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 dont 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 im 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, its 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 theyre running out of seals to kill, and greg will talk about sealing. And hes off the coast of where exactly . The coast of chile. Chile, basically. And he sees this derelictlooking ship this a cove and approaches it. And this appears in his memoirs, and melville took the story from delanos 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 slavetrading ship, he saw that right away. What he didnt realize from the outset was that this was a ship where thered 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 theyd come which was west africa, senegal. They were asking to go back in the book, but theyd 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, isnt 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. Its 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 delanos 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 delanos sunny view of humanity blinding him to the reality of a slave rebellion of of whats 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, theres this extraordinary exchange where he is with benito and hes 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 theyre in the boat, and don bene toes 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 humanlike healing to you . Warm friends, steadfast be friends of the trades. With their steadfastness, they but waft me to my tomb, senor, was the foreboding response. [laughter] you are saved, cried captain delano be, more and more astonished. Youre 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 Ellisons the invisible man. So its 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 hadnt read it before, and i read it, and i assigned it, and, you know, it was as you conveyed, its fascinating. Its on the high seas, you know, its, 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 dont 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 delanos memoir for quite a while. This is not a new thing, its actually a true story. But unfairly like popular sea captain it wasnt that popular. It didnt sell. But it was out there. I mean, there was a bunch of, you know, the memoirs 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 melvilles 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 Scotts alien was true. [laughter] kind of the same structure. The readers know theres evil lurking onboard, but you dont 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. Its 500 and something pages. And his memoir, i mean, chapter 18 is fascinating. But the whole memoir itself is just almost, you know, its just one misadventure after another that was, that captured something, i think, about the early, you know, promise of the American Revolution. I mean, melvilles portrayal of delano is a wonderful, one of the first fullyrebelledded american innocent abroad forebearer of Graham Greenes the quiet american and everything between and after. And its 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, its, 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 thats 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, lets 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 whos on a contract to offload them in latin america. And this was a standard operating procedure. Yeah. And i dont 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 onearmed 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 seafaring 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 were 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 youre really expanding on here for many people for the first time, and its 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 wasnt 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, im sorry, on this sealing expedition, and slavery is dying out. Its certainly dying out in new england, and its assumed to be dying out in the south. And hes and its 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, thats the thing thats also fascinating so you have this pirate thats picking them up, and hes bringing them there presumably because its a slightly goofy deal. And then he cant 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 arent set up seals properly. I mean, its not exactly clear for many of these captains whats 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 hes basically sailing into the he encounters in the South Pacific race, terror and violence that will later explode in the United States. And thats, and thats the kind of, you know, its almost circular, right . And then melville reads the story when slavery does explode in the United States, and so this, theres 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, were aware at least from i mean, melville doesnt 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 whats with the seals . Well, sealing doesnt 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 sevenyear 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 theyre 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. Hes 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. Whats happening is that the Chinese Market is being flooded, and the prices are falling, and they cant 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, theres Cooperation Among sealers, theres 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 hes 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 hes desperate, a bunch of escaped botany bay prisoners, convicts. And they start mutinying as hes heading back towards and theyre mutinying because hes theres no money to be made. Well, theres no money ho