘decolonized readership’ would apply much better (Watts 1998:88). Watts’s use of the concept of postcoloniality exclusively refers to Updike’s relationship to England, as well as to a more general concept of ‘colonial thinking’ in terms of binaries. The term is borrowed from Sidney Kaplan (1957).

3 Textual and geographical displacement in Arthur Mervyn and The Red Rover 1 The tragic story of Toussaint’s imprisonment and death is related by C.L.R.James in The Black Jacobins (James 1978a:362–5). 2 Sheldon Watts has slightly different numbers for the French troops, claiming that of 35,000 men, about 6,000 survived (Watts 1997:237). Alfred Crosby writes that between 1793 and 1796, the British Army in the Caribbean lost about 80,000 men to yellow fever. Half of the soldiers and sailors stationed

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in, or touching, West Africa, died of yellow fever and malaria (Crosby 1986: 140). Jean Devèze, An Enquiry into, and Observation upon the Causes and Effects of the Epidemic Disease Which Raged in Philadelphia from the Month of August till towards the Middle of December 1793 (Philadelphia, 1794), quoted in Powell (1965:172). Devèze’s writings were to remain the most authoritative ones on yellow fever for many decades (174). For general information about the contending theories, with reference to Europe, see Reichert (1997:199ff.). The French troops nevertheless slew about one-half of Haiti’s black population during the revolutionary war (Watts 1997:237). The other rhetorical cudgel used against alien immigrants from the French Caribbean was, as so often in cross-ethnic relations, the language of seduction. Jared Gardner quotes from an article in the Federalist press which warns American husbands against the violation of their wives and daughters by the ‘lusty Othellos’ from abroad unless they wanted to witness the production of a ‘colored breed’ (quoted in Gardner 1994:436). Thus Susan Sontag writes that syphilis, once it reached epidemic proportions in Europe, was called ‘French pox’ by the English, morbus Germanicus by the Parisians, the ‘Naples sickness’ by the Florentines, and ‘Chinese disease’ by the Japanese (Illness as Metaphor, quoted in Campbell 1992:98). Campbell adds that ‘foreignness’ does not necessarily involve geographical distance but that the discourse of disease was (and is) also used for denoting differences within a society. Thus various domestic groups, like women, blacks, and Jews, ‘have at one time or another all been understood as uniquely susceptible to certain disorders,’ for example hysteria (98). I am particularly thinking of Poe’s ‘revenge’ stories: ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), which is set in an imaginary kingdom and describes the bloody revenge of a monstrous but intelligent gnome against his master the king (whom he chains to the chandelier together with his ministers); ‘The Black Cat’ (1843), whose vengeful title figure is often read as an allegory of black people; ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) about the futility of trying to escape both the intrusion of disease and the power of historical change by shutting the kingdom off against the environment; ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) about the murder of two white women by an alien ape; and ‘The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether’ (1845), which describes the imperceptible but finally too obvious revolution that had taken place in a French insane asylum, whose inmates tar and feather the wardens until they resemble orangutans. All of these tales, and a few more (e.g., ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’), as Joan Dayan argues, reveal ‘the rot at the heart of the Great House’ of Southern plantations (Dayan 1991:93). The novels are Wieland, published in September 1798, followed by Ormond, published in February 1799, Arthur Mervyn (first part), published in May 1799, Edgar Huntly, published in August 1799, and the second part of Arthur Mervyn, published in July 1800. Elsewhere I have argued that Edgar Huntly’s foundational fantasies are crucially propelled by the influx of foreign capital—a debt that must be

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forgotten for the national narrative to emerge. See Mackenthun (1997b). For a similar argument see Gardner (1994;1998: chapter 3). Hereafter cited as AM. Daniel Cohen nicely summarizes the different faces of Arthur produced by criticism: some regard him as a hero, others as a moral model, a hypocrite, an imposter, a foolish innocent, a radical innocent, a repressed neurotic, and an amoral neurotic (Cohen 1986:362–3n.). The inconsistency of criticism is in this case not exclusively the result of different theoretical approaches but of the ambivalent characterization of Arthur in the novel. In Brown’s novel Ormond, which likewise takes the yellow fever epidemic as its setting, the fever even has positive effects on the female main character, Constanza. For her, the chaos produced by the epidemic means a release from social constraints and pressures. The protagonist of Brown’s short story ‘The Man At Home’ likewise benefits from the fever. So, as mentioned above, did Brown himself. See Ferguson (1979: 293–5). For an extensive treatment of the significance of disease discourse in ‘Man At Home’ and Ormond see Christophersen (1993:18–21, 55–8). The English law of 1788 which, in reaction to the parliamentary investigations of that year, reduced the number of slaves per ton, aggravated the trade for small highrisk ventures and strengthened the big trading houses. American slavers directly benefited from this legislation (which, in 1788, no longer concerned them), as they could continue the old practice of tightpacking (Mannix and Cowley 1962:89). James Walvin describes the 1790s as a decade of unrest in the whole West Indies. The British faced slave unrest in Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada. But the strongest maroon resistance existed of course in Jamaica. Between July 1795 and March 1796, in the light of recent events in Haiti, Jamaican maroons and runaway slaves ‘tied down and generally bamboozled British forces ten times their size’ (Walvin 1993:256–8). The ‘grotesquely misproportioned’ body, together with the livery, condenses figures like that of the famous Jamaican maroon leader Cudjoe, who led a guerilla war against the British government in the first half of the eighteenth century, with more recent representations of black leaders in European military garb. Cudjoe’s body is represented as very short, stocky, hunchbacked, and muscular; his clothes reminiscent of those of Robinson Crusoe (in the view of Thomas Thistlewood) (Walvin 1993: 257). The black Jacobins of Saint Domingue, conversely, consciously clad themselves in fashionable European dress—at least in part as a strategic means of gaining international acceptance. A wonderful example of the mimicry of dress is in my view the portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a member of the delegation from Saint Domingue to the French National Convention in 1794. Painted in 1797 by Anne-Louis GirodetTriosin, Belley is shown in casually arranged military attire, with a feathered hat in his hand, and nonchalantly leaning against a statue of Abbé G.T.F.Raynal, France’s foremost critic of imperialism and slavery. (Robin Blackburn uses the painting as his book cover—see Blackburn 1988; on Raynal see Pagden 1995:163–7.) The description of the tawny apparition as one-eyed evokes the figure of Stephen Girard, the FrenchCaribbean merchant and Philadelphia’s benefactor, who was likewise

