Amistad
The story of the Amistad has become part of the less glamorous history in the United States and the wider Western world in terms of the human rights violation that was slavery. The story began in February 1839, when Portuguese slave traders violated all the treaties in existence at the time and abducted Africans from Sierra Leone in order to ship them to Cuba to be sold as slaves. In Cuba, 53 African men and women were sold to Spanish planters. The Cuban schooner Amistad would ship them to a plantation in the Caribbean. However, the simplicity of this plan was ruined by revolting Africans, who seized the ship in on 1 July 1839. The captain and the cook were killed, and the remaining crew members were told to sail to Africa. This plan, however, also did not work, as the U.S. brig Washington seized the Amistad off Long Island, New York. The commander of this ship was Lt. Thomas R. Gedney. The document to be examined here is his libel, a written statement to Judge Andrew T. Judson of the district...
Gedney's aim was to obtain salvage for the ship; therefore, his account of the ship's cargo and its value is very detailed.
Created during August, 1939, when the ship was seized, the libel was written on the Amistad and estimated the value of the ship's cargo at $40,000, while the Africans were valued at $25,000 if they were to be sold as slaves. Maritime law at the time dictated that people who were able to save ships or their cargo from loss could claim compensation in the form of salvage. It is on the strength of this law that Gedney claimed his right to salvage compensation, since it was with great "difficulty and danger" to themselves that he and his crew were able to save the Amistad, its cargo, and its value in human slaves. In other words, they saved the ship from loss to its "rightful" owners. Furthermore, since, according to Gedney, the slaves could speak only…
