Master Mariner

THE LIFE AND VOYAGES OF

AMASA DELANO

Captain Amasa Delano, 1763-1823



BY
JAMES B. CONNOLLY

1943

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CHAPTER XIX

Taking Over a Slave Ship

WHILE Amasa was still climbing over the rail of the Perseverance he was calling out to shot the guns and open the gun ports.

Aboard the Tyral, meantime, they had slipped their cable and were trimming sails to put out to sea. And so, when Amasa's guns were ready for action, the Tyral had dropped so far astern of him that Amasa could bring only his after-gun to bear; and the best his gunner could do was to shoot away the Tyral's fore-topmast stay, and some small ropes that were no hindrance to her slipping along for the harbor entrance.

The Tyral was soon out of reach of Amasa's stern gun and tacking for the open sea. The Perseverance at the time was moored with two bower anchors, and, they being her only bower anchors, Amasa was left with a serious problem. To slip and leave those anchors would be to invalidate his insurance. Even the exigency of the situation could not make him forget what that insurance meant to him. As he recorded later for the benefit of ship captains under a like temptation:

"It should always be borne in mind that to do anything which will destroy the guaranty of their insurance policies, how great soever may be the inducement, and how generous soever the motive, is not justifiable; for should any accident subsequently occur, whereby a loss might accrue to the underwriters they will be found ready enough, and sometimes too ready, to avail themselves of the opportunity to be released from responsibility; and the damage must necessarily be sustained by the owners. This is perfectly right. The law has wisely restrained the powers of the insured, that the insurer should not be subject to imposition or abuse. All bad consequences may be avoided by one who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates."

Conscientious Amasa! He was ten thousand miles from his home port, and what any underwriters would know of his doings on this underside of the world was what he cared to tell them. Yet even so, he was refusing to slip his cables and get going after the fleeing slaver. So! And now what? Well, he had his two boats, and he had learned from Captain Severo that the Tyral's firearms would be of no great use to the slaves, he having put them as far out of order as he could on the night of the uprising. So? Said Amasa, and, now seeing his battle plan more clearly, he drew muskets from his cabin rack for the men who would be manning the boats.

Severo then warned Amasa that his men would all be killed, the Negroes being such bravoes and so desperate that there would be no such thing as their surrendering. To that Amasa did not agree, saying that after a few of them were shot down they would surely be in a mood to consider more favorably the matter of surrender. Give people time to think things over-that is, if their blood is allowed to cool-they come to more sensible conclusions. So!

Amasa mustered his two boat crews, armed them, and ordered them overside. They obeyed with cheerfulness. They were all men from home in the boats, no Botany Bay chaps.

Amasa was about to step into the whaleboat when Severo took hold of his hand and begged him to stay aboard his ship. Amasa's first officer, Mr. Lowe, also pleaded with him, saying he should stay aboard to hold down the Botany Bay men. He was the one among them they feared and respected, and in his absence, with so few of his own old crew left aboard, there was no knowing what they would plot to do. Also what would become of their voyage if anything happened to him, their captain?

Amasa listened, stayed aboard, and placed Mr. Lowe in charge of the boarding party. Under him were Second Officer Brown, Amasa's brother William, Mr. George Russel and Mr. Nathaniel Luther, midshipmen; William Clark, boatswain; Charles Spence, gunner, and thirteen seamen. By way of encouragement, Amasa told them that Captain Severo considered the Tyral and what was in her as lost; that the value was more than one hundred thousand dollars; that if his crew would retake her every officer and man of the Perseverance would share in the way of salvage. If he (Amasa) and his crew should afterwards be disposed to give Captain Severo any part of the salvage, Captain Severo would consider it as a gift.

When the Spanish captain and four of his crew leaped from the Tyral, all but one of the remaining white men of the crew had taken to her rigging. That one was the chief mate, and he stayed on deck because he wasn't given the chance to go aloft. Amasa pointed them out now, saying that death was to be the certain portion of those men if his boat crew did not take the Tyral. "And now shove off, and may God prosper you in your arduous duty," concluded Amasa. With his pistols at his waist he faced the Botany Bay chaps, who were looking-some--as if they hoped the boat crews would never come back.