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oneeyed. And finally, the scene looks forward to the ‘carnival twinship’ of Poe’s characters Arthur Gordon Pym and the ‘grotesque hybrid’ Dirk Peters (see Chapter 4). On ‘carnival twinship’ see Wilson Harris (1983). In his famous essay ‘Das Unheimliche,’ Freud argues that feelings of uncanniness are not aroused by things completely new or alien but by things that were once familiar but have been defamiliarized through a process of repression (Freud 1993:160–1). Freud’s list of instances of the uncanny includes the recurrence of animistic beliefs evoked by silent and dark rooms, the uncommon repetition of events, the omnipotence of thoughts, the motif of the Doppelgänger, and the return of the dead. All of these motifs are deployed —either individually or in combination with others—in Arthur Mervyn. I prefer the concept of the uncanny to that of the Gothic because of its greater analytical precision, and because it includes an aspect of what Morrison would call ‘rememory’—the retrieval of lost or repressed knowledge. I take it that a text can be Gothic without being uncanny—if we understand Gothic to refer to generic features and conventions whereas uncanny primarily refers to the temporal structure of a text. Arthur Mervyn is certainly both, exhibiting numerous Gothic devices (like empty and haunted houses, hidden chambers and corpses, ravished and suffering women). It is also Gothic to the extent that it holds up a mirror to society, thereby subverting particular beliefs and principles and challenging the certainties of the Age of Reason (see Davidson 1986:237). I owe the idea of the ‘pathological text’ to Heike Paul. This reading of Arthur Mervyn in terms of America’s ambivalent postcoloniality is largely inconsistent with Edward Watts’s reading of the novel’s postcoloniality. While I am stressing the text’s meditation on the ideological conflict between the discourse of national independence and a discourse of foreign invasion and racial anxiety, Watts discusses Arthur Mervyn as a ‘fiction of authorship,’ a reflection on writing and on the postcolonial author’s detachment from the political realm. His reading combines two very different projects: a largely new criticist concern with the social alienation of the early republic author (which I cannot see, neither in Brown nor in Tyler) and a concern with the ‘profound tensions’ that exist ‘between the remnants of colonial dominion and the emergent national character’ (Watts 1998:97). Sheldon Watts writes that the French campaign against Haiti was actually financed with money gained from the Louisiana Purchase (Watts 1997:239). The term ‘romancing the empire’ is Amy Kaplan’s (Kaplan 1990); ‘maritime nationalism’ is Thomas Philbrick’s (Philbrick 1961). On the vast popular sea literature of Cooper’s contemporaries, see Philbrick (1961: chapters 3 and 5). Hereafter cited as RR. Martin Green sees the reason for the neglect of the Red Rover by literary criticism not in the literary but in the cultural realm; poetically, he asserts (and I agree with him), The Red Rover, as well as another of Cooper’s sea novels, The Water-Witch, are superior to his forest romances (Green 1978: 161, 166). Both the Rover’s ship and Chingachgook are destroyed by fire.

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27 The British side had sneaked a significant detail into the version of the treaty submitted to the United States for ratification, which differed from the version previously agreed upon: the text now read that subjects of both countries may be convicted of illicit trading in slaves on the coasts of ‘Africa, of America, and of the West Indies’ (the two documents are quoted in DuBois 1986:265–6; see also 141). This addition was of course unacceptable to the American side. 28 Marshall would argue in a similar vein a few years later in Cherokee v. Georgia (1831), the Supreme Court case which paved the way for the Cherokee Removal of 1838. Facing the dilemma of having to choose between the breach of the law of nations on the one hand and political expediency on the other, Marshall denies his court’s responsibility in the land rights case and displaces the problem onto historical providence (Spicer 1969:193). 29 It is of course quite incomprehensible why nobody besides the chaplain should have known of DeLacy’s estate, nor how the chaplain could possibly end up on the same ship with Wilder and Mrs. Wyllys some thirty years later: 30 Scipio is also removed: he dies in the final battle between the Rover and the British cruiser Dart, fighting, as Olaudah Equiano would, for Britain.

4 Ambivalent Atlantic: slave ship memories in antebellum writing 1 The metaphor appears in Benito Cereno (Melville 1970:245) and Blake (Delany 1970: 305). Douglass gave an address called ‘Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano’ at New York in 1849 (Stepto 1982:359n.; see also Sale 1997: chapter 5). 2 Hereafter cited in the text as R. 3 Having claimed that Redburn’s narrative was ‘about…decolonization,’ Buell on the next page seems to change his mind, pointing out that, as in MobyDick, ‘Melville tried to puncture democratic complacency by establishing a continuum between European imperialism and Yankee enterprise’ (223). This statement is indeed congenial with my own reading. 4 The following account of the Creole incident closely follows Jones (1975) and Cover (1975). 5 Howard Jones reports that some of the Creole slaves had heard of the chance for freedom in the British Bahamas from other slaves telling them of the wreck of the ship Hermosa a year before, whose slaves were taken to Nassau by English wreckers and there set free (Jones 1975:31). This little piece of oral history indicates the oral communication network among slaves by which important knowledge was spread from one plantation to the next. 6 Hereafter cited in the text as MD. 7 Howard Jones concludes that the Creole revolt was not planned but that Madison Washington spontaneously seized an opportunity to overthrow the power of the ship’s crew (Jones 1975:30).

