Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
below, was but a pretense: that he was engaged there maturing his plot, of which
the sailor, by some means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn the stranger
against; incited, it may be, by gratitude for a kind word on rst boarding the ship.
Was it from foreseeing some possible interference like this, that Don Benito had,
beforehand, given such a bad character of his sailors, while praising the negroes;
though, indeed, the former seemed as docile as the latter the contrary? The whites,
too, by nature, were the shrewder race. A man with some evil design, would he
not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and
malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden? Not unlikely, perhaps.
But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don Benito
be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who
ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species
almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes? These diculties recalled former
ones. Lost in their mazes, Captain Delano, who had now regained the deck, was
uneasily advancing along it, when he observed a new face; an aged sailor seated
cross-legged near the main hatchway. His skin was shrunk up with wrinkles like a
pelican’s empty pouch; his hair frosted; his countenance grave and composed. His
hands were full of ropes, which he was working into a large knot. Some blacks were
about him obligingly dipping the strands for him, here and there, as the exigencies
of the operation demanded.
Captain Delano crossed over to him, and stood in silence surveying the knot;
his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to
those of the hemp. For intricacy, such a knot he had never seen in an American
ship, nor indeed any other. The old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making
Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The knot seemed a combination of
double-bowline-knot, treble-crown-knot, back-handed-well-knot, knot-in-andout-knot,
and jamming-knot.
At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning of such a knot, Captain Delano
addressed the knotter:—
“What are you knotting there, my man?”
“The knot,” was the brief reply, without looking up.
“So it seems; but what is it for?”
“For some one else to undo,” muttered back the old man, plying his ngers
harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed.
While Captain Delano stood watching him, suddenly the old man threw the
knot towards him, saying in broken English—the rst heard in the ship—something
to this eect: “Undo it, cut it, quick.” It was said lowly, but with such condensation
of rapidity, that the long, slow words in Spanish, which had preceded and followed,
almost operated as covers to the brief English between.
For a moment, knot in hand, and knot in head, Captain Delano stood mute;
while, without further heeding him, the old man was now intent upon other ropes.
Presently there was a slight stir behind Captain Delano. Turning, he saw the
chained negro, Atufal, standing quietly there. The next moment the old sailor rose,
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