>> watch for the authors in the ner future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> greg grandin recounts a slave revolt at sea and the subsequent discovery of the ship in the south pacific in 1805. [applause] >> thank you for the coleman center which is a wonderful institution and also gave me an advance b look at this great book. it is a great book. i, it was a thrill to be asked to do this with greg tonight. i come at it -- he comes at it as a historian, and i come at it as a reader of his book but also as a reader of melville, and it seems kind of well fitting that we should be meeting in the new york public library to talk about, i think, unambiguous toly the greatest new yorker ever lived, melville. [laughter] i don't think anybody comes in his wake. and to talk also about the much larger story that he was expanding upon in it. and greg asked me to do the honors for a minute at the outset about just laying up the story can i'm sure many of you are familiar with and many of you may not have read as recently. and so i thought i would do that, and i remember seeing a documentary about pablo casals, and he said i always play a little bach in the morning, it's like a benediction on the house. reading melville that way too. st the story of the american sea captain who fetches up on a sealing ship at the end of a long expedition that the sealing is running out, that is to say they're running out of seals to kill, and greg will talk about sealing. and he's off the coast of -- where exactly? >> the coast of chile. >> chile, basically. and he sees this derelict-looking ship this a cove and approaches it. and this appears in his memoirs, and melville took the story from delano's memoir, and he expanded on it his own way. basically, the story is he went aboard the ship. he saw this ship that looked in trouble, was aware that it may be a trick, it was a pirate ship that was going to ambush him, was pretending to be derelict by the side of the road, as it were. but he went there but also thought they might need help, brought water, brought pumpkins, he was a proper new england yankee. and he went there and he went onboard and thought that what he was seeing was a ship which had run into all kinds of trouble and where the slaves, it was a slave-trading ship, he saw that right away. what he didn't realize from the outset was that this was a ship where there'd been a mutiny, a slave rebellion, and the slaves had risen up and killed a great deal of the -- well, the slave trader and a lot of the white people onboard and demanded to be returned to where they'd come which was west africa, senegal. they were asking to go back in the book, but they'd been loaded on in the gulf off nigeria, the end of the niger basin, and they wanted to go back to africa. and this ended up in a standoff. and when they saw this captain delano approaching, they created a masquerade. and in this masquerade they pretended -- even though the slaves were now in control of the ship and the white captain was their prisoner, they pretended that it was still the other way around. and they propped up this fading man who was their prisoner and played the sort of servile attendant to him but also controlled the thing. and the whole time delano was onboard, he imagined, well, isn't this just remarkable the slave so wonderfully attentive and imagine being served by such a person. this is just such a fine relationship, and look at how careful he is. and everything was amiss that he slightly picked up. he sort of attributed to the the idea that maybe this was an ambush after all, and maybe benito was the sinister guy of after all. it's only at the ladies and latf the drama aboard that ship. so i thought i would read you a little sense of how melville approaches this. he describes the ship, 17ed 9, the -- 1799. the morning was one peculiar to that coast. everything was mutant calm, everything gray. the sea, though undulating, seemed fixed and was sleeped at the surface like waved lead that is cooled and set in the mold. the sky seemed gray too. flights of troubled gray fowl kiss and kin with troubled gray vapors skimmed low and fitfully over the waters as swallows over meadows before storms. shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. he made it very easy for english professors in future years. [laughter] considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot and the sort of stories at that day associated with those seas, captain delano's surprise might have deepened into uneasiness had he not been liable except on extraordinary and repeated incentives and hardly then to indulge in personal alarms any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. whether many view of what humanity is capable such p a trait implied more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perceptions may be left to the wise to determine. so he sets it up very much as delano's sunny view of humanity blinding him to the reality of a slave rebellion of of what's going on. and throughout the book that runs as a theme. i will go be now and leap towards the very end where having found out what happened and he sort of saves benito, there's this extraordinary exchange where he is with benito and he's sort of saying, you know, you saved my life but really captain delano says, but you saved mine because imagine out had gone awry. imagine i had been more suspicious and acted accordingly, why, these slaves would have had my head in a second and would have killed me like that. so really by maintaining the deception, you saved my life just as much as i ultimately, but you unmasking the deception, saved yours. and they're in the boat, and don bene toe's not very persuaded. he says you general rise and mournfully enough, but the past is past, my moralize upon it? forget it. the blue sea and the blue sky, these have touched over new leaves because they have no memory, because they are not human. but these mild trades that now fan your cheeks, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? warm friends, steadfast be friends of the