The two boats, with strong-armed men at the oars, soon overhauled the slow-moving Tyral, took their stations off her bows, one to the windward and one off the lee bow, and opened a brisk fire of musketry. They paid special attention to the man at the helm, not knowing that he was the chief mate and acting as helmsman against his wishes. Making a target of him wasn't to his liking, and he saw no reason why he had to stand for it. Presently he let go the wheel, bounded to the mizzen rigging, climbed to the crossjack yard, and called out in Spanish to Amasa's boats: "Don't come aboard!" His saying that led Amasa's men to think he favored the cause of the mutineers; and they took to paying special attention to him. They sent two musket balls into him, one ball into his side and one into his thigh. Neither wound was mortal, but the two together decided the unlucky man to come down on deck again before he was shot apart.

The slave ship by now had drawn nearer the mouth of the harbor and was getting the benefit of the fresher wind from the open sea. She began making such headway that all hands in the boats had to give over their fire and turn to at the oars. Even so they were having trouble holding the pace of the ship under the increasing breeze. First Officer Lowe called the men aloft in the Tyral to come down on the yards, cut away the rovings and earings of the topsails, so that they would fall from the yards and spill the ship's wind.

The men aloft did that, the Tyral's way was checked, and the boat crews ceased rowing and reopened fire. The new man at the wheel, a mutineer, was soon shot dead. The chief mate took to the mizzen rigging again before he could be commandeered to steer the ship. The mutineers, having no sailormen among them, did not know now what to do. The ship yawed, came round to the wind, and, when she did, both boats boarded, one on each bow, and raked the deck with musketry fire.

The mutineers retreated to the afterpart of the deck and made a barricade of the water casks, which Amasa had left on board. They piled them up across the midship deck, from rail to rail to the height of a man's head. They fought as men fight that know that death awaits them if captured alive. Every man of them was dead or severely wounded when Amasa's men forced the barricade.

It was a horrible picture that Amasa saw when he boarded the slaver with handcuffs and leg irons, to secure the hands and feet of those still alive. Those who weren't dead of musket wounds had part of their bowels hanging out, or parts of their backs and thighs sliced off. The slicing was the work of the sealing lances. The lances were used for skinning seals, and were always kept at razor edge.

After ironing the mutineers, Amasa had to exercise as much authority over Captain Severo and his crew as he ever had over his gang of convicts when they threatened to go wild on him. The Tyral men, with their twenty-five murdered shipmates in mind, were for making an end then and there of the slaves still alive. One of the Spanish sailors had found a razor in the pocket of an old jacket of his, which one of the slaves had taken from him and was now wearing. The sailor opened the razor and made ready to cut the man's throat. Amasa got to him in time and then shouted that whoever harmed a single prisoner would be brought to the gangway and flogged. Even the Spanish captain was for making use of a dirk on one particularly bad slave. One of Amasa's men called his attention in time to save the Negro. Amasa seized the captain, took away his dirk, and threatened him with his displeasure if he attempted to hurt a single prisoner.

"You are only saving that one to be hanged, for hanged he will surely be," said Severo. Amasa agreed to that prophecy, but for the time being that one's safety was his care. Eventually he got them all under control.

Amasa put everything in order on the slaver, swept the bottom of the harbor for the cables and anchors the Negroes had cut the ship clear of, and sailed her to Concepción with his own ship acting as convoy. After the usual customs preliminaries were attended to at Concepción, Amasa turned the Tyral over to Captain Severo. He also turned over to him a bag of doubloons of a thousand dollars' value, Spanish silver dollars of a like amount, several watches, some gold dust, and some silver plate. All these things he had found in the slaver's cabin after he took her over.

Amasa could now see nothing but pleasant weather ahead for himself and his crew. But he was reckoning without the enmity of the Botany Bay convicts he had put ashore at Santa Maria. They had been picked up by the Spanish authorities and were now in jail in Concepción, and Amasa and his prize ship were hardly at anchor in Concepción Harbor when the jailbirds were sending word to Captain Severo that they had information concerning the American Captain Delano that might interest him.

