Free The Empire of Necessity by Greg Grandin Page B

“rules for their government” stipulated that any motion that was made, seconded, put to a vote, and carried by a majority would be “binding on all.” The association was an almost perfect example of the principle of government by consent, of men coming together in a state of (despoiled) nature and agreeing on a set of laws to protect their interests and freedoms.
    The charter mandated that all the alone men would collectively decide when the skinning season was to start. It allowed that whigs that wandered inland could be hunted freely but permitted “not a seal to be taken” on the beach until “we all go a sealing.” The idea was to give rookeries a chance to form and grow before they were assaulted. The members of the association would club, rip, and flipper the seals collectively as a group but they would flay the carcasses individually, with “every man” taking “what he skins” as the product of his labor. No sealing would be done on Sundays and any man caught violating the rules or stealing the skins of another member would be fined appropriately. Members, if possible, would sell their skins to ships as a group, to get a better price.
    It would have been remarkable if all the association did was to try to regulate hunting in response to vanishing seals and the predations of captains and shore gangs. Yet one of its rules went beyond that, expanding the idea of freedom to mean not just individual liberty but mutual interdependence and social security: “If any of us get disabled by sickness, or being bitten or wounded,” the members agreed, “there shall be an equitable proportion of sealing ground set off for the disabled person or persons; or that his deficiency of skins occasioned thereby, shall be made up to him by the rest of us, in an equal ration proportionate to the number of skins taken by each individual.” Each would do what he could, but each would have what he needed.
    For the brief few years in the late 1700s and early 1800s when the council of American sea captains, among them Amasa Delano, governed Más Afuera, they ruled less like republican emissaries than like rival emperors divvying up a continent: they signed treaties defining boundaries, commanded expeditions that fought one another over resources and wealth, came together to enforce common rules governing property and debt, and even issued their own currency. * At the same time, an odd lot of “felons, pirates & murderers” survived in the nooks and crannies of this “terrific sovereignty,” men who might either renounce Jesus and money and live in caves or decide that being free “in every respect” meant organizing a half-anarchic, half-social-democratic seal-hunting guild.
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    As to Captain George Howe, he fell apart after Más Afuera’s captain’s council ruled against him. The Onico became infested with rats, which he couldn’t smoke out. Depressed and anxious, he was, as Moulton guessed he would be, relieved of his command by the Swain brothers, who took his skins and crew.
    Howe wound up in Valparaiso, confined to the back room of a home of a respected Spanish family, gravely sick with fever. Amasa Delano considered Howe an honest and noble-minded friend, despite joining the Swain brothers to rule against him, and was surprised to learn of his whereabouts. Delano himself had dined a number of times in the house, yet his hosts never once told him that Howe was a few feet away, dying. When he paid a visit, he found the captain untended, in a room “no better than a hovel, in a most deplorable situation.” Alone in a “miserable bed,” Howe looked “wasted,” like a skeleton.
    Just before Howe died, the owner of the house brought out his ledgers and had the captain “acknowledge the different charges” he had incurred during his stay. The Spaniard already held the captain’s cash for safekeeping. Now he presented him with a bill for his room and board. “So far gone,” Amasa wrote, Howe could