Free The Empire of Necessity by Greg Grandin Page A

called witnesses and considered evidence but the case came down to the balance of Moulton’s portage bill, the record kept by ships listing a sailor’s credits and debits. Moulton didn’t contest that his share of the voyage was worth less than what he owed on cash advances and for the tobacco and other provisions he had taken from the Onico ’s slop chest. But he said his debt should be deducted from Howe’s earnings, since it was Howe’s erratic rule that made the voyage unprofitable.
    The captain-judges decided in Moulton’s favor, ruling that he was no longer obligated to Howe. Moulton was elated, until he realized that the Swain brothers, who were employed by the same Norwich merchant company that owned the Onico , were using the dispute to best Howe. They wanted his ship, crew, and what few skins he had. They weren’t so much absolving Moulton’s debt as transferring it to Valentine Swain and the Miantonomoh . That’s why Valentine Swain had had Moulton’s chest brought on board his ship before the hearing, to make it difficult for Moulton to flee.
    Captain Swain demanded to know Moulton’s intentions, but Moulton hedged. He was fighting here for a principle, the doctrine of “free labor,” the idea that since every man possessed his own conscience in the eyes of God, he also possessed his own labor. For Moulton, this meant “sealing for myself or whomever I pleased.” Yet now he was being passed from one master to another like, as he put it, a “tool.”
    Standing before these lords of the island in the oak-lined cabin of one of their “most consequential,” Moulton was acutely aware that there were forms of power that might not exactly be called slavery yet were coercive nonetheless. The captains’ recommendation that he join the crew of the Miantonomoh was presented to him merely as “advice.” Moulton, however, had no doubt that it was the “advice of those who commanded nearly all the ships and property of merchants belonging to the United States in this ocean, and who dictated, divided, and parceled out the sealing ground on this island.”
    “You will at once see how near that advice approached to a command,” was how Moulton described his predicament in his memoir.
    Moulton thanked the captains for releasing him from Howe’s authority. He then muttered “some ambiguous expressions” to evade Swain’s question and conceal his intentions. The Miantonomoh , set to sail the next day for Valparaiso, was leaving a sealing gang behind, which Moulton said he would join. That night, he removed his chest and bedding from the ship and fled to the interior of the island.
    Swearing never to sign his name to “another portage bill, under any ship-master whatever,” Moulton set out to live “independently in every respect,… to seal by and for myself.”
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    Swain’s crew didn’t make it easy. Moulton built a hut and started to hunt seals, joining the ranks of Más Afuera’s hundred or so masterless alone men. He was treated as a deserter, constantly harassed by the men of the Mars and the Miantonomoh , who stole his skins and chased him from the island’s rookeries.
    Moulton had made his bid for freedom in mid-1801, just as the skinning season was about to start. After six or seven years of intensive slaughter, there were fewer seals on the island. By the end of the year, “very few clapmatches” or “young seal pups” were to be found. The only seals coming on shore were “old whigs.” Despite the shortage, the market in Canton was still saturated and prices were still falling. The result was more clashes among the seal gangs attached to specific ships on Más Afuera, more stealing, and more fighting over territory.
    In response to what today would be called an ecological crisis, some of the alone men formed an association. Having recently helped draft a “declaration of independence,” Moulton now joined with others to compose a constitution. The alone men’s