trades. with their steadfastness, they but waft me to my tomb, señor, was the foreboding response. [laughter] you are saved, cried captain delano be, more and more astonished. you're saved. what has cast such a shadow upon you? the negro. and some of you may be familiar with that passage as the p graph also to ralph ellison's "the invisible man." so it's an extraordinary story. melville towards the end also in his odd way disappears into -- he sort of hands the whole narrative over to these fictional depositions in which best three toe tells his whole story himself from his perspective but as if in legal documents translated from some court. how did you get into this? i mean, you ended up reading the real document. there was a real slave revolt, this was a real captain. how did you find, how did you expand upon it? >> i mean, there really was a babo, a benito. i came to the story when i was teaching a class in latin american history, and actually a friend of of mine in the audience suggested i assign the novella. i hadn't read it before, and i read it, and i assigned it, and, you know, it was -- as you conveyed, it's fascinating. it's on the high seas, you know, it's, you know, almost as in this new england sea captain was all of a sudden captured by the baron today sisters -- bronte sisters. [laughter] and readers don't know that the west africans are in charge until melville reveals it. and i was preparing to teach the class, and i was reading around about the novella, and it turns out literary scholars have known that it was based on chapter 18 of delano's memoir for quite a while. this is not a new thing, it's actually a true story. but -- >> unfairly like popular sea captain -- >> it wasn't that popular. it didn't sell. but it was out there. i mean, there was a bunch of, you know, the memoir's easily available. and there was just something -- i just remember when i read -- i think i actually read that it was based on a i true story this a footnote in this great book on melville, you know, a kind of analysis, interpretation of melville's writing. and it kind of struck --thin lit footnote a few times that it was based on a true story. it was kind of like finding out that ridley scott's alien was true. [laughter] kind of the same structure. the readers know there's evil lurking onboard, but you don't know where it is. and then i, thanks to the wonders of google books, you can read, i mean, download the pdf of his memoir. it was published in 1817. it's 500 and something pages. and his memoir, i mean, chapter 18 is fascinating. but the whole memoir itself is just almost, you know, it's just one misadventure after another that was, that captured something, i think, about the early, you know, promise of the american revolution. i mean, melville's portrayal of delano is a wonderful, one of the first fully-rebelledded american innocent abroad forebearer of graham greene's the quiet american and everything between and after. and it's superficial but in a superficial way that has depth and resonates. it says something about the innocence and idiocy of the united states, right? the kind of bumbling in the world. the actual, real delano i think says something -- even one, i think, it's, e captures something much more profound, i think, about the american experience. and his encounter and his reaction which we can get to later on in the discussion, i think, is rooted much more in social relations and economics rather than just a kind of blindness and cheeriness that's associated. so the book that i wound up writing basically has two narrative lines. one that follows the west africans who staged this remarkable deception and the other narrative line follows delano into the pacific as a sealer and their encounter in the south pacific. >> well, let's talk about that just for a second because i think, i mean, the story is an amazing story, and tbreg has reconstructed -- greg has reconstructed it with this exact shipment of slaves but then constantly expanding outward to give you a sense of the immensity of the trade at this time and to make you understand how much this age of freedom was also the age of slavery and how much everything is linked to it. epidemiology gets in, culture gets in there, everything gets in there in terms of how the world is reacting to these slaves and so forth. but, i mean, they are a british shipment -- a slave on a british ship that gets pucked up by a pirate -- picked up by a contract who's on a contract to offload them in latin america. and this was a standard operating procedure. >> yeah. and -- i don't speak french, but -- [speaking french] and he was actually, believe it or not, he had one arm. [laughter] i never realized how much i actually wanted to start a book with a captain, a pirate, a one-armed pirate until i actually did. [laughter] and he, yeah. i mean, he was a partisan of the french revolution and he understood himself as a sea-faring jack to bin, and we have this perception of of them sailing the ever free sea. but at least in the case of latin america, they were actually vanguards and merchant capital. they seized british goods because the for instance. was, you know -- the french was, you know, ongoing with the british and then contractual relations are south american merchants and brought the goods, the seized goods into montevideo and by far the most profitable cargo seized were slaves. and at least one group of west africans that wound up on name e actual boat which in the novel is the -- >> yeah. that was brunging the west africans -- bringing the west africans up to lima came in from this seized liverpool slave owner that had been seized and was on the way to montevideo. >> so talk a little bit, i think we're somewhat aware though probably not as much as we should be, the slave trade in the united states and how that worked a little bit. but the extent to which it was a huge part of latin america and southern -- the whole southern hemisphere is probably something that you're really expanding on here for many people for the first time, and it's at the corps