The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker

potatoes, sausages, and “fresh beef.” Ten barrels of biscuit, 480 bunches of bananas, five hundred pounds of jerked beef, and three dozen fowl stored in hen coops rounded out the extensive edible holdings. There was much less available on board to drink: fourteen demijohns of wine, not to be consumed on the voyage but rather sold at its end, and only six casks of water. As it happened, in the days leading up to the voyage, ship captains in Havana were having “great difficulty of finding a sufficient quantity of water casks,” as one of them put it, a shortage that would have consequences. 6
    Unlike the
Teçora
, the
Amistad
did not have a lower deck, where the enslaved would be jammed together overnight and in bad weather. It was a single-deck vessel with a hold, which measured six feet six inches from the top of the keel to the underside of the main deck above, with headroom diminishing on both sides as the hull curved upward to meet the outer edges. The bulky cargo already stored in the hold left limited room for the human freight, which was jumbled in with, and on top of, the hogsheads, casks, and boxes. The enslaved, crammed below deck, had very little headroom.
    Indeed, the hold was so crowded that half of the captives would have to be quartered on the main deck and forced to sleep in the open, overnight, in chains for the three-day voyage. The rest were fettered and kept below. Because the
Amistad
had made numerous voyages in the coastal slave trade, its timbers retained the smell of previous terrified passengers, a condition made worse by the lack of ventilation. Theprisoners would sit in the dark, stuffy, cramped hold for long hours at a time, in a painful crouch, enveloped by, and themselves exuding, the sharp odor of bondage.
    The deck of the
Amistad
was crowded, especially during the day when all sixty people (fifty-three Africans, five crew members, and two passengers) inhabited its 1,200 square feet, much of which was devoted to the masts, the longboat, the hatchway, and other shipboard fixtures. The
Amistad
lacked not only the size of the
Teçora
, but several features of larger slave ships, notably a barricado on the main deck, a defensive bulwark behind which the crew could retreat in the event of an uprising and from which they could fire their muskets and pistols down on the insurgents. It also lacked a gun room for the secure stowage of weapons. The
Amistad
did have a galley with a brick oven for the preparation of the captives’ food—a telltale sign of its slave-trading purpose. It also had a large hatchway amidships for the easier movement of bodies from above and below during the voyage. It had ten sweeps (oars) for self-locomotion and easier maneuvering along the treacherous shoals and inlets of the north coast of Cuba. 7
    Because the schooner carried a lot of sail on its tall, light spars—more sail than most other vessels its size—and because the crew was small for the intended three-day voyage, sailors based in port would have helped to prepare the ship to sail. Once at sea, the
Amistad
was a “great sailer,” that is to say, very fast and maneuverable by the standards of the day. One knowledgeable observer pointed out that it would outsail most United States Navy revenue cutters, which also were designed for speed in order to catch quick and evasive smugglers. 8
    A New Middle Passage
    The sailors hoisted the anchor and the vessel slipped quietly past the British antislavery vessel, sailing by Fort Moro at the mouth of the harbor around midnight, just as the evening gun fired. The intended voyage was fairly routine, one hundred ten leagues (three hundred miles) eastward from Havana to Guanaja in Puerto Príncipe (now called Camagüey), a thriving new region for sugar production. Landownersbellowed for slaves as they sought to hew plantations from the verdant forest. Captain Ferrer himself had made the trip many times, as had his bondmen, Antonio and Celestino, and likely too his