NOTES 211

8 The majority of them chose to remain in the Bahamas. Only five who had hidden in the hold of the Creole eventually returned to the United States— and into slavery (Jones 1975:32). 9 Hereafter cited in the text as HS. 10 See Castronovo (1995) for an extended discussion of ‘The Heroic Slave’ as a response to the myth of the founding fathers. Andrews (1990) gives a very perceptive reading of the narrative strategies of authentication in ‘The Heroic Slave.’ 11 The ambivalence of naming is already contained in a nominal act that took place outside the fictional world of ‘The Heroic Slave.’ Although the names of slaves, from ‘Jupiter’ to ‘Scipio,’ are often ironical, ‘Madison Washington’ betrays an extraordinary sense of humor if provided by the slavemaster, or, if received from the mother, a shrewd case of prophetic will. Douglass does his best to make Madison Washington fulfill the promise of his name, elevating him to a charismatic superman with leonine and Herculean strength and a voice that ‘could terrify as well as charm’ (HS 303). 12 The figure of Grant may remind us of the fact that seamen were particularly prone to render their support to blacks—perhaps because they often compared their own situation with a life in slavery. Such was the case of the free black David Walker who, in 1829, wrote and printed his pamphlet An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World and distributed it from a used clothing store near the Boston wharves where he worked by ‘buttonholing’ sailors and asking them to carry his message to other seaports. The pamphlet shortly turned up in Savannah and Richmond, Virginia, and some time later in North Carolina, Walker’s birthplace. The police magistrate of Wilmington found the pamphlet to be ‘totally subversive of all subordination in our slaves’ (quoted in Bolster 1997:197). Meanwhile, sailors, preachers, and radical abolitionists circulated the text to Louisiana, ensuring that Walker ‘left his mark throughout the seaboard South.’ The Georgia legislature, followed shortly by North Carolina and Florida, went as far as imposing a forty-day quarantine on all vessels with free black seamen on board and ordered every black seaman discovered to have been in contact with slaves to be imprisoned. What the authorities could not prevent, however, was that the pamphlet was spread by white seamen: a steward, for example, had carried sixty copies of An Appeal into Savannah to deliver them to a black preacher. David Walker paid dearly for his commitment: he died under mysterious circumstances one year after publication of his subversive tract, apparently by poisoning (Bolster 1997:198; cf. Sale 1997:50, 176). 13 Other accounts of the incident (by Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, and Pauline Hopkins) are less reluctant than Douglass in mentioning Washington’s violence, but at the same time they provide a better reason for it by developing the ‘romance’ theme of Washington reacting violently in an attempt to protect his wife (Douglass has his wife die before the slaves board the ship) (Yarborough 1990:179, 186n.; Andrews 1990:28). 14 Douglass undoubtedly knew the figure; after all he has modeled his oratorical style on Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1797) (Douglass 1993:4).

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15 Quoted in Cheyfitz (1991:113). Cheyfitz calls the scene a ‘scene of primal colonization.’ 16 Byron’s epic poem The Corsair (1814), of course, provided a model to the Red Rover and is thus doubly evoked in ‘The Heroic Slave.’ The quote would later be used again by Martin Delany in Blake, as well as by W.E.B.DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (Sundquist 1993:124). The novella in fact contains a direct reference to Byron’s work: two of its mottos are taken from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The latter of these two, Byron’s sentence ‘Hereditary bondmen, know ye not/ Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?,’ is used as an introduction to the last chapter which begins with the auctorial narrator’s diatribe against the American slave trade (HS 338). 17 I find the concepts of ‘double-voicedness’ and ‘intentional hybridity,’ or Gates’s adaptation of them in his notion of ‘signifyin(g),’ more congenial to Douglass’s transparently strategic use of Anglo-American literary conventions than the concept of ‘passing,’ suggested by Russ Castronovo (Castronovo 1995:194 passim), which in my view exaggerates the aspect of ‘imitation’ and self-protection. A similar problem is posed by Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘mimicry,’ which suffers from overemphasizing the productivity of colonial power in creating the ideological grounds of intervention —that is, from a lack of differentiating between the various discursive strands within a monolithic concept of colonial power. I am thinking of Bhabha’s formulation from ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’: ‘Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal…. If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridisation rather than the hegemonic command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, an important change of perspective occurs. It reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion, founded on that uncertainty that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention’ (Bhabha 1985:97). As has often been remarked, the theory lacks a notion of agency, which makes it less useful to my discussion of early African American fiction than Bakhtin’s ‘hybridization.’ (For example, it would seem to completely fail in the case of Blake.) The trouble lies in Bhabha’s theory’s indebtedness to the Foucauldian notion of the universality of discourse producing its own resistance (see Foucault 1981:101–2). 18 The biographical information on Conneau is derived from his Slaver’s Log and from Mannix and Cowley (1962:235–7). 19 The edition I am using (Conneau 1976) is not a reprint of the 1854 edition but based on the original manuscript of 1853 which the modern editors found in a small back room of an old bookstore. 20 Besides being a swashbuckling tale of high-seas adventure, A Slaver’s Log Book also capitalizes on the contemporary interest in travel literature on Africa. But unlike the great model of African exploration literature, Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), Conneau satisfies the expectations of a racist reading public in giving gruesome accounts of African barbarism, cannibalism, and human sacrifice (Conneau 1976:203, 279–82).

NOTES 213

21

22 23

24

25 26 27

28

29

30

For a discussion of Mungo Park’s Travels in terms of sentimental travel writing, see Pratt (1992:74–85). Bozales were slaves brought directly from Africa; ladinos were slaves who had been born or resident in America. The distinction became crucial during the Amistad trial discussed below. Hereafter cited as BC. As various critics have shown, Melville was apparently well-read in the African travel literature of his time, especially the narratives of Mungo Park and John Ledyard (see Leslie and Stuckey 1982:289–95). Many intellectuals throughout Europe and America argued, like John Stuart Mill, that ‘it was from Negroes [the original Egyptians] …that the Greeks learnt their first lesson in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these Negroes did the Greek philosophers…resort as a treasury of mysterious wisdom’ (quoted in Horsley-Meacham 1991:235). African American orators like Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany likewise referred to the African origins, via the culture of ancient Egypt, of occidental civilization. Franklin also examines the multiple allusions to Charles V who, like Benito Cereno, ended his life in a cloister. In general, Benito Cereno subtly comments on the decline of the Spanish New World Empire. Like the Spanish dominion in America which it represents, the San Dominick is a wreck which, ‘like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state’ (Franklin 1961; BC 219). As so many of these ships, the Amistad was ‘built and fitted in Baltimore’ (Jones 1987:23). http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/timeline/amistad.html (accessed March 6, 1998). http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/library/misc/hvd.bowry.html (accessed March 11, 1998). Jones (1987:156) misspells the title of the play (‘Private’ instead of ‘Pirate’). The announcement of the play itself misspells the name of the ship. Incredible as it may seem, both plays went on stage one week after the capture of the Amistad (September 2 and September 4, respectively). The Black Schooner, according to the information to be deduced from the playbill, exploits all the sentimental and racist conventions (the horrors of slavery, the equivalent horrors of black mutiny), and ends in a grand celebration of the deed of the Yankee crew of the ‘United States Brig Washington.’ The best historical account of the Amistad case, which has recently acquired dubious fame through Spielberg’s nationalistic movie version, is to my knowledge Jones (1987). Bakhtin regards ‘chronotoping,’ or time-spacing, as a quality inherent to novelistic discourse, so Benito Cereno must be said to perform a specific kind of chronotoping (Bakhtin 1981:84–5). See Foucault (1973:xviii). Foucault’s famous example is the ‘disorderly’ fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. For a further application of the concept to postmodernist fiction see McHale (1987:44–5). McHale suggests the term ‘zone’ for the disorderly timespace produced by heterotopian fiction—a term that is quite appropriate to Benito Cereno as it adds a political or

