Whydah Exhibit

The Whydah exhibit was interesting although a little thin on physical objects. The ship broke into pieces during the wreck and the most of what washed up on the beach was spirited away by scavengers. Much of the exhibit was reconstructions of the ship with mannequins.

One thing that the curator(s) did particularly well was contextualizing piracy within the Atlantic triangle, specifically the relationship between piracy and slavery in the early 18th Century. The rise in transatlantic commerce made piracy attractive due to both the temptation posed by the riches to be gained and due to the fact that sailor life aboard merchant ships was pretty hard. After the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the wars with Spain and the need for privateers, many sailors were left unemployed and vulnerable to pirates Pirates impressed both black and white sailors as well as the slaves captured in their slave ships raids (this wasn't always the case. As W. Jeffery Bolster points out, pirates were just as likely to sell slaves as to free them). Blackbeard's crew may have been as much as 60% black.In fact, there is some speculation that the massive crackdown on piracy prior to 1730 was spurred by the threat piracy posed to the slave trade

One of the more gruesome and haunting displays was of the shoe, stocking, and shinbone of a boy named John King who's estimated to have been between 8 and 11 years old. King and his mother were passengers of one of the ships captured by Bellamy's crew, and King was so enamored by the pirates that he threatened to kill his mother if she tried to stop him from joining them. He died with most of the Whydah's crew.

In terms of my own work, it's hard to say precisely how much will be useful. There were 2 things that might make it into the chapter if only as footnotes.

• The alterations made to the Whydah by Bellamy's crew seem similar to descriptions of the San Dominick in Benito Cereno. The partitions were removed to reflect the egalitarian ethos embraced by pirates.
• Cotton Mather was judge presiding over six members of Bellamy's fleet. He freed one who alleged to have been impressed into service.

Is Dred the antebellum Boogey Man?

I'm rereading Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and thinking about the problem of the figure of the slave in abolitionist literature a post-revolutionary context. It's a problem I outlined in my first chapter and still haven't quite figured out how to flesh it out fully.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dred is the say that it displays Stowe's own evolving thought processes regarding both abolition. On the one hand she writes with an eye towards addressing critiques of the figure of Uncle Tom, allowing some space for black rage in an abolitionist text. On the other, she can't quite bring herself to imagine the revolt itself, let alone the possible success of such a revolt. I'm alternating my re-reading of Dred with Bob Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of Representative Identity. In chapter 4 he notes that Stowe in her appendix containing Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner she excises any mention of the fate of Turner's accomplices. In suggesting that the hammer has yet to definitively fall on the Turner Insurrection, Levine sees Stowe as "rhetorically participating in the political terror inspired by the heroic tradition of the black heroic deliverer as embodied both by [Nat] Turner and her fictional creation Dred" (Levine 174). I've never really thought of the text in this way, although if one is looking at the text as something of a corrective for Uncle Tom's Cabin it makes a certain amount of sense.

Yet I can't quite let go of this nagging feeling that there still something squeamish in Stowe's treatment of violence. Part of it is that Dred isn't just an combination of real-life conspirators Vesey and Turner, but an amalgamation of both literary and real-life figures of slave insurrection going all the way back to Behn's Oroonoko. Turner and Vesey themselves are already imbued with a certain kind of spectral dread (no pun intended) because of this longer history, both in terms of slavery, insurrection and the Haitian Revolution and the literature that accompanies them. This makes Dred almost a comfortably familiar figure upon which to foist white American anxieties regarding insurrection. Part of Melville's genius in Benito Cereno was taking this image of that tall Coramantee-like warrior and making him the decoy for the real leader, wee Babo.

Violence is probably not the thing that Stowe is squeamish about but rather the dislocation of it from familiar sites be they these maroon swamp communities or in threatening slave figures. What if Old Tiff suddenly snapped and massacred the Cripps?

These are mostly older thoughts but I'm revisiting them both as way of recapturing some of the questions that initially drew to this text. I think in the same way that Grainger struggled to reconcile the virtue of production with the evils of slavery, Stowe struggles to deal with the violence of insurrection in a way that both embraces the rights of black to rebel and yet keeps it at a distance.