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Authors: Greg Grandin
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fought in the American Revolution, represented a living symbol of rights and a challenge to arbitrary authority.
Moulton tried to escape. Setting out on a twelve-day trek to the other side of the island, he slept in caves, climbed precipices, and slipped down into deep valleys, barely avoiding landslides. With Howe following on his heels carrying “fire arms well loaded with powder and ball” and swearing “revenge,” Moulton crawled “up a gulch to gain the top of a mountain” and called to God to rescue him from “covetous one-eyed self interest.” “Oh! Pride and ambition, what havoc have you made,” he cried, “let me be delivered from malice, deceit, and envy.… Lord, save or I perish.” Howe caught him on the far side of the island and dragged him back to the Onico .
* * *
The extent of George Howe’s hatred of Moulton was extreme, but his power over his crew was typical. Both maritime law and custom granted captains of whalers, slavers, merchantmen, sealers, and naval vessels absolute authority over their men. “A Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession,” thought one eighteenth-century mariner. Captains could whip at will; the quarterdeck where floggings took place was often referred to as the “slaughter-house.” Sailors were punished for the most minor offenses: losing a whaleboat’s oar, breaking a dish, or letting an African slave drink out of the wrong water cask. Captain Francis Rogers of the Crown told his crew that he would “skin them alive,” while another shipmaster told a sailor that he would “split his Soul or Stab him and eat a piece of his Liver.” Captains doled out their punishment with a “brutal severity,” said one account, describing what happened when an old hand on a slave ship anchored off Bonny Island complained about his water allowance: a deck officer beat him until his teeth fell out and then jammed “iron pump-bolts” in his mouth, forcing him to swallow his blood. 2
Legally, ships remained redoubts of the old regime well through and beyond the Age of Revolution. It wasn’t until 1835 that the U.S. Congress passed an act that tried to place merchant ships under the rule of law and due process, making it a crime punishable by $1,000 or five years in prison for “any master or other officer, of any American ship or vessel on the high seas” to, with “malice, hatred, or revenge, and without justifiable cause, beat, wound, or imprison, any one or more of the crew … or withhold from them suitable food and nourishment, or shall inflict upon them any cruel and unusual punishment.” And it wasn’t until 1850 that the navy outlawed flogging on its vessels. But these practices continued well past their legal abolitions. “No southern monarch of the slave,” said a sailor in an account of his voyages in 1854, could best the “brutality” and “want of moral principle” of sea captains. 3
Still, the new language of rights spreading around the Atlantic and Pacific following the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions provided sailors with new ways to think about shipboard sovereignty, along with ways to contest it when they felt it was unfairly exercised.
* * *
By the time Moulton returned to the Onico ’s sealing camp, he found most of the rest of his shipmates ready to join him against Howe. They were younger than Moulton, but most of their fathers had fought in the revolution, so they did what their parents’ generation did: they elected an assembly, drafted a declaration, and voted to rebel against a man named George.
Like the Declaration of Independence, on which it was clearly modeled, the document the sealers of the Onico composed in September 1800 was both a litany of specific grievances and a treatise on natural law and just rule. There, on a remote island at the bottom of the world, its drafters identified themselves as “citizens of the United States of America” and
Moulton tried to escape. Setting out on a twelve-day trek to the other side of the island, he slept in caves, climbed precipices, and slipped down into deep valleys, barely avoiding landslides. With Howe following on his heels carrying “fire arms well loaded with powder and ball” and swearing “revenge,” Moulton crawled “up a gulch to gain the top of a mountain” and called to God to rescue him from “covetous one-eyed self interest.” “Oh! Pride and ambition, what havoc have you made,” he cried, “let me be delivered from malice, deceit, and envy.… Lord, save or I perish.” Howe caught him on the far side of the island and dragged him back to the Onico .
* * *
The extent of George Howe’s hatred of Moulton was extreme, but his power over his crew was typical. Both maritime law and custom granted captains of whalers, slavers, merchantmen, sealers, and naval vessels absolute authority over their men. “A Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession,” thought one eighteenth-century mariner. Captains could whip at will; the quarterdeck where floggings took place was often referred to as the “slaughter-house.” Sailors were punished for the most minor offenses: losing a whaleboat’s oar, breaking a dish, or letting an African slave drink out of the wrong water cask. Captain Francis Rogers of the Crown told his crew that he would “skin them alive,” while another shipmaster told a sailor that he would “split his Soul or Stab him and eat a piece of his Liver.” Captains doled out their punishment with a “brutal severity,” said one account, describing what happened when an old hand on a slave ship anchored off Bonny Island complained about his water allowance: a deck officer beat him until his teeth fell out and then jammed “iron pump-bolts” in his mouth, forcing him to swallow his blood. 2
Legally, ships remained redoubts of the old regime well through and beyond the Age of Revolution. It wasn’t until 1835 that the U.S. Congress passed an act that tried to place merchant ships under the rule of law and due process, making it a crime punishable by $1,000 or five years in prison for “any master or other officer, of any American ship or vessel on the high seas” to, with “malice, hatred, or revenge, and without justifiable cause, beat, wound, or imprison, any one or more of the crew … or withhold from them suitable food and nourishment, or shall inflict upon them any cruel and unusual punishment.” And it wasn’t until 1850 that the navy outlawed flogging on its vessels. But these practices continued well past their legal abolitions. “No southern monarch of the slave,” said a sailor in an account of his voyages in 1854, could best the “brutality” and “want of moral principle” of sea captains. 3
Still, the new language of rights spreading around the Atlantic and Pacific following the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions provided sailors with new ways to think about shipboard sovereignty, along with ways to contest it when they felt it was unfairly exercised.
* * *
By the time Moulton returned to the Onico ’s sealing camp, he found most of the rest of his shipmates ready to join him against Howe. They were younger than Moulton, but most of their fathers had fought in the revolution, so they did what their parents’ generation did: they elected an assembly, drafted a declaration, and voted to rebel against a man named George.
Like the Declaration of Independence, on which it was clearly modeled, the document the sealers of the Onico composed in September 1800 was both a litany of specific grievances and a treatise on natural law and just rule. There, on a remote island at the bottom of the world, its drafters identified themselves as “citizens of the United States of America” and
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