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31 32

33 34 35

36

37

38

39

40

‘conflictual’ quality to the more neutral geographical terms ‘space,’ ‘area,’ or ‘world.’ See Sundquist (1993:144), and my Epilogue. Like Melville, Benjamin rejects a notion of history as a temporal continuum which Benjamin calls the ‘homogeneous empty time’ of historicism and its idea of progress (Benjamin 1977:260, 258). History, he claims, should not be studied as if it were a rosary whose beads are neatly passed through the fingers in a linear order but as a series of constellations into which one’s own epoch enters with particular previous ones (261). James Kavanagh has found out that Delano lies to his sailors concerning the value of the cargo (Kavanagh 1986:372). The link was first detected by Harold Beaver (BC 449). The name of Delano’s actual ship was Perseverance (BC 449). Sterling Stuckey and Josuah Leslie detect traces of the African trickster hare, known in America as Brer Rabbit, in Babo’s macabre masquerade (Leslie and Stuckey 1982:295). Poe himself called his only novel a ‘silly book’ and a hoax some time after its mediocre reception by an audience addicted to ‘true’ travel accounts (Poe 1983:18, 20). For a brilliant critique of the dehistoricizing reception of Pym (as well as Poe’s other work) see Rowe (1997). Hereafter cited as Pym. The strange ending is often seen as a reinscription of Ulysses’ plunge into the whirlpool beyond the pillars of Hercules described in Dante’s Inferno. Black cooks were apparently more rebellious than other black jacks. Madison Washington served as cook to the Creole slaves, and Sidney Kaplan refers to the trial records from the Denmark Vesey plot of 1822, which reveal that the conspirators had sent a black cook to carry a letter to Saint Domingue asking for support (Kaplan 1957:14n.). The intertextual link has been detected by the invaluable Harold Beaver (Pym 263). The text in ‘Premature Burial’ reads: ‘It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes from the damp earth—the clinging of the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm… carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil’ (Poe 1965:263; emphasis added). It goes without saying that these texts are overdetermined with cultural meaning and can be historicized in various ways: I do not intend to claim that Pym and ‘Premature Burial’ consciously deal with the slave trade. But what is important in my view is to historicize Poe’s obsession with live entombment and revenge beyond the insight that he is employing romantic literary motifs. Slavery and the presence of Africans were a daily reality for a Southern writer, whether in the streets or in the popular press. For a reading of these two texts in the context of Indian removal see Mackenthun (1998a).

NOTES 215

41 As Harold Beaver notes, Poe’s description of the stone structures and the hieroglyphics was probably inspired by reading, and reviewing, J.L.Stephens’s travelogue Arabia Petraea, or Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, and the Holy Land (1837). The ancient rock city of Petra is located between the Dead Sea and Akaba in today’s Jordania (Pym 266). Poe’s preoccupation with the ancient inscriptions on the ‘black’ island may also be read as an allusion to black masonry. Founded in Philadelphia by Prince Hall, black masons claimed that masonic secret knowledge originated with the ‘children of Ham’ in Africa (Ethiopia, Egypt, Assyria) and that two of the fathers of masonic secret knowledge, Euclid and Pythagoras, achieved their mathematical knowledge in Africa. See Martin Delany’s lecture Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry (1853), published too late to be a direct influence on Pym. Even so, Poe was enough of an expert of the secret sciences to have come across these theories. On black freemasonry, see Levine (1997:8). On Ethiopianism in general, see Moses (1998). 42 As Harold Beaver has shown, the sentence echoes the language of the Bible (Job 9: 21–4), but the intertext begs more questions than it answers (Pym 271). 43 I take the term ‘subjugated knowledges’ from Michel Foucault’s discussion of the selectivity of theoretical knowledge. Foucault defines it as ‘those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised,’ which ‘have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.’ A subjugated knowledge, Foucault explains, is often a popular knowledge (‘le savoir des gens’)—‘a particular, local, regional knowledge, …which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed’ (Foucault 1980:82). 44 For a very inspiring reading of the Dismal Swamp scene as a ritual of empowerment, see Crane (1996:542–3). Blake’s swamp scene certainly writes back to a similar scene in ‘Heroic Slave,’ from whose biblical undertones it is distinguished by its reference to African traditions (their parodistic representation notwithstanding). Needless to say, Delany’s novel also revises the biblical sentimentalism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘wrenching apart,’ as Eric Sundquist writes, the ‘racialist sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ (Sundquist 1993:198). But not without producing its own sentimental discourse. 45 Hereafter cited as Blake. 46 On the Atlantic radicalism of his namesake William Blake, see Linebaugh and Rediker (2000:344–53). 47 Delany uses a minimum of poetic license in his description of the good relations between Yankees and Southern slave traders. The British consul in New York guessed that out of 170 slave trade expeditions to Cuba in the years 1859 to 1861, 74 sailed from New York. Most of the ships used were American built (Thomas 1998:770, 759). 48 Ballard’s justification for partaking in the odious commerce is a fitting parody of Shaw’s juridical formalism: ‘It is plain that the right to buy implies the right to hold, also to sell; and if there be right in the one, there is in the other; the premise being right, the conclusion follows as a matter of course. I have therefore determined, not only to buy and hold, but buy and sell also. As I have heretofore been interested for the trade I will become interested in it’

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49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