of this book -- the core of this book, the americas. it was as big a deal there both economically in terms of a trade and also in terms of what the slaves were able to do. >> so one of the things that the event allows an opening up of just the extent and the full panorama of slavery in the americas where people in the u.s. and students of u.s. history tend to treat u.s. slavery as its own thing. but that was really the last stage of this larger expansion throughout the measurings linked to the expansion of free trade, linked to the atlantic ocean market revolution that began in the caribbean in the 1770s, moved down to brazil and then south america. and then it wasn't until, you know, it was the last stage. it was after the cotton gin and the move into the mississippi valley and then west and then after the war of 1812 that it explodes in the united states. and one of the things that this story does is not only does it give you a sense of the spatial scope of slavery by tracking the west africans across into montevideo and across the pampas and into the pacific, but also in some sense a chronological -- delano leaves new england in 1804, 1805 on this sealing -- 1803, i'm sorry, on this sealing expedition, and slavery is dying out. it's certainly dying out in new england, and it's assumed to be dying out in the south. and he's -- and it's in full swing many south measuring. 1804 -- south america. 1804 was the height of what the spaniards called without moneysing any words free trade in blacks. service the deregulation of the mercantile system that had regulated slavery for centuries. more slaves came into montevideo in 1804 than any previous -- >> how many? what are we talking about? >> i mean, numbers -- many of them came in as contraband. >> well, that's the thing that's also fascinating so you have this pirate that's picking them up, and he's bringing them there presumably because it's a slightly goofy deal. and then he can't get them off the ship, and then they have to march across the entire continent to the pacific coast which is an incredible odyssey also because these aren't set up seals properly. i mean, it's not exactly clear for many of these captains what's going to happen to their dying cargo when they arrive. >> right. it was, he. >> the cruelty of it is extraordinary. >> the con version of contraband into commodity was a complicated process. even though the viceroy allowed some to be sold as commodities but the rest he wanted out of buenos air race, so there was also sort of schemes in order to convert them from contraband into commodities. but to go back into this kind of chronological thing, what delano is doing is he's basically sailing into the -- he encounters in the south pacific race, terror and violence that will later explode in the united states. and that's, and that's the kind of, you know, it's almost circular, right? and then melville reads the story when slavery does explode in the united states, and so this, there's an interesting circular -- >> right. >> -- chronology to the story. >> sort of like a glimpse of the future coming to him from the past. >> yeah. >> right. what was the sealing business all about? i mean, we're aware at least from -- i mean, melville doesn't get his due probable as the great industrial novelist that he was, but he was the great novelist of the oil business the whales, but what's with the seals? >> well, sealing doesn't play a big part in the novella, he mentions it. delano was from a good yeoman stock family that was less -- he was an ancestor of franklin delano roosevelt from one of the less successful branches of the delano family. and he, he came from a family of shipbuilders and fishermen and that, he came off age during the american revolution. he was born in the last year of the seven-year -- the french and indian war which was kind of precursor, set the stage for u.s. independence. and he was in some ways a melvillean character in the sense that the a the revolution catapulted him into history. the american revolution which he ran away when he was a teenager to participate in, he went from one add vebture to -- adventure to another, but he could never quite redeem the promise that the revolution, you know, suggested. and he did for a little built, in his very first sealing voyage in the 1790s. sealing was the u.s.' fest experience -- first experience with boom and bust. ships start leaving new england and heading into the south pacific, and they're taking tens of thousands -- >> blubber also or skins? >> skins because they had perfected a technique in order to remove the fur from the hair and trading them -- and mostly in china for spices and tea and porcelain and bringing them back. delano in his first sealing expedition took hundreds of thousands of countries. it was enormously -- of skins. it was enormously successful. and for a while it had seemed like he had managed to blush himself. he and -- to establish himself. >> this is way down south. >> he's in the islands off of chile. and this, by the second, but his second expedition when he sets out in 1803, the seals are discuss appearing. what's happening is that the chinese market is being flooded, and the prices are falling, and they can't absorb -- the seals are rotting, the skins are rotting in the rain on the docks. and the price is plummeting. and that leads to sealers accelerating the killing on these islands. so what you have is you have oversupply and extinction going hand in hand on one island after another. and this -- during the boom period, during the flush, right, there's cooperation among sealers, there's money to be made. sealing itself is about an all or nothing system of labor relations as you can imagine. once, you know, and once the seals start disappearing, the conflicts start emerging both between sealing ships and among and on crews. delano on this trip when he crosses paths with the trial, his own crew is mutinying. first he tried sealing in new zealand and australia, and the seals are gone there too. his men jump ship -- >> this is a voyage of how many