Captain Severo called at the jail, and the five ex-convicts there swore that Captain Delano had been a pirate, offering in evidence Captain Delano's insistence off the New Holland coast that he had full rights to sealing among the islands there. These five convicts included three who were still bearing the marks of musket wounds incurred when running from their prison guards.

When Amasa heard of the matter he mourned that he hadn't turned them over to the prison officials at Botany Bay. He would have had the thanks of the authorities besides collecting a reward. However, he hadn't done so, and now look!

Besides the piracy charge, the convicts charged Captain Delano with assault and battery, and brutal floggings aboard his ship of men who were not of his crew. They were the men not of his crew. They were stowaways, yes. The assault and battery was when Amasa had knocked one of them down with his bare fists. He could have shot the man and been upheld by all maritime law for the shooting. But he was never for shooting mutineers.

Captain Severo's promise in Santa Maria of giving his ship and all in her to Captain Delano if he would retake her had been made in the hearing of several of Amasa's crew; but here now at Concepción he was for getting her back without cost to himself.

All that western coast of South America was then a colony under Spain, and the crown city was Lima. Amasa had to go to Lima to defend himself. Lima was then the top city of the western hemisphere.

The evidence of the convicts against Amasa was laid before the viceroy. On his previous sealing voyages to that Spanish coast Amasa had seen quite a bit of Spanish people and Spanish life of the south coast ports, and he liked what he saw of the people and the life; but this was the great viceroy in splendid Lima-who could tell about this lordly man in his high office?

Amasa waited for the verdict. Well, when the verdict came Amasa went overboard for the viceroy, after his usual fashion when speaking of anybody he liked:

"The Viceroy in Lima was too great and too good a man to be misled by the false representations of the convicts. He told Don Bonito Severo that my conduct towards him proved the injustice of these depositions, taking his own official declaration at Concepcion for the proof of it; that he had been informed by Don Jose Calminaries, Commandant of Marines at the time, of the affair of the Tyral on the coast of Chili; that Calminaries had informed him that he was satisfied that no man had behaved better, under all circumstances, than the American Captain Delano had done to Don Bonito, and that he never had seen or heard of any man treating another with so much dishonesty and ingratitude as Don Bonito had treated the American. The Viceroy had previously issued an order, on his own authority, to Don Bonito, to deliver to me eight thousand dollars as part payment for services rendered him. This order was not given till His Excellency had consulted all the tribunals holding jurisdiction over similar cases, except the twelve royal judges."

Those twelve trial judges loomed before Amasa like high cliffs under the lee of his ship. What would they do now? He was a stranger, a plain sailor in from the sea. There was such a thing as bribery in courts ashore.

Some quality there must have been in Amasa that won people to him. There he was, worrying aplenty, when the viceroy himself sent for him to advise him to agree to Don Bonito's appeal. The royal judges were by then well acquainted with the story of the Tyral, said the viceroy. The entire coast, indeed, knew it by now; and knowing the story, the royal judges would do much better for Amasa than the viceroy himself ordered. The judges, besides being men of high character and holding their appointments directly from His Majesty, had no fear of local political influence. Of course, if Captain Delano preferred, he (the viceroy) would hold Don Bonito to his order; but he would lose nothing, and might gain something, by allowing the appeal to go to the twelve judges.

A friendly soul, the great viceroy, and Amasa pondered his advice. But he had been in Lima two months, and he had thirty men aboard his two vessels (the Pilgrim had arrived at Santa Maria during the two months); his men were then hunting seals somewhere among the islands on the coast of Chile; they had no way of helping themselves, or receiving succor, except from him, their captain; and if he were to wait longer for another court decision it was a certainty they would suffer. He therefore would prefer that His Excellency's order would be put in force.

