Topsail schooner (2m).
L/B/D:
64 × 19.8 × 6.2 dph (19.5m × 6m × 1.9m). Tons:
ca. 60 grt. Hull:
wood. Comp.:
5 crew. Built:
Baltimore; <1839.
In August 1839, reports of a schooner of distinctive Baltimore clipper lines and manned by twenty-five to thirty Africans began circulating around the waterfronts of New York and New England. The vessel had requested food and water from several passing ships, and some of its crew had landed along the eastern end of Long Island. On August 26, as the ship lay at anchor off Culloden Point, the schooner and her crew were seized by the revenue cutter Washington under Lieutenant Thomas Gedney.
The ship turned out to be a coastal slave trader of Cuban registry. On June 28, she had embarked fifty-three slaves newly landed at Havana from the Portuguese slave ship Teçora and purchased by José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, who hired Amistad for the two-day sail to Puerto Príncipe. Under the leadership of a slave named Cinque, who had been captured from his home in Kaw-Mendi in what is now Sierra Leone, the slaves seized the ship, killing the captain and his cook and wounding Montes and Ruiz in the process; two sailors also disappeared, possibly drowning when they leaped overboard. Cinque ordered his erstwhile captors to steer Amistad to the east, the direction from which he knew they had sailed in Teçora; but by night, Montes and Ruiz sailed north, hoping to make landfall in one of the slave-owning states of the United States.
After seizing Amistad, whose name is Spanish for "friendship," Gedney had the ship taken to New London, where, because slavery was still legal in Connecticut, he could claim salvage on the ship and her cargo, including the slaves, who had been purchased for $450 each in Havana. In the opening round of legal proceedings, Ruiz and Montes argued that their property should be handed over to the Spanish consul and that the slaves be charged with murder and mutiny in a Spanish court. In support of their case, they insisted that the slaves were not from Africa, but that they had been slaves prior to the banning of the slave trade. Owning slaves was not illegal under Spanish law, but trafficking in slaves had been since 1817. Gedney brought suit on behalf of himself and his crew seeking compensation for salvage. The plight of the Africans, whose de facto leader was still Cinque, immediately aroused the interest of the abolitionist movement. Their intent was to demonstrate that the Spaniards were guilty of piracy for engaging in the slave trade. The Africans would then be free to return to their homes in Africa.
The abolitionists' biggest obstacle was President Martin Van Buren, who was eager to avoid a confrontation with the Spanish government, which sought a ruling in favor of Ruiz and Montes. More important, he was up for reelection and had no intention of alienating southern voters. Articulating his administration's case was Secretary of State John Forsyth, himself a Georgia slave-owner. A district court ruling found that the Africans had been born as free men and were kidnapped into slavery. However, the court also decided that Cinque and the others should be turned over to the administration to be returned to Africa. Fearing that the Van Buren administration might just as easily return the Africans to Spain, the abolitionists enlisted the services of Representative John Quincy Adams, himself a former president and secretary of state, to argue the Africans' case before the Supreme Court. The high court eventually ruled in favor of the Africans, and in November 1841 the thirty-five survivors of the original fifty-three taken aboard Amistad returned to Sierra Leone in the bark Gentleman, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. Amistad was returned to Cuba, but the legal entanglements did not end there: although Congress voted $70,000 to be paid to Spain in 1844, reparations were not paid until 1860.
In 1995 the Connecticut Afro-American Historical Society and Mystic Seaport Museum announced plans to build a replica of Amistad.
Jones, Mutiny on the "Amistad." Smith, "On the Design of the Amistad."