years? >> this is 1803, he leaves in 1803, and he's back in 1807, and the event with the trial happens in 1805. his crew mutiny -- not mutiny, jumps ship in tasmania, and he winds up taking on a bunch of -- because he's desperate, a bunch of escaped botany bay prisoners, convicts. and they start mutinying as he's heading back towards -- >> and they're mutinying because he's -- >> there's no money to be made. well, there's no money -- >> how do they know that when tear at sea? >> because they're going from island to island, and there's no seals left to kill. and he crosses paths with the trial. and we can talk about the deception and his blindness to it, but once he realizes that he is basically the victim of a con, of this elaborately-staged manipulation, he rallies his men to put down the rebellion and retake the ship. >> and brings them together. >> that brings them together. so what's interesting is if you think of ahas been, right? -- ahab, he becomes this kind of avatar or embodies a certain kind of charismatic power. he's often held up at a precursor of a 20th century totalitarian because he's able to, you know, through his just criz pa and creating an emotional bond with his men in which they participate this madness, i think delano represents a much more modern form of power control over labor in the context of disappearing natural resources and this intersection with race terror. so he rallies his men not to hunt a white whale, but to suppress black rebels, right? so it ends, it create -- it provides a window into a more kind of social understanding of race, violence and slavery and the intersection of slavery and environmentalism. >> yeah. i mean, you have a section now that i've my bookmark where you throughout the book greg has these sections called interludes which are wonderful meditations on various aspects of the material and also on melville mostly. and this one is on, called the machinery of civilization, but it's where you do the delano versus ahab kind of comparison and really looking at them as, ultimately, i mean, your thing is to say the character today of the way that we think of ahab is synonymous with ruin, used to, plain everything from george w. bush's wars to global warming. but insurgents like ahab, however dangerous to the people around them, are not the primary drivers of destruction, you write. you say that is those who would be the men who never defend, who carry out the grinding day in, day out extractive process. men are smitten with the glory ies of the planet. so you really set him up in a different way. melville sets him up as a slightly blythe american who doesn't actually read the complexity of the drama he's in, and you're saying he's also an establishment figure in a deep way, that he kind of represents -- i mean, and it's also interesting that melville cruts this diabolical ahab in a way, but he likes him. and he doesn't like delano that much. >> no, no. he sets him up for a fool pretty blatantly, little passage i read on the first page. not a stupid fool -- >> right. >> -- but a fooled person. >> yeah. i mean, not so much an establishment figure i don't think i would pirg him as an establishment figure, but someone who certainly believes in institutional um. i mean, in his memoirs at a number of points he believes in the rights of property. he has an encounter with the french revolution in, you know, in the indian ocean, and he has a fairly clear understanding that institutionalism is important, that if you are going to have, you know, rights of man you have to have the strong institutions that guarantee, you know, property rights. and he believes in obeying them. he explicitly says it a number of times. he is, at the same time, blind to the social world around him. i think that there is a bliewmedness that melville captures, melville sees in the memoir and captures. >> but the slave rebellion on this ship, it's, i mean, we think of it as like this extraordinary story and once melville got ahold of it, it captured a lot of imaginations through time. was it unusual then? was it something that people would have taken note of? would it have made it into the newspapers as an interesting story from the seas, or was this pretty much something that went with the territory, that happened a lot? you have some other stories of slave revolts often with the same demand, take us back to africa and this kind of fascinating diagnosis by these medical experts who are brought in to analyze why the slaves are so unhappy but don't talk to them -- [laughter] nostalgia and schism and so forth of the soul. >> i mean, slave revolts on ships were quite common. i think that there's a few sur saws that have counted 600 -- surveys that have counted 600, but i think that's just a fraction. i think every, some of the wes africans who pull off this deception had been involved in two other slave ship revolts in montevideo coming out before they even get to the pacific. >> so is you could survive one of these revolts. >> right. because i hi there was incentive -- i think there was incentive to keep property alive. but my point was none of them are documented in, like, counts of slave ship revolts. so i think it was quite common. i think what is remarkable about this one is, i mean, these west africans had been through, i mean, probably a year and a half ordeal before they even got to, got to the south pacificment -- pacific. then they ruse up and they -- rise up and they seize the ship. they're on -- they're sailing up and down the coast of chile and peru for 53 days before -- they're out of food and water, they survived at least one horrible storm. two women and two children died of star vegas. >> they don't know how to run the ship. >> they kept a skeleton crew of spaniards alive -- >> having hung the skeleton of the ship's cap talk about off the figurehead. >> but think about that context. i mean, they're dehydrated, and they're starving, and they're dying. they're literally dying. and yet they came -- they come up with this, they manage to summon the reserves and resources