I

                   Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

                        Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
                        sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
                        horror the corposant and compass rose.

                   Middle Passage:
                             voyage through death
                                       to life upon these shores.

                        "10 April 1800--
                        Blacks rebellious.  Crew uneasy.  Our linguist says
                        their moaning is a prayer for death,
                        our and their own.  Some try to starve themselves.
                        Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
                        to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."

                   Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

                        Standing to America, bringing home
                        black gold, black ivory, black seed.

                             Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,           of his bones
                   New England pews are made,           those are altar lights that were his eyes.

                   Jesus   Saviour   Pilot   Me
                   Over   Life's   Tempestuous   Sea
 

                   We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,
                   safe passage to our vessels bringing
                   heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

                   Jesus   Saviour

                        "8 bells.  I cannot sleep, for I am sick
                        with fear, but writing eases fear a little
                        since still my eyes can see these words take shape
                        upon the page & so I write, as one
                        would turn to exorcism.  4 days scudding,
                        but now the sea is calm again.  Misfortune
                        follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning
                        tutelary gods).  Which one of us
                        has killed an albatross?  A plague among
                        our blacks--Ophthalmia:  blindness--& we
                        have jettisoned the blind to no avail.
                        It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.
                        Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes
                        & there is blindness in the fo'c'sle
                        & we must sail 3 weeks before we come
                        to port."

                             What port awaits us, Davy Jones'           or home?  I've
                   heard of slavers drifting, drifting,           playthings of wind and storm and
                   chance, their crews           gone blind, the jungle hatred           crawling
                   up on deck.

                   Thou   Who   Walked   On   Galilee

                        "Deponent further sayeth The Bella J
                        left the Guinea Coast
                        with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd
                        for the barracoons of Florida:

                        "That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half
                        the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
                        that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
                        and sucked the blood:

                        "That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest
                        of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;
                        that there was one they called The Guinea Rose
                        and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

                        "That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames
                        spreading from starboard already were beyond
                        control, the negroes howling and their chains
                        entangled with the flames:

                        "That the burning blacks could not be reached,
                        that the Crew abandoned ship,
                        leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
                        that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

                        "Further Deponent sayeth not."

                   Pilot   Oh   Pilot   Me
 

                             II

                   Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
                   Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
                   have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
                   of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

                   Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
                   Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
                   and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
                   Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

                   And there was one--King Anthracite we named him--
                   fetish face beneath French parasols
                   of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
                   whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

                   He'd honor us with drum and feast and conjo
                   and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
                   and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
                   red calico and German-silver trinkets

                   Would have the drums talk war and send
                   his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
                   and kill the sick and old and lead the young
                   in coffles to our factories.

                   Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
                   for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
                   from those black fields, and I'd be trading still
                   but for the fevers melting down my bones.
 

                             III

                   Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
                   the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
                   their bright ironical names
                   like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth;
                   plough through thrashing glister toward
                   fata morgana's lucent melting shore,
                   weave toward New World littorals that are
                   mirage and myth and actual shore.

                   Voyage through death,
                                        voyage whose chartings are unlove.

                   A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
                   spreads outward from the hold,
                   where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
                   lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

                        Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,      the corpse of mercy
                   rots with him,      rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes.       But, oh, the
                   living look at you      with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,      whose
                   hatred reaches through the swill of dark      to strike you like a leper's
                   claw.       You cannot stare that hatred down      or chain the fear that stalks
                   the watches      and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;      cannot
                   kill the deep immortal human wish,      the timeless will.

                             "But for the storm that flung up barriers
                             of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,
                             would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,
                             three days at most; but for the storm we should
                             have been prepared for what befell.
                             Swift as a puma's leap it came.  There was
                             that interval of moonless calm filled only
                             with the water's and the rigging's usual sounds,
                             then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries
                             and they had fallen on us with machete
                             and marlinspike.  It was as though the very
                             air, the night itself were striking us.
                             Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,
                             we were no match for them.  Our men went down
                             before the murderous Africans.  Our loyal
                             Celestino ran from below with gun
                             and lantern and I saw, before the cane-
                             knife's wounding flash, Cinquez,
                             that surly brute who calls himself a prince,
                             directing, urging on the ghastly work.
                             He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then
                             he turned on me.  The decks were slippery
                             when daylight finally came.  It sickens me
                             to think of what I saw, of how these apes
                             threw overboard the butchered bodies of
                             our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.
                             Enough, enough.  The rest is quickly told:
                             Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us
                             you see to steer the ship to Africa,
                             and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea
                             voyaged east by day and west by night,
                             deceiving them, hoping for rescue,
                             prisoners on our own vessel, till
                             at length we drifted to the shores of this
                             your land, America, where we were freed
                             from our unspeakable misery.  Now we
                             demand, good sirs, the extradition of
                             Cinquez and his accomplices to La
                             Havana.  And it distresses us to know
                             there are so many here who seem inclined
                             to justify the mutiny of these blacks.
                             We find it paradoxical indeed
                             that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
                             are rooted in the labor of your slaves
                             should suffer the august John Quincey Adams
                             to speak with so much passion of the right
                             of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
                             and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's
                             garland for Cinquez.  I tell you that
                             we are determined to return to Cuba
                             with our slaves and there see justice done.
                                   Cinquez--
                             or let us say 'the Prince'--Cinquez shall die."

                        The deep immortal human wish,
                        the timeless will:

                             Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
                             life that transfigures many lives.

                        Voyage through death
                                            to life upon these shores.