(Blake 60). On Ballard’s legal formalism see Crane (1996:538–9); on Shaw’s, Thomas (1987:94–8). Among the events condensed into the period covered by the novel are the diplomatic crisis around the British consul in Havana, David Turnbull, who was deported for condemning, and reputedly conspiring against, the American slaving practice in 1842; the so-called Escalera conspiracy of 1844, which ended with the execution of the Cuban national poet Placido; the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850; the filibustering activities of Lopez and others around 1850; and the Ostend Manifesto of 1854. See Sundquist (1993:206–7) and Floyd Miller’s notes to Blake. For a more detailed account of the situation in Cuba, especially CubanAmerican slaving joint ventures in the 1840s and 1850s, see Thomas (1998: 635–43, 747–84). Levine ingeniously combines Blake’s identity as the son of a black tobacco farmer with the earlier dialogue about Ballard’s Cuban cigar (Levine 1997: 204). The revolutionary Blake is indeed the son of a man who uses slave labor to produce the luxury goods consumed by Yankee entrepreneurs. Delany’s representation of Blake certainly betrays an elitist notion of political action. The novel centers on the educated planter class itself; it is not clear how the lower class free blacks or the slaves will be agitated. Another insecurity of its imagination of liberation is that the novel weakly recommends money as the instrument by which to obtain freedom. Blake’s relatives in the first part buy their way into freedom by bribing ferrymen, while the rich Cuban Creoles liberate the Africans freshly imported on the Vulture by buying them (after having spread the news of the attempted mutiny to lower the price). Floyd Miller, editor of Blake, notes the similarity of these songs with abolitionist parodies of patriotic songs, such as ‘Oh, Hail Columbia, happy land!/ The Cradle Land of Liberty/ Where None but Negroes Bear the Brand/ Or Feel the Lash of Slavery …’ (Blake 319–20). In a footnote Delany claims that he has transferred this song from the American South, where he overheard it being sung by a black boy sitting on a fence (Blake 210n.). It is this inclusion in his fictional text of such subjugated (folk) knowledges which sets Delany’s novel off against the other texts discussed in this chapter. The number seems exorbitant but is identical with that which the Martha was about to embark when captured by Admiral Foote in 1850 (DuBois 1986:313). Sundquist thinks that Blake’s ‘stymied’ ending well represents the historical moment before the outbreak of the American Civil War and calls the novel ‘strangely apocalyptic in its inconclusion’ (Sundquist 1993:221). Levine finds the ending quite fitting as it makes ‘the creation of white paranoia itself the potent end product of Blake’s plotting’ (Levine 1997:215). Contrary to Douglass, Delany favored the idea of emigration and African colonization. Shortly after completing the text of Blake, he headed the first scientific expedition to Africa from America. For detailed treatments of Delany’s political thought see Crane (1996) and Levine (1997). For a reading of Blake as a text congenial to a postcolonial definition of the African diaspora, see Gilroy (1993).

NOTES 217

57 The editors deserve admiration for a highly sophisticated and extremely wellcommented edition. I owe thanks to Peter Hulme for alerting me to this novel. 58 Hereafter cited as EA. 59 Trinidad, after having served as a hideout for buccaneers in the seventeenth century, was conquered by Spain in 1783 but became a British possession in 1797. The novel’s themes of miscegenation and illegitimacy bear some resemblance to Philip’s own biography. He was himself the illegitimate child of a ‘coloured woman’ who lived on the Trinidad sugar plantation of the French Creole Louis Philippe. His father is unknown, but the fact that he received a good education, which would later enable him to become one of the foremost politicians of Trinidad, suggests that at least one of his parents must have been wealthy (Cudjoe 1997). 60 His pirate crew is likewise composed from different parts of the world, singing the ‘songs of all nations’ and speaking many languages while using English as a lingua franca (EA 27–8). 61 Philip may have read Moby-Dick when he was in London in 1853–4, where Melville’s novel was published under the title The Whale in October 1851.

5 Metaphorical Atlantic: antebellum fictions of the Pacific 1 There is a vast literature on this topic. Besides Hulme, see Todorov (1987), Cheyfitz (1991), Greenblatt (1991), Seed (1995), and Mackenthun (1997a). 2 I discuss these two texts at more length in Mackenthun (1998b). 3 Ledyard eventually made it back to the United States but died during an expedition into Central Africa in 1789 (Johnson 1966:466). On Jefferson’s Pacific projects, see Smith (1978:16–18) and Ronda (1990). 4 The ideological and economic link between the two oceans is wonderfully symbolized by the voyage of the Bounty in 1789, exploiting the Pacific for breadfruit in order to turn it into a staple food plant for slaves in the Caribbean—an ‘ecological imperialism by which the ends of the earth were joined in productivity,’ as Greg Dening writes (Dening 1992:12). 5 Nukuhiva, due to its ideal geographical position between the American mainland and East Asia, served as a much frequented entrepôt for whaling and trading vessels. 6 Thus Porter’s Essex was sacked by the power of maternal Britain while its namesake, the whale ship Essex, was crushed by a whale about two decades later—an event that provided one of the historical sources for Melville’s MobyDick. 7 The rules for claiming foreign territory were very strict in theory. In their instruction to Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour, for example, the Royal Society appealed to Cook and Banks to treat the natives with ‘the utmost patience and forbearance’ and to consider that the shedding of their blood ‘is a crime of the highest nature. They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European; perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favor. They are

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8

9

10

11

12

13

the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent’ (quoted after Williams 1998:552). As Cook’s own actions suggest, the humanist idealism of these instructions was highly impracticable. To the colonizer on the beach they must have sounded like romantic crap. On Hariot, see Mackenthun (1997a: chapter 3). Interestingly Porter denies the existence of cannibalism on Nukuhiva, against the evidence of all other writers. Herbert assumes that the presence of cannibalism would have come into conflict with Porter’s rhetorical transformation of the Marquesans into members of the American ‘family’ (Herbert 1980:92). Cannibalism, traditionally regarded in the Western discourse of civilization as a sign of utmost savagery, sits too uncomfortably with Porter’s view of the Marquesans’ hopeful position on the hierarchy of civilization. On the topic of cannibalism in the Pacific and in Melville’s work, see Sanborn (1998). Porter had in fact proposed a scientific expedition into the Pacific to the United States government, using nationalistic and commercial arguments to convince President Madison of its feasibility. But to no avail: Madison did not even respond to Porter’s declaration of Marquesan conquest (Herbert 1980: 82–3; Dening 1980:29). The debate about why Cook was killed continues to spark historical and theoretical discussion, most recently between Marshall Sahlins (1985; 1995) and Gananath Obeyesekere (1992). See also Edmond (1997). One of the best accounts of these theories is Horsman (1981); see especially chapter 7. It is the polygenists who, as Robert Young has shown, produced the most interesting theories of the impossibility of miscegenation between whites and blacks or of the infertility of their ‘hybrid’ offspring. These theories were increasingly challenged by the living counterevidence of a growing mulatto population in the American South—frequently produced by the carnal desire or ‘breeding’ calculus of the very defenders of polygenism. See Young (1995:98 passim). Mardi includes a long description of Southern slavery, including a rather unpleasant parody of one of its major defenders, John Calhoun, whom Melville calls Nulli—in allusion to the nullification crisis (466–9). Standing in front of the Statue of Liberty, the travelers read the inscription ‘In—this—re— publi—can—land—all—men—are —born—free—and—equal…. Except— the—tribe—of—Hamo.’ The United States Senate is a huge banquet of overweight fellows filling themselves with exquisite food and drink with a ‘quaffing, guzzling, gobbling noise’ (448, 450). For ‘carnivalesque parody’ see Spanos (1995:192). Spanos very perceptively regards the Linnaean system of nature as ‘the imperial project at the site of natural science’— a link explored at some length by Mary Louise Pratt (330; see Pratt 1992). Spanos gives a Foucauldian reading of the ‘Cetology’ chapter, in which he associates Ishmael’s pre-classical logic with the seemingly chaotic classification logic informing Jorge Luis Borges’s fantastic ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ which Foucault mentions at the beginning of The Order of Things (192–5; see Foucault 1973:xv-xxiv). Spanos’s central argument is that Moby-Dick proleptically delegitimizes the underlying logic of