in order to perform, to shed the trappings of freedom which had proved to be fragile because slipping away every day that they were out in the south pacific. and assume the role of slavery in order to fool it'll know for nine hours. i mean, who knows why melville was -- melville left no letters or journal entries. what attracted him to the story. but i think one, i hi it's one of the things certainly has to be the way that these west africans were able to use the things that they were said not to have possessed; cunning and reason andty kind of internal -- and any kind of internal control. all of the things that are usually associated to free men, right? in order to prove of the lies of the things that they were said to be, humble and fawning and simple-minded. what's fascinating about benito cerrano and the true events also is, you know, you compare it to harriet beecher stowe's uncle tom's cabin where her case is presenting african slaves as simple minded, as being somehow more purer christians in their transparency and motives. >> so like delano per -- >> right, perceives. and pellville writes the story in which they're cunning and deceitful, and they respond to the brutality that's inflicted on them with equal brutality and violence. >> right. >> it's a fascinating -- >> his almost last, his last lines on babo is so many months after dragged -- well, he also gives a somewhat admiring description of the fact that babo never says a word after a he's been captured. like, he never talks about anything, won't respond to any aspect of it, and says some months after he met his voiceless end. the body was burned to answerer, but for many days that head met unabashed the gaze of the whites. so he's pretty, i mean, once again it's like melville's not really being subtle here. it's, you know, this is you're thinking of these slave bodies and here's mind that ran the show for a bit. >> yeah. >> not to only dwell on the melville side, but how was that read at the time? >> it wasn't. [laughter] >> melville. >> it appeared -- >> it undersold moby dick. [laughter] >> i mean, it was published about four years after moby dick, and moby dick was a commercial and critical failure and disaster, and melville, this was the moment that biographers really identify him as a point of mixed emotional and physical exhaustion. >> this is when he went to the holy land. >> yeah. a little bit after. and he published it in putnam's monthly journal based, you know, a publication here in new york and came out in three segments in october, november and december of 1855. and i think the -- there were notices of it in the times describing the narrative as a weird-like narrative, creeping horror, reading it as a creeping hour are. -- horror. but i think it went quickly into obscurity like much of his other writings until the 1920s. >> and when you went with about reconstructing this, i mean, you saw you sort of came across and this was sort of mind-blowing footnote first, but you went all over the map that this story covers, and you were finding -- what i find kind of amazing is how intensively documented all of this is. that all the cap talk abouts were, like, writing correspondence describing the plight of the terrible l conditions of the slaves, the crude calculations of turning slaves into commodities and protecting slaves and trading them off and figuring out -- all of that's on paper and preserved. >> yeah. >> and how were you able to reconstruct this exact shipment on its unbelievable odyssey across the ocean and then up over the mountains of the andes? >> well, doing this kind of archival research is, you know, when your trying to reconstruct an event, it's almost -- it provides some kind of structure and organizing structure that moves you along. if one were to go out and write a history of slavery and freedom in the americas, that's, you know, that's -- but if one is trying to follow the itinerary of, you know, so there's protocol records if latin america that are kind of in some ways the hidden history of capitalism. documents, transactions and sales including sales of slaves. so that was helpful. and the court case itself in chile and in spain, it was -- because -- so melville makes, so melville -- the one major change, this comes back to the question about sources and research, the one major change that melville does in his novella is that he has delano trying to to comfort the passengers, trying to to comfort a broken cerrano. in reality, delano spends eight months getting half of the work of surviving slaves again, in order to maintain loyalty, in order to maintain his crew. and they've had this falling out, and delano basically pursues them from concepcion up to santiago and lima. so those court cases are documented. so there's a, that legal proceeding of delano dealing with spur authorities and -- spanish authorities and making his demands and claims. there's a lot of paperwork related to that. you know, i was only able to kind of document one group of west africans because they came, there are west africans on the trial who stage this deception. they don't become a consignment as such until they're sold to this, this provincial falling aristocrat who gets into slavery in order to stem husband position. -- his position. that's when they become the 70 west africans can finish. >> that lot. >> right, that lot. prior to that they've come through in different ways, and i was only able to identify one stream as it were, the pirate. >> right. still, it's quite amazing that all has survived -- >> and, again, it was 1804. probably more than half of enslaved peoples that came into month rid owe were contraband and undocumented in historians' estimate. >> and, and so you have all this documentation about them. i mean, what do you really make in thend of the original story in that sense of delano chasing them down like that? is it as much of a microcosmic story without the novel? melville had a good nose for -- >> yeah. i think -- no, well, again the moment that it happens, 1804, is a generation after the american revolution, a