The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Page B

burning thirst, they tapped and drank it, without permission. When they were caught, Captain Ferrer decided to teach everyone a lesson. At least five men—Fuli, Kimbo, Pie, Moru, and Foone—and perhaps as many as seven (Sessi, Burna)—were each, by turn, restrained and flogged. 15 “[F]or stealing water which had been refused him,” Fuli “was held down by four sailors and beaten on the back many times by another sailor, with a whip having several lashes.”He referred to the lacerating cat-o’-nine-tails, the primary instrument of power aboard a slave ship. The sailors then flogged the other four, then repeated the entire cycle of punishment four times on each person. In order to maximize the torture, the seamen, with Ruiz’s permission, mixed together “salt, rum, and [gun] powder” and applied the burning compound to Fuli’s wounds. Not surprisingly—for gunpowder was often used by sailors in tattooing—the marks of the wounds on Fuli’s back were still visible months later. Kinna later pointed out another use of the compound: “Rum, salt, powder—put togedder, make eat dis I tell you.” In October, one of the Africans was still “lame, so as hardly able to walk, as he declares from blows received on board the Amistad.” Tensions aboard the schooner escalated amid the hunger, thirst, violence, torture, and blood. As the Africans later announced, “They would not take it.” 16
    Who Is for War?
    Shortly after the morning meal of Sunday, June 30, Cinqué and Celestino squared off in a fateful encounter on the main deck of the
Amistad
. Tension had been rising between the two. Celestino had cuffed Cinqué and had likely been greeted in return by fiery eyes of resistance. He expanded his campaign by taunting the proud prisoner, of whom it could have been said, “Dat man ha big heart too much.” 17
    Because the two men shared no common language, Celestino communicated by signs and gestures—“talking with his fingers,” as one African recalled—and the menacing cook’s knife he held in his hand. In order to answer the questions that were on every captive’s mind—where are we going and what will become of us at the end of the voyage?—Celestino drew his blade’s edge across his throat: they were going to a place where they would all be killed. The cook then made a chopping motion with his knife to show that their bodies would then be hacked to bits by the white men. He took the imagined bits of flesh to his mouth: they would be eaten. He gestured to a cask of salt beef, implying that it was filled with the bodies of Africans from a previous voyage; he gestured again to an empty cask indicating that therein laytheir fate. As Cinqué noted, “The cook told us they carry us to some place and kill and eat us.” Kinna added that Celestino “with his knife, made signs of throat-cutting. &c., and pointed to the barrels of beef, and thus hinted to Cinquez, that himself and his companions were to be cut up and salted down for food like beef.” He pointed to “an Island ahead where the fatal deed was to be perpetrated.” His words had direct impact, although they did not terrorize and pacify, as he had intended they should. Instead, they galvanized the Africans to action. Every account of the uprising told by any of the
Amistad
Africans emphasized the decisive importance of Celestino’s threat as a catalyst of rebellion. 18
    The slave-sailor’s taunt resonated with a potent set of beliefs held by the
Amistad
Africans. In their African homelands, people had long believed that the strange white men who showed up on the coast in “floating houses” were cannibals. Those forced aboard slave ships often thought that the casks of beef they saw held the flesh of previous captives and that puncheons of “red wine” held their blood. Slaveholders in many parts of West Africa had tried to strengthen discipline in their own societies by threatening to sell slaves to the white men, who would, they explained,