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15

16

17

18

19 20

the Cold War and of the so-called ‘New World Order’ with its attending post-historical philosophies. His project, which reads Melville’s novel in the terms of a history of the present, is therefore not dissimilar to that of C.L.R.James’s postwar reading of Moby-Dick in terms of working-class struggles for social justice and a critique of totalitarianism. The Tahitian native Aoturu, for example, who followed Louis Antoine de Bougainville to France in 1769, died of smallpox in Mauritius on his way back to the Pacific. Vedovi died of tuberculosis shortly after disembarking in New York. His skull, like that of many a ‘cannibal,’ was added to a scientific collection (Bougainville 1985: 210–16; Goetzmann 1986:284–6; Chappell 1997:83, 134). Russ Castronovo reads the passage in terms of a discursive unsettling of the authority of the founding fathers (1995:84–5). Carolyn Karcher includes this scene in her excellent analysis of Melville’s parody of contemporary scientific racism (Karcher 1980). Anacharsis (né Baron Jean Baptiste de) Clootz was a Prussian sympathizer of the French Revolution who in 1790 led a motley deputation, composed of representatives of all the different cultures and nationalities he could find in Paris, in front of the French National Assembly and introduced them as representatives of the human race. An ‘ardent advocate of the Universal Republic,’ Clootz propagated war against all the tyrants of the world. He was awarded honorary French citizenship by the Legislative Assembly in 1792 but executed by the Robespierre regime which mistrusted his radicalism and militant atheism. Melville repeatedly refers to Clootz, for example, in the Confidence Man and in ‘Billy Budd’ (Beaver 1972:750; James 1978b:19; Black and Porter 1994:161–2). Carolyn Porter has pointed out Ishmael’s method of subverting a monological regime of truth by employing what she calls, following Bakhtin, his ‘double talk’ or ‘doublevoiced discourse’—by playing out opposites against each other until their difference collapses in sameness. We have seen the process at work in Benito Cereno (Porter 1986: 94). William Spanos develops the point further when he points out that ‘Melville’s decentering of the imperial metaphysical ontology determining the discourse of the American Renaissance’ constitutes an overdetermined moment in an indissoluble, however unevenly developed, relay of decenterings that includes the scientific (the discursive practices of positivistic science parodied in the cetology chapters), the economic and the social sites (the Pequod as capitalist factory and socius), and the political site (the self-reliant subject whose fulfillment is Ahab’s totalitarianism) of the antebellum American world picture’ (Spanos 1995:113). The two positions reiterate the two discursive registers of Porter’s Journal— one humanistic—enlightened, the other authoritarian—imperialist—where they uneasily occupy the same textual site. Sims was defended by Melville’s friend and oceanic traveler Richard Henry Dana Jr., whose Two Years Before the Mast had appeared in 1840. The intertextual link between the two novels has been pointed out by Leon Howard and Michael Rogin (Howard 1958:152; Rogin 1983:3–11).

220 NOTES

21 As Heimert and Rogin have shown at some length, Moby-Dick weaves into its fictional fabric much more of the rich political rhetoric of its time, including the public discourse about the annexation of Texas, the MexicanAmerican War, the speeches of Calhoun and Webster in the slavery debates, American filibustering in the Caribbean, and the California gold rush (Heimert 1963:510 and passim). 22 I know of no evidence that Douglass and Melville ever met. They certainly had common acquaintances, like the abolitionist Richard Henry Dana, who was head of the Boston Vigilance Committee formed by Douglass in response to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 (Robertson-Lorant 1996: 260). One of several common traits of the fictions of Melville and Douglass is the centrality of the concept of higher law, which was crucial to the abolitionists’ understanding of civil disobedience. The concept of higher law was most fervently promoted by the abolitionist Theodore Parker, who may have served as a model for Father Mapple (Rogin 1983:136–7). 23 For a reading of ‘The ‘Gees’ as a satire of the scientific racism as deployed in Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s treatise Types of Mankind (1854) see Karcher (1980: chapter 6). 24 Melville’s inversion of hunter and prey in the ambiguous relationship between Ahab and Moby-Dick can be traced down to individual pronouns. See Arac (1995:728). 25 I think it is important to distinguish Ahab’s concept of time, which is largely providential, from the concept of time deployed in the novel as a whole. 26 I take the concept and terminology from Walter Benjamin’s theses on history (Benjamin 1977:253). For Sundquist’s reference to ‘shaving-time’ see Sundquist (1993:162). 27 In his review ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’ Melville refers to Hawthorne’s ‘art of telling the truth’ which, he asserts, will always be ‘covertly, and by snatches’ (Melville 1967:542). The same applies to Melville’s own aesthetic strategy.

Epilogue 1 My account is based on Gilroy (1990), Boime (1990), and Reynolds (1992).

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Index

Adams, John Quincy 8, 78–82, 91 Africa 4, 10–11, 15, 23–7, 34, 37–8, 40– 1, 49, 52, 78, 82, 100, 103, 106, 108– 13, 119, 123, 127, 130–1, 134, 144, 159 African origins of civilization, discourse of 157–8 African splendor, discourse of 117–18, 144 Allen, John 2; Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People 50 Amistad (ship) 81, 87, 91, 119, 123, 125, 145 Anglo-Saxonism, romantic 6, 69, 179n2 Antelope (ship) 80–3 Astor, John Jacob 148, 155 Astoria 148, 155 Atlantic economy, slave-based 1, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16–17, 20–1, 23, 62, 71, 85, 102, 124, 133, 135, 171, 178; see also Black Atlantic Atlantic Ocean 8–9, 16–17, 23, 26, 33, 36, 52–3, 56–7, 63, 71, 76, 83–6, 108, 112–3, 128, 137, 146–9, 153, 158–9, 171–2 Banks, Joseph 155, 194n7 Barbary States 39–40 Barlow, Joel 39 Bellinghausen, Fabian von 154 Benezet, Anthony, Some Account of Guinea 35 Benjamin, Walter 176, 191n32 Berlioz, Hector 72