generation before the spanish-american revolution, the year that haiti declares itself independent. it really is the apex of. >> right. >> -- the heart of the age of revolution, the age of liberty. really i think it captures, and it's the convulsing moment of free trade and blacks, the liberalization of the slave system and everything that came with it. and the way it intersects, as i mentioned earlier, with sealing and this kind of boom and bust resource extraction and u.s. expansion. so even if melville didn't read it and turn it into this compelling novella, i think itself it's a fascinating story. >> and you found that they were, that most of these slaves were muslims. >> they were identified -- >> on the particular boat. >> yes. the leaders were identified as muslim by spaniards. and there was a thurm of ore -- a number of other incidental evidence that suggests they followed, they tracked the lunar islamic calendar across -- they started their ascent up the andes at the beginning of ramadan, they were -- or ramadan started when they were a few day into that ascent, and they staged their uprising on the holiest day of ramadan, the night of power. they knew how to read and write in their own language, they knew contract law, they forced benito to sign a contract saying he would bring them back to -- these are all indications that at least the leadership was -- and this were identified as moors, and there was another slave ship uprising which is a whole chapter in the book that was also led by muslims, and the peruvian viceroy wrote a letter back to spain once again making a suggestion that spanish authorities had been making for centuries that they stop enslaving muslims because they bring these perverse ideas. [laughter] >> too much trouble. >> yeah. and those perverse ideas, i mean, again, one could speculate what -- he didn't, the viceroy didn't say what those perverse ideas were, but i think that when catholics talked about islam, they didn't have the specify what the perverse ideas were. it was everybody knew what the problem was with islam without having to lay it out. >> so what percentage of the slaves that were brought over to the american slave trailed, do you have any sense of what the -- >> historians, one scholar says as many as 10 percent, but i think that's just a -- and it's estimated based on origins. but there are indications, there's evidence of muslims who were enslaved in the south. it's well documented. but in terms of percentage -- >> and how, i mean, when, obviously, the viceroy's grousing about this, but how much of what was sort of perceived to be the problem was they were actually educated and literate? was there a higher percentage be of them than -- >> well, i think that was part of it. [inaudible conversations] >> babo staged the rebellion where they knew how to read and write in their own language, and they also knew spanish enough to listen in on benito's conversation with delano and make sure he wasn't being tipped off. i think that there's even beyond literacy there was a sense that islam was a prophetic religion that had a strong ethos of solidarity and social justice that i think helped enslaved peoples survive in all sorts of ways. >> how conscious other than people like the traders and the viceroy, how conscious were sort of the people of the, the white people of the americas i guess who respect the people of the -- who aren't the people of the americas that they were muslims? was that part of the perception of it all or all the same that they just came from somewhere else and had their own -- >> i think it wasn't a problem until it became a problem, you know? if it was -- so in the largest urban slave rebellion in americas in history was led by, was -- had very strong participation by muslims in 1835. and that became very much part of the counterinsurgent response of, you know, islam as a problem. from the beginning, again, from nearly the first early uprisings and movements for resistance muslims often iewfed as a problem. -- identified as a problem. and spanish authorities were constantly issuing edicts about not enslaving muslims because they were a problem. >> let me ask you about with delano being down there in latin america and the sort of of new england abolitionist, he runs the slave ship and, obviously, his first idea is that slavery's a bad thing supposedly and that it's dying out, as you say. and then he suddenly realizes that it's actually the slaves who have imprisoned this poor white captain and killed a number of people, the insurgents, and he unleash ares a lot of violence against them without any hesitation which helps unite his crew. where was he really at on this at the end? how did somebody like that really regard slavery? did he feel any kind of fellow humanity like that? did he feel like, ultimately, it's property and property's property? >> i think he felt both. many principle, he saw himself as a modern person. he was opposed to piracy, arbitrary laws of all kinds, and he explicitly said he was opposed to slavery in his memoir. you know, but then he's caught in this vortex of of ecological exhaustion and this kind of -- [inaudible] of supply and demand, and he responds as he does. delano -- >> try to collect on the slaves. >> yeah. trying to collect -- >> the collateral -- >> in order to keep his crew intact. >> right. >> delano has an interesting trajectory. it doesn't really end there. he comes back to the united states. this is his last major voyage, and he's basically broke with. and all of the belief and self-creation and self-mastery kind of -- he's an early kind of, you know, he has, he's actually quite, he has actually a quite early kind of cultural pluralism in his understanding and tolerance of other people. he's not a supremacist. in some ways there's a lot of parallels between him and pellville in their understandings of, you know -- melville in their understandings of nonwestern people which i found very compelling. he comes back, and he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the whole thing, with