Don Bonito was part owner of the Tyral and her cargo, and he brought his every influence to delay paying Amasa. He held off so long that the viceroy told him that he would put him into a dungeon, where he would not see sun, moon, or stars while the American captain's just claim remained unsettled; and the viceroy was about to order Don Bonito to jail when a company of Don Bonito's friends waited on His Excellency and pleaded that he should consider Don Bonito's family, who were rich and respectable. To that the viceroy retorted that Don Bonito's character had been such as to disgrace any family that had any pretensions to respectability; but that he would grant their prayer, provided that Don Bonito settled the American Captain Delano's claim without further delay. Two hours after leaving the viceroy, merchant friends of Don Bonito brought Amasa the money awarded him by the viceroy. And what a relief to Amasa, who was in such need of ready cash that he was wondering where to turn for credit to find food for his men.

The Tyral affair served Amasa as a good alibi for one of his solemn moralizations, as:

"I cannot find where I ever have done anything to deserve such misery and ingratitude as I have suffered at different periods, and in general, from the very persons to whom I have rendered the greatest services."

The Tyral slaves who had survived the fight were charged with murder and tried. Of nine of them the court said:

"They are condemned to the common penalty of death, which shall be executed by taking them out and dragging them from the prison at the tail of a beast of burden as far as the gibbet, where they shall be hung until they are dead, and to the forfeiture of all their property, if they have any, to be applied to the Royal Treasury."

The court further ordered that the Negresses and young Negroes-José, Alexandro, Yambaio, Francisco, and Rodriguez-be condemned to ten years' confinement in the place of Valdivia, to work chained, on allowance and without pay, in the work of the king, and to attend the execution of the other criminals. The foregoing was signed:

Before me-José de Abos Padilla
His Majesty's Registrar and Notary of the Royal
Revenue.

Amasa was given translations of all the court papers in the Tyral case. Several translations were of pleasing import to him. One signed by José de Santiago Concia and transmitted to Dr. Juan Martinez de Rozas read, in part:

"This Royal audience thinks it fit, in case you should have an opportunity of speaking with the Bostonian Captain, Amasa Delano, to charge you to inform him, that they will give an account to his Majesty, of the generous and benevolent conduct which he displayed in the punctual assistance that he afforded the Spanish captain of the aforesaid ship Tyral, for the suitable manifestation, and publication and notability of such a memorable event. God preserve you many years."

A full account of the Tyral affair was sent to the King of Spain at Madrid by the officers of the high tribunal; and by and by Amasa received a most complimentary letter from His Majesty. Later, after Amasa was back home, the Spanish minister to the United States forwarded to the Spanish consul at Boston a gold medal and a letter conveying the compliments and good wishes of His Catholic Majesty to Captain Amasa Delano. The medal was pinned on Amasa's broad chest with some ceremony by the consul.

Philadelphia, 8th September 1806 Sir, His Catholic Majesty the King of Spain, my master, having been informed by the audience of Chile of your noble and generous conduct in rescuing, off the island Santa Maria, the Spanish merchant ship Tryal, captain Don Benito Cereno, with the cargo of slaves who had mutinized, and cruelly massacred the greater part of the Spaniards on board; and by humanely supplying them afterwards with water and provisions, which they were in need of, has desired me to express to you, sir, the high sense he entertains of the spirited, humane, and successful effort of yourself and the brave crew of the Perseverance, under your command, in saving the lives of his subjects thus exposed, and in token whereof, his majesty has directed me to present to you the golden medal, with his likeness, which will be handed to you by his consul in Boston. At the same time permit me, sir, to assure you I feel particular satisfaction in being the organ of the grateful sentiments of my sovereign, on an occurence which reflects so much honour on your character. I have the honor to be, sir, Your obedient servant, (signed) Marquis De Case Yruso

After the Tyral story got out Amasa was received everywhere on the west coast as a hero. He had entree to whatever society he cared to frequent; and he cared to see more than one side of it. As the sealing captain who knew how to discipline desperate convicts he was received in the cantinas of the ports when he chose to look in on them. No knowing, he might sometime be in need of a few hands to help handle his ship while his boats were out. Elsewhere the captain of the good manners, who was also the brave man, was likewise welcome. Above any other foreign mariner of his day, he was allowed a look-in on the home life of the Spanish colonists. He reported favorably on them.