Black Atlantic 4–5, 16–17, 21, 23, 38, 63, 69, 87–8, 112, 120, 133, 141, 146–7, 171, 176; see also Atlantic economy, slave based The Black Schooner or the Pirate Slaver Armistad 119 Blake, William 33, 146 Bounty (ship) 193n4 Brazil 10, 24, 103, 106, 109–13, 124, 133, 177 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 20 Brown, Charles Brockden 5, 18, 22, 46, 70, Arthur Mervyn 2, 19–20, 49–56, 85, 112; Edgar Huntly 15, 20, 56, 69, 186n 10; Steven Calvert 66 Brown, John 122, 174 Brown, William Wells 1; Clotel 101, 133, 142 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du 64 Burke, Edmund 182n, 26 Byron, George Gordon 72–4, 76, 98–9, 142; The Corsair 74 Carey, Mathew 49–50; A Short Account of the Malignant Fever 50 Caribbean 2, 8, 10, 14–15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 38, 48, 52, 54–5, 58, 61–

236

INDEX 237

3, 66–7, 69, 73, 80, 83, 106, 112, 118, 124, 141, 145–7 Carpentier, Alejo 182n23 Clarkson, Thomas 176 Cliff, Michelle 2; Free Enterprise 177 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 76 colonialism 8, 16, 20–1, 88, 129, 131, 159–60, 180n6 and n7; discourse of 8, 16–17, 23, 37, 49, 153, 158; internal 9–10, 13–14, 181n14+n15; Spanish 172 Columbus, Christopher 36, 118, 120–1, 147, 183n12 Conneau, Theophilus 102–8, 139; A Slaver’s Log Book 102–4, 107–8, 190n20 continental expansion 5, 7, 69–71, 148; see also westward expansion Cook, James 155, 160, 165, 194n7 Cooper, James Fenimore 7, 16, 18, 27, 46, 69, 71, 99, 161, 179–80n6; The Crater 148; Notions of the Americans 71–2; The Pilot 100; The Pioneers 70, 77; The Red Rover 7, 18, 69–70, 72–80, 83–5, 89, 100, 142, 160, 168, 171–2 Cortés, Hernán 149 Creole (ship) 89–95, 97, 109, 140, 188n5 Cuba 9–11, 14, 25, 63, 70, 80, 105, 107, 109, 112, 119, 124, 133–40, 177 D’Aguiar, Fred 2 Dabydeen, David 2, 177–8 Dampier, William 123 Decator, Stephen 40 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 23–5, 28, 30, 46–7, 114, 137 Delano, Amasa 123; Narrative of Voyages and Travels 118 Delany, Martin 7, 11–12, 22, 101, 158;

Blake 2, 7, 11, 85, 133–40, 146, 192n44, 192n51, 193n53+n55 Denon, Vivant 157 Devèze, Jean 51–2 disease 49–54, 105, 128; as discourse 26, 48, 53–4, 61, 63, 67; see also infection, yellow fever Douglass, Frederick 7, 12, 16, 21–2, 119, 158, 166, 168; ”The Heroic Slave” 85, 93–102, 120, 124, 133–4, 140, 142, 144, 192n44 Drake, Richard 103–7; Revelations of a Slave Smuggler 103– 7 DuBois, W.E.B. 10–12, 79, 101, 107 Dumas, Henry 120 empire 8–9, 12, 69–70, 80, 148–9, 153, 174; maritime 70; see also imperialism, continental expansion enchantment 20, 120–1 Equiano, Olaudah 4–5, 7, 26, 29, 42, 46–7, 49, 87, 102, 137; Interesting Narrative 2, 7, 17, 23, 27–38, 48, 62, 184n16 Everett, Alexander Hill 157 Falconbridge, Alexander 28, 35, 42 Fanning, Edmund 154 Foote, Andrew (Admiral) 108–13, 139, 172; Africa and the American Flag 108– 13 Forster, Georg 155 foundational fiction 17–18, 46, 96, 168 foundational narrative 1, 6–7, 84, 179n3 Franklin, Benjamin 38, 43–4 Freud, Sigmund 21, 187n17 Fugitive Slave Law 98, 134, 142, 168, 170 Gall, Lothar 166

238 INDEX

Garrison, William 98 Giddings, Josuah 90, 100 Girard, Stephen 51–2, 62–3, 148, 186, 7n16 Godwin, William 33 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 72 gothic 19–21, 66–7, 121–2, 126–7, 133, 137, 187n18 Haiti 10, 29, 48–9, 52–3, 55–6, 63, 65, 67, 126, 135, 141, 153, 172; see also Saint Domingue Hakluyt, Richard 35 Hamilton, Alexander 54 Hammon, Briton 45–7; Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings 25–6 Hariot, Thomas 151 Harris, Wilson 174, 178 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 18; The Scarlet Letter 18, 182n22 heterotope 17, 120, 171–2, 190n30 high seas 21, 75, 89–90, 104, 109, 125– 6, 139, 145, 161; see also ocean Hubbard, William, The Present State of New-England 171 Humphreys, David 39 Illinois (ship) 11 Imperialism 3, 6–7, 9–10, 12–16, 20, 129, 152–3, 159, 167, 171–3, 180n6 and n7; see also continental expansion, westward expansion; empire infection 49, 53; discourse of 17, 49, 59, 61, 67; see also disease; yellow fever Ingraham, Joseph 149 Irving, Washington 148; Astoria 155–6 James, C.L.R. 48, 163 Jay, William 90, 100

Jefferson, Thomas 5–9, 15, 31, 53–6, 61, 64, 67–9, 78, 148–9, 152–3, 160; Notes on the State of Virginia 55, 137; Summary View 5–7 Johnson, Charles 2 Jones, Absalom 2, 50; Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People 50 Kant, Immanuel 182n26 Lafitte, Jean 80 Lamming, George 173 Las Casas, Bartolome de 118 law of nature 77–82, 85, 90, 143, 145; see also right of nature Ledyard, John 148, 157 Linneaus, Carolus 163 The Long Low Black Schooner 119 Louisiana Purchase 69 L’Ouverture, Toussaint: see Toussaint L’Ouverture Madison, James 151 manifest destiny 5, 69, 148, 153, 165, 172 Mansfield, William Murray (Judge) 31 Marshall John (Judge) 82–3 Martha (ship) 111, 193n54 Marx, Karl 114 masquerade 20, 73, 75–6, 83, 112–4, 132, 145; on shipboard 104–5, 107–10, 116– 17, 121, 125 Mediterranean 23, 26–7, 40, 149, 159 Melville, Herman 5, 7, 12, 14–17, 21– 2, 72, 134, 147, 149, 159; “Bartleby the Scrivener” 124; ”The Bell-Tower” 26, 89, 124; Benito Cereno 2, 17, 20, 85, 89, 114–25, 134–6, 144, 159, 161, 171– 3; ”The Encantadas” 159; “The ‘Gees” 169; Mardi 18, 159–60;

