Mordeillo, the careerist who never cared to remain a mere captain, sees his opportunity to yield more profits from his trade than anyone has before. The longer voyage was risky. He is venturing into a new frontier, as they say in a world where no one cares if these "explorations" and these "daring risks" are detrimental to other human beings. Grandin explains: West Africans surviving the Middle Passage "didn't travel much farther once they crossed the Atlantic." Arriving at any one of the slave harbors ("New Orleans, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Alexandria, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, Baltimore, and Charleston"), the enslaved would be unloaded and sold, and they would spend the remaining days of their lives along coastlines, "rivers, island plantations, haciendas, and cities." Those aboard the commandeered Neptune, however, had already traveled for weeks and "in some cases months."
When Mordeille finally arrives at port in Rio del la Plata, he is not expected by society to concern himself with the suffering and dehumanizing conditions in those hulls. He is expected to think in terms of profits. The "creatures" in the hulls of those two ships are just that--creatures--declared by the world at that time to be less than human. Apes, maybe. Uncivilized. Violent, even, mind you! As in our modern era, Mordeillo and his fellow "privateers" would have easily gulped down a few beers at a table with the likes of a Goebbels or a Heydrich with no trouble. I am sure several CEOs would love to shake Mordeille's hands.
Mordeillo could not escape the bottom line. Like two peas in a pod, where would racial oppression live without profits and vice versa? Aboard his ship again, Mordeille counts the money. He calculates: "80,000 silver pesos."
"80,000 silver pesos"!
And as Grandin reminds us, Mordeillo loves liberty! Similar to many of his generation, Mordeillo is a believer in liberalism. Freedom. "The fact that he was a Jacobin believer in the rights of man and the liberties of the world and also someone who made his living seizing British slaves and selling them to Spanish American merchants", however, did not bother him in the least.
The "one-armed French" captain, "a seafaring Jacobin," with a crew, wrapped in "red sashes," singing the "Marseillaise," is above all, a privateer. A free-market guy! An individual who wants to go far in the world, remember. Today, the economy is booming for the 1% who, like those in Mordeillo's day, love liberty too!
Mordeillo zeroed in on a great location to do business, where no one would worry about the morality let alone the legality involved in "trading" humans as commodities. And, as Grandin writes, Buenos Aires was that great place with booming markets, particularly in "contraband" commodities. Buenos Aires is a city "conceived in corruption," Grandin writes. And enslaved blacks were often the contraband! Mordeillo has contraband slaves!
For privateers like Mordeillo, the smuggling of material goods and slaves is going so well; these profiteers forget all about the motherland or should I say, the fatherland? The government of Spain bulks and tries to regulate trade, writes Grandin, to "prevent the development of a too-powerful merchant class in America." Governments are still attempting to regulate a "merchant class" that is now the corporate-ruling class! Nike or some other corporation can save money to increase profits by taking its business to Bangladesh, where workers are in a different kind of "hull" locked in factory buildings. Their bosses are "free," however!
The definition of "freedom," Grandin argues, is associated with "the freedom to buy and sell Africans as they wish." For Mordeille, down in Rio de la Plata, the "slave trade... had become a free-for-all." Grandlin adds: "It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery."
What a lucky Mordeillie, huh?
The African trade market is opened up. "[F]ree trade of blacks helped make a more varied commercial society," Grandin argues. As a result, extended routes and deregulation bring about an altogether different kind of bondage than the world had known before. "The African slave trade... survived the dawn of the Age of Liberty but was expanding and becoming even more lucrative." Consequently, the West Africans who survived the journey to Montevideo arrived "as part of slavery's new extreme, the motor of a market revolution," Grandin explains. More than ever now Africans are "investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete value." In other words, "slaves literally made money," and they made money exclusively for the Europeans, the colonists, and the newly arriving and soon-to-be citizens in the land of the free.
How about that Mordeillo!
Well, this would be the end of the story. The slave trade is over. (Unless you consider the trafficking of human beings in our modern era). Sitting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington D.C., there is a black president--so I am told. But who is free? Specifically, who is "free" of this legacy of enslavement? Certainly not the victims of that peculiar institution. The European descendents in Europe and the US need to ask this question too.
In the 1950s, the US sold the American public and the world The Commie. The Red Scare! Round up all the usual suspects! Socialists and communist activists, union leaders, workers, leftist writers, artists, academics, Hollywood actors, directors, and screenwriters. Today, the US has sold the world "terrorism." There are terrorists everywhere!
The powers seem to always come up with some narrative and some practices of oppression to prohibit the development of freedom and equality. Some empire of necessity develops ways in which to amass wealth for the few and oppress the many.
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