christianity, with the united states. what's interesting, he's on this voyage with his brother. he and his brother come back, and they have almost die metally call responses to the violence that they're involved in outside the u.s.' borders which i think is kind of almost emblematic. in some ways it's the -- >> his brother concern. >> his brother becomes more, he becomes a fundamentalist. he becomes a christian fundamentalist, and he becomes more, he embraces the kind of fire and brimstone christianity which is at odds with -- they come from ducksberry, and it was an early town that embraced unitarianism, that moved away from calvinism, that had a very liberal understanding of christianity and man's capacity for self-perfection. you know, a lot of ministers that would go on and be very influential in creating, in articulating what eventually becomes unitarianism actually came from ducksberry. and the delano brothers came out of that hothouse of on the to mitt romney -- optimism, and you see their response is samuel delano becomes a fundamentalist. the other brother becomes jaundiced. he writes a letter to his brother right before he dies in 1820, in the early 1820s that ca about aboll bishing christianity -- abolishing christianity and is very, very critical of the united states and the missionaries, particularly the missionaries. and it's not, it's not a -- so in some ways it's almost these emblematic responses -- [inaudible conversations] >> creates the new left and the new right. you know, this kind of very strong criticism of american empire and an embrace and defence of american empire. that's embodied and represented in the responses of the delano brothers to their involvement in this kind of race, terror and other -- and failure overseas, you know, fall your beyond the u.s. border. >> it's interesting when you say delano -- is it delano or delano? >> the real question is how you say amassa. somebody in new england said it's amassa. >> maybe we can take a two second break while you tell us the story -- not a particular happy tale either. >> there's only one in the bible, and so he -- it's in the book of samuel, and he's, i think, a cowz sun of king david, and he's killed -- or a nephew of king david, and he's killed by his cousin, job, who pretends to embrace him and kiss him and pull his beard in affection as he sticks a dagger in his side and his intestines spill out on the street. and why -- [inaudible conversations] >> this is why you don't know a lot of -- >> so delano's parents named all of his other brothers samuel, william and alexander and they named him amassa -- [laughter] which is a name sake. this is off on a tangent, but he was named after his -- >> this is a lot of the fun of the book too. >> he was named after his uncle, amassa delano, who was in the seven-year war got, was involved in the massacre of native americans in kind of the vermont, canada region and resorted to cannibalism in order -- as they were escaping the retribution of native americans and the french -- >> the connecticut river. >> yeah, down the connecticut river. they had, they wound up taking one of the native americans hostage, and then they were starving and lost, and they wound up killing her and eating -- or killing the boy and eating the boy. and then they themselves were captured by the community that the boy was from, and they were massacred. so why you would name -- [laughter] why somebody would be named after, you can imagine you could read a lot into being named -- [laughter] >> i mean, when you say about him having a sort of similarity with melville about some of his views of sort of seeing other people as other people, that seems like something that melville doesn't see in him. that's the side of him that isn't the innocent abroad. he may be an innocent abroad, but he wisens up also. and it's an exposure that came with all the sailing around. and these people would go on a four-year voyage and be loading crews and taking crews from wherever they were. i mean, they had to deal with an awful lot more humanity than your average person be stuck around ducksberry all day. >> yeah. you know, it's hard to tell what melville, you know, this is a little bit of an aside. melvilleans are obsessed with not just the sources of melville's writing, but the actual physical copies of the book because he is a great marginalist. he wrote and annotated and underlined, and they have his shakespeares, they have his bible, they have his darwin, they don't have the copy of delano's memoir which he got it from one could read that memoir and see a lot of other melville stories. there's a certain innocent. he could be israel potter, you know, kind of revolutionary war veteran that, again, as i mentioned is thrown into world history but can't understand it. you know, he's encountering all these great events and great people. that's delano. you know, there's -- [inaudible] there's a lot of, you know, i don't know what -- but to answer your question, when melville read delano, he did transform him, and he didn't transform him into a sympathetic character at all. he transformed him into this first kind of innocent abroad bumbling through the world in some ways, you know, a certain kind of emblematic of an innocence that can't see cause and effect, can't see the relationship of one's actions to the consequences of their actions. >> i mean, i feel like we're just getting started here, but i think we're actually at point where we should open up for questions, and that's the protocol i guess with the microphones. you'll be on c-span. [laughter] and so here's your moment to talk to world and to talk to greg. any questions? you've answered everything. [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> go ahead. >> i don't know, i mean, was there something about bawo as well? >> well, babo in the true event, in the historical event is the organizer of the deception, but he's not the person who plays the role of benito cerrano's body servant. it's his son. melville kind of combines those two characters, and there's been