INDEX 239

Moby-Dick 2–3, 14, 19–20, 72, 85, 92–3, 113–5, 159–74; ”The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” 124; Redburn 85–9, 108, 146, 159; Typee 148, 159 Menzies, Archibald 155 middle passage 4, 21, 34, 36, 38, 104, 139, 146, 178; see also slave trade; transatlantic slave trade Milton John 76; Paradise Lost 32, 47 Monroe, James 78 Morrell, Benjamin 155; Narrative of Four Voyages 154, 156 Morrison, Toni 2–4, 19–21, 126; Beloved 171, 178 Morse, Jedidiah 8–9 Morton, Samuel G. 118, 132, 166 Newport (Rhode Island) 73, 75, 77, 79– 80; see also Rhode Island Newton, John, “Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade” 28, 104 Nott, Josiah C. 118 Nukuhiva (Marquesas) 149–51, 153 ocean 14, 16–17, 33, 71, 98–100, 102, 112, 128, 146–7, 159, 161, 176; as extrajuridical space 7, 12, 75–6, 89–90, 145; see also Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean; high seas Pacific Exploring Expedition 149; see also United States Exploring Expedition Pacific Ocean 5, 8–9, 14, 16, 71, 119, 123, 147–8, 153, 161, 165, 171–2 Paine, Thomas 40, 43; The Rights of Man 27, 40 Palmer, Nathaniel 154 Pasteur, Louis 52

Philadelphia 2, 27, 29, 38, 49–53, 56– 60, 62–3, 66, 102, 107, 148 Philip, Maxwell 7, 12, 16, 21, 140–6, 158; Emmanuel Appadocca 16–17, 85, 100, 140–6 Phillips, Caryl 2 piracy 6–7, 40, 43, 73, 75–81, 83, 91, 100, 105, 109, 115, 123, 140–1, 143, 145, 168 Pliny 163 Poe, Edgar Allan 16, 18, 20–2, 56, 72, 108, 147, 172–4, 185–6n8; Arthur Gordon Pym 16, 19, 126–33, 136, 140, 144, 153–9, 174; “Hop-Frog” 132, 185n8; “M.S. Found in a Bottle” 160–1; “The Pit and the Pendulum” 57; “The Premature Burial” 129, 191n39 Porter, David 17, 80, 148–53, 155–6; Journal of a Cruise 149–53, 194n8 postcolonial writing (modern) 2–3, 173– 4 postcolonial theory 5, 12, 14–15, 125 postcoloniality 2, 40, 67; of the United States 5–6, 9, 14–16, 26, 73, 79, 87, 109, 159, 181n18, 185n23; of early American writing 1–2, 5, 17, 46, 63, 85, 122, 144, 173–4; ambivalence of 5–6, 9–10, 14–15, 20, 37, 46, 90, 174 Prichard, James Cowles 157 Prosser, Gabriel 68, 89 Ralegh, Sir Walter, The Discovery of Guiana 35 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, Abbé de 64 Reed, Walter 52 Rhode Island 7; see also Newport right of nature 7, 31, 46, 56, 79, 100–1, 109; see also law of nature Roberts, Josiah 149

240 INDEX

romance 18–19, 24, 69–73, 78, 120, 126, 140, 182n23 and n25 Roscoe, William 88 Rush, Benjamin 50–4, 59 Ruskin, John, Modern Painters 176–7 Saint Domingue 10, 27, 29, 32, 48–9, 51, 53, 55–6, 64, 66, 68–9, 118, 125, 186n 16; see also Haiti Scott, Sir Walter 72 Seaborn, Captain Adam, Symzonia 154, 156 Shakespeare, William, The Tempest 159 Shaw, Lemuel (Judge) 134, 168, 192n48 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 33 Sims, Thomas 134, 168 Singue 123, 125 slave rebellion 68, 89, 91, 106, 115, 133, 135–7, 153; see also slaveship revolt slave trade 11, 17, 28, 31, 37, 42–4, 47– 8, 62, 77–83, 88–91, 95, 98, 103–12, 115, 120, 124, 134, 176–7; illegal 10–11, 16, 78–9, 89–91, 103– 12, 134, 177, 180n12; see also transatlantic slave trade; Atlantic economy, slave-based; middle passage slaveship revolt 93, 97–8, 117, 119, 139; see also slave rebellion Smith, Captain John 34, 129 Solander, Daniel 155 Somerset case 31 Spencer, Philip 72–3 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene 159 Spurzheim, Johann G. 166 Stedman, John 146 Stephens, J.L., Arabia Petraea 154, 156 Stevens, Edward 55 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 120; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 97, 100, 133, 142, 192n44 sublime 20–1, 76–7, 100, 145, 156, 160–1, 176, 182n26

Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels 45 Symmes, John Cleves 154 Thomson, James, The Seasons 48–9, 54, 176 Tocqueville, Alexis de 72, 80 Toussaint L’Ouverture 10, 48, 55, 58, 68–9, 118, 125 transatlantic slave trade 1–3, 6–7, 10, 12, 16, 21, 38, 40–1, 49, 78, 85–7, 102, 112, 119, 133, 137, 159, 168; see also slave trade; Atlantic economy, slave- based; middle passage translatio imperii 16–17 Turner, Frederick Jackson 70 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 20; Slave Ship 176–8 Turner, Nat 89, 126 Tyler, Royall 5, 17–18, 22, 27, 49; The Algerine Captive 23, 38–47, 85, 129, 184n 19 and n21, 184–5n23 Typee 150–3, 156 uncanny 19, 21, 67, 120–2, 131, 160– 1, 169, 172–3, 187n 18 United States of America, postcoloniality of 5–6, 9, 12, 28, 46, 60; see also postcoloniality, of the United States; postcoloniality, ambivalence of United States Exploring Expedition 154, 163, 165, 182n22; see also Pacific Exploring Expedition Unsworth, Barry 2 Vesey, “Denmark” (Télémaque) 89 Volney, Constantin François 157, 183n5 Walker, David 188–9n 12 Washington, George 96, 166 Washington, Madison 89, 94, 96–101, 119, 125, 166, 188n11 Wedderburn, Robert 4 westward expansion 9, 13, 69, 174;

INDEX 241

see also continental expansion; imperialism Whitman, Walt, “Passage to India” 149 Wideman, John Edgar 2 Wilkes, Charles 149, 154, 163, 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary 33 yellow fever 49, 56, 105, 112, 128; epidemic of 1793 2, 50–4, 57–8, 60– 1, 63; see also disease; infection Zong (ship) 2, 28, 169, 171, 176

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