While Amasa was on that Spanish west coast, the English and Spaniards down that way were doing wicked things to each other. Since the McCluer expedition, Amasa was in favor with English ship captains everywhere, except of course the sealing captains of the Australian islands. His management of the Tyral capture put him in strong with the Spanish officials; and he was thus in position to render good service to both English and Spanish friends.

Meeting with Spaniards who had escaped from English ships, he took measures to prevent their recapture by English captains. He also prevailed on English captains to deliver Spanish prisoners to their friends in Chilean ports. For the other side of the log he could say: "I have taken out of the different Spanish prisons on the coast of Chili and Peru more than 150 Englishmen and put them aboard English ships; or kept them aboard my own ship until I arrived at some neutral port. I have even carried some to my own home port."

Amasa was brought up to believe that most people were naturally good; but from out of his wanderings he had learned that people fell from their early standards. He had also learned that a few bad men could damage the reputation of an entire nation. He liked the Spanish and English people both, but among them on the west coast men of both sides were playing dirty tricks on the other side. As:

"Captain Sole, commanding the American brig Tabor, had been several times into Coquimbo for wood and water, fresh meat, vegetables and fruit, and so had become acquainted with the first people of Coquimbo. He was in high favor with the governor and his family, and they were in the habit of calling on Sole aboard his vessel when she was in port. It happened that Captain Sole being at sea, an English privateer, the brig Antelope, entered Coquimbo harbor. She showed no colors, but she was like a sister to Sole's ship in appearance; so like her that when she had come to anchor, the governor of Coquimbo and a party of friends came down to the landing and hailed for a boat to go aboard. A boat was sent, and the governor's party were over the Antelope's rail before discovering that she wasn't the American Capt. Sole's ship."

Without knowing who his visitors were, the Antelope's captain held them for ransom. He named the sum, and the Spaniards agreed to pay that sum on the condition that a committee of their own selection be allowed to go ashore and raise the money. The English captain agreed to that, and the Spaniards included the governor in the ransom committee. After they had paid the ransom and were all gone the English captain learned that the governor of the province was one of the ransomed group. If he'd known that he would have tripled, or quadrupled, the amount of the ransom. He turned berserk, went ashore with an armed party, and started in to wreck the port. Amasa arrived in Coquimbo shortly after and logged his view of the wreckage:

"Among other things they tore down the images of the saints in a small adobe church, shot holes through the altar, ended up by tearing the little church to pieces. This exasperated the Spaniards so much that they would not thereafter allow any foreigner to obtain supplies in Coquimbo."

Even Amasa was held up when he put in there.

Not long after his Coquimbo exploit, the Antelope's captain sailed up the coast and took station off Callao, the port of Lima, meaning to blockade the port. The Antelope was a heavily armed privateer, and she was jogging back and forth outside the harbor when the ship Henry from Cádiz showed up. She was a former London ship that had been captured by the Spanish.

The Spanish captains of the coast had been holding it in for the Antelope's captain since Coquimbo; so now, learning who the armed blockader was, the captain of the Henry sailed out to engage him. The Henry was ship-rigged and mounted the same number of guns as the Antelope.

The two ships stripped for combat and maneuvered for position. The Antelope was a faster ship than the Henry, but the Henry's captain was a smarter sailing master. He outmaneuvered the Antelope, and when the two closed in to gun range the Henry was to windward. The pair cannonaded each other, with the Spaniard having the best of it.

The Antelope tried to sheer off and run for it; but the Henry was still holding the windward berth, and her captain was for fighting at closer quarters. He bore down, grappled the Antelope, and made a hand-to-hand fight of it. The Antelope's crew stood to it until her captain was killed and thirty of themselves killed or wounded.

Amasa was in Lima when the Antelope's wounded were landed there and hauled through the streets in carts.

"Wounded though they were, the spectators showed them little pity on account of their sacrilegious conduct at Coquimbo. They [the spectators] seemed to exult in their misery. The women were the worst, throwing stones at the carts and shouting: "Curse you for English heretics! Do you remember Coquimbo?"

Amasa's good offices were of no avail here. When racial and religious hatreds prevail the humanities go over the side.