a lot of speculation among literary here to u.s.es what it was about -- theorists what it was about the name babo, you know, that, why melville used that name. >> he doesn't have a restaurant, so he put it on -- anybody else? >> i think yo started to answer this question, is there any evidence about how much of delano's memoirs melville actually read? >> this is no evidence. >> [inaudible] you could see evidence of -- [inaudible] being a more complex character. >> well, he's undoubtedly a more complex character, but there's no evidence that -- there's nothing. there's no literary or traces of what melville was thinking when he wrote benito cerrano or where, so there's a kansas between him and the memoirs that his father-in-law who actually plays a role as a judge in enforcing the fugitive slave acts which helps lead the radicalization of politics in the 1850s -- >> melville's father-in-law -- >> melville's father-in-law. as a young attorney in boston works pro bono for cel -- for delano. he basically writes his memoir in order to get out of debt, out of -- probably out of debtor's prison. he's certainly destitute. and shaw helps, basically, offers his legal services for free, keeping him out of jail, defending him in court but with also drawing up the contract that leads to the memoir. so there's a lot of speculation that he might have given the memoir to melville, but melville could have come across it in ship's libraries. an enormous amount of copies were printed for some reason. and the probate report of delano, i think -- phillip reacted to this when i told him the story. so it'll know dies -- delano dies and his total estate is a 50 cent used hammock to, a 50 cent old pine writing desk and 700 unsold copies -- [laughter] >> so what happens when you become a writer instead of a ship's captain. he should have stuck to sealing. [laughter] >> that somehow resonated with -- [laughter] >> the hammock sounded very desirable to me, you know? [laughter] well, if i have time for one question then i will ask you, there's obviously this huge debate that you've alluded to amongst melvilleans, where was he really at in this book? the question of did he look at slavery in terms of chattel and the economics of it and the trade and the condemnation of it or was he looking at the whole fast fish, loose fish thing in moby dick where he basically says who ain't a slave, tell me that, you know? there's a kind of larger existential view of slavery for him as the absence of freedom in the human condition and that doesn't justify slavery to him, obviously. but then there are obviously very clear things where he feels that on the contrary greater bondage is greater bondage and that that's for him a defining aspect of the -- i mean, whether it's tip or these characters who pop up lout -- >> yeah, yeah. >> how do you read that in the end? where do you see melville coming out -- >> well, again, melville's engagement with slavery is often on this after a level of, you know, it's about the kind of emotional bondage or, you know, psychological bondage, you know, philosophical bondage. and he was, he definitely, i think he was definitely -- he was quite critical of this very fetishizing notion of freedom that was emerging in the united states that understood freedom as kind of individual supremacy. he believed that people lived in relations of dependents and obligation and necessity that that kind of, that kind of elevation of a notion of freedom obscured, and he called it a vile liberty. but there was no real evidence, he didn't really -- benito cerrano was the one book and one moment where he engaged specifically with chattel slavery, with the realities of slavery as a social institution. but there was an earlier moment and it links up with the story. so the very first instance in which melville talks about slavery, u.s. slavery as u.s. slavery he is in this quasi-memoir called red burn which he publishes, i think i can remember -- maybe in 1850 or 1849, i don't really remember the date. and there's this wonderful passage where e comes across this monument in liverpool, the character that kind of represents him, his experiences, because he had been to liverpool. and liverpool -- and the monument is of lord nelson, and he -- [laughter] i'll go back to looking -- >> tell me that. [laughter] >> and the monument is lord fellson expiring at the moment of his victory against the french. and it's this crazy statue where every other nelson statue in britain is very simple when you think about nelson square in london, lord nelson up on top of the pedestal. this one has a naked nelson falling back with, you know, this horrible skeleton of death reaching up to grab his heart, and there are these four -- at the base of the pedestal of the statue there are four captives that are meant to represent french and spaniards prisoners of war. of melville goes off on this extended riff about how they reminded him of slaves in the market, and it's almost the stream of conscious riff on the wrongs of africa and the wealth of liverpool and the wealth of virginia and carolina and slavery creating it all. and i think that, you know, the ideas are interesting that slavery created the wealth of the ben the ben weaver world, but i think what melville was doing was free associating the way slavery kind of creates, you know, a stream of associations and, you know, and-s structure consciousness. and what's fascinating about that is that statue was put up by a committee of system of the best liverpool, you know, men and merchants, and they were mostly, they were all slavers including the slave john bolton who was responsible for, who owned the ship that had been, that had been seized by the french pirate in 1804. so in other words, the statue, the statue that provoked, prompted melville to think about slavery in the first place was raised by one, by man most immediately responsible for bringing the west africans to the americas that would inspire melville years later to write this masterpiece. ..

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