Free The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Page B

ever beheld.” And yet whatever success he had describing these horrors owed something significant to the
Amistad
rebels. Not only was Thompson in Sierra Leone because his own American Missionary Association had been founded to accompany the
Amistad
captives in their repatriation, his very visualization of the slave shiphad been shaped by the successful rebellion nine years earlier. For in drawing the lower deck full of the enslaved, Thompson drew upon an image that had been engraved by John Warner Barber and published in
A History of the Amistad Captives
(1840). The original image was based on conversations the artist had with the rebels themselves in the New Haven jail. The distance between decks in both images is listed as “3 feet 3 in.” One of the faces on the lower deck appears to be that of Cinqué. 79

    Lower deck, Middle Passage
    The Middle Passage
    Because the
Teçora
was an illegal slaver, very little documentation about it has survived. Yet the experience of the
Amistad
Africans can be reconstructed by drawing on evidence about other, similar slave ships and voyages from the same era, and by analyzing carefully what nine of the Africans—Bau, Burna, Cinqué, Fabanna, Grabeau, Kale, Kinna, Margru, and Teme—said about the ship and its Middle Passage. Within an ordeal of violence, suffering, and death lay a bonding experience that would prove crucial to their resistance and survival. 80
    The vessel was said to have been Portuguese, but it may have been Brazilian. Its name may not have been
Teçora
at all, but rather
Tesoura
(scissors) or, more likely,
Tesouro
(treasure), a not uncommon way to refer to the black gold it carried. Cinqué and Bau explained that the vessel was “crowded with slaves,” five or six hundred in all, with“plenty of children.” It was a brig, a two-masted vessel, and it was middling in size as slave ships went, probably between a hundred fifty and two hundred tons carrying capacity. It was therefore significantly more crowded than British slave ships as regulated by the Dolben Act of 1788—and those vessels were certainly crowded enough, as the infamous depiction of the Liverpool slave ship
Brooks
made chillingly clear. Like all other slavers in the post-abolition era, the vessel would have been designed for speed: it had to be able to outrun the vessels of the British anti-slave-trade patrol. 81
    The
Teçora
possessed the standard equipment of a slave ship. It had hundreds of sets of irons—shackles for the ankles, manacles for the wrists, and rings for the neck—as well as numerous chains and padlocks. Bau testified that they were “two and two chained together by hands and feet, night and day, until near Havana, when the chains were taken off.” On the main deck was a huge copper pot, used to prepare the victuals of the enslaved (and the crew) for a passage that took “two moons,” roughly eight weeks. In the hold, below the slave deck, sat the huge water casks, on top of which were piled wood for cooking, naval stores, and provisions, especially the rice that most peoples of the Gallinas region were accustomed to eat. 82
    The
Teçora
had a main deck, and below it a “slave deck,” where the
Amistad
Africans and the hundreds of others would spend sixteen hours a day, more in bad weather. Men and women were stowed separately, the former forward, the latter aft. The lower deck itself featured platforms, built by the ship’s carpenter in order to squeeze another hundred or more people into the vessel. According to Captain Forbes, who had sailed aboard a slave ship captured off the Gallinas Coast in 1838 and had seen many others, the usual distance between the lower deck and the main deck above was between thirty-six and forty-eight inches. He had seen one lower deck with a height of only eighteen inches. This claustrophobic nightmare had been specially designed to ship children, perhaps like another vessel Forbes saw that carried boys and girls between the ages of four and