The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 24, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The storm to which the below editorial refers was the so-called "Long Island Express", before the 1950 convention of naming storms was established. It had passed north of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola on September 18-19 as a category 5 hurricane, skirted the U.S. coast, passing about 150 miles east of Cape Hatteras on the 21st, then turned northward at a furious pace, coursing vortically over Long Island the same afternoon, registering sustained winds of 121 mph with gusts reaching 183, minimum barometric pressure at 27.94, ranking it as a category 3 hurricane. The deadly storm, the worst ever to hit New England, as it did so without prior landfall, after tracking across Long Island, hurled itself across western Connecticut, and western Massachusetts, causing 10-12 foot storm surges in Narragansett and Buzzards Bays. The flooding, to which the editorial alludes, arose primarily from the banks of the Connecticut River.

Six hundred died, 8,000 homes were lost, and a third of a billion 1938 dollars in damage resulted, (4.748 billion adjusted for inflation).

The storm, until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had the fourth highest death toll of any recorded storm in U. S. history and was the ninth most costly in property damage.

Now, it ranks fifth and tenth, respectively.

And it is the only time that Cash ever wrote about a hurricane. If you thought that we thus chose to come to this month's editorials in September, 2005 because of the whorling Katrina of August 29, 2005, after coursing through the four months of 1939 leading up to World War II during the period May to August, 2005, you'd be guessing incorrectly. It was by the purest coincidence that we landed here now--mainly, of course, chosen for the timing of Munich.

And this hurricane of 1938, perhaps a little coincidentally itself, had its origins a few hundred miles out from Dakar, about 500 miles north of Lomboko, near Sierra Leone, making initial landfall at Fire Island, about 40 miles west of Montauk Point, near which lies Culloden Point.

It was here at Culloden Point that an apparitional ship was discovered anchored, inhabited primarily by blacks, by a survey ship, the U.S. cutter Washington, on August 26, 1839.

It turned out, upon investigation aboard, that the ship had set sail from Havana in June with a cargo of 49 slaves bound for Guanaja; four days out upon the journey, there was a mutiny and the captain was killed by the slaves brandishing sugarcane knives.

The leader of the mutiny, one Cingue, had been kidnapped by four African men off the road near his home in Mani, in the Mendi country of Africa, ten days from the island of Lomboko from which those sold into slavery were disembarked to cut the cane in Cuba for the sugar and rum merchant trade. Cingue had been sold by his kidnappers first to an African Vai-man, then to a Spanish slaver, thence to Cuba.

A phrenologist who did a work-up on Cingue described him this way:

Gilabaru, second in command of the mutineers, was captured similarly on the road near his home in the Mendi and sold to a Vai-man who sold him to a Spanish slaver at Lomboko. In Gilabaru's case, his abduction was in recompense for the escape of one of two slaves purchased by his uncle in Bandi and then bartered in repayment of a debt. Gilabaru explained that Africans thus taken into captivity at Lomboko were chained together and fed fish and rice in scant enough equivalent necessary to keep them living for the voyage which lay ahead. Gilabaru, according to the narrative, was "very active, especially in turning somersets."

Another of the slave-mutineers, Kimbo, also from the Mendi country, had been taken as a slave by his king at the death of his father. He never saw any books in his country. "When people die in his country, they suppose the spirit lives, but where they cannot tell."

In the ensuing Federal court case over whether the Spanish slavers had the right to ownership of these men as chattel or whether they were captured on American free soil and hence entitled to the rights of free men or whether they were shipped to Cuba in violation of Spanish law ab initio and hence to be returned to Africa, or whether only the courts of Cuba, not the United States, should have proper jurisdiction over this latter question, Gilabaru and Kimbo testified that they had recently been shipped from Africa to Cuba, thus Bozals in the language of Cuba. To become a Bozal, Gilabaru and Kimbo had been bound with their fellow captives by wrists and ankles in chains two by two day and night, crammed into four foot high decks crowded thick with others similarly captured out of the Mendi, mostly women and children, unable to sleep without pain, fed a little rice and a small amount of water daily, riding the seas in the vomit of their fellows, whipped to open sores into which gunpowder and vinegar were then poured, women and children crying in voyage, crying upon the occasion of reaching Cuba, those who didn't die in passage that is, faced with the separation forever from their fellow tribesmen of the Mendi; Gilabaru and Kimbo were sad, but did not cry, for they were men, they said.

Once purchased by two Cubans, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, in Havana out of the Barracoons, the slave marts, to which all Bozals were immediately taken after landing, they were placed on board the Amistad for the journey to Granaja, constrained in iron collars about their hands, feet and neck, tied together by chains by night and whipped, given little food and water, told by the mulatto cook aboard ship that they were to be eaten upon coming to port at Principe. After four days of this torture, they managed to break the padlock holding the chain, seized the cane knives, killed the captain and the cook, and took the remaining crew and their owners captive for the voyage back home to the Mendi country.

The captive crew steered the ship in stealth northward and westward when they could, against the insistence exerted upon them on pain of death by the mutineers that they steer east toward Africa. After two months at sea, they wound up off Culloden Point.

Kimbo said of the people of New England, "They are good people--they believe in God, and there is no slavery here."

When the author of the account tried to explain to Cingue the form of government in the United States, however, it was not well understood:

Pervading the subsequent legal proceedings was the question of whether the Spanish government should be entitled under a 1795 treaty to the right of trial of the mutineers for murder of its citizens. The Van Buren Administration wished to acquiesce to the requests of the Spanish government to return the men to Cuba where they could attempt to prove before its courts that they were not properly slaves under Spanish law, as a defense to their conduct aboard ship in killing and kidnapping their kidnappers. Of course, had this position of the President been carried to action, it would have assuredly led to the men being tried in Cuba as murderous villains of Spanish citizens and inevitably shot or hanged. The coffers in Cuba, after all, grew fat from the trade, receiving an illegal payment of ten dollars per head for every one of the twenty to twenty-five thousand slaves imported annually since the slave trade had been outlawed by Spain fully 19 years earlier.

The District Court and Circuit Court of Appeals had determined that the men were taken into slavery illegally in violation of the Spanish law and thus directed the President to dispatch a ship to carry them back to Africa.

The case, controversial for its ramifications to slavery in general, landed finally before the Supreme Court where former President John Quincy Adams, together with future Connecticut Governor Roger Baldwin, who had successfully argued the case below, argued for the mutineers' freedom from tyranny, from slavery.

Said Story of the mutineers:

The order of the lower courts for transport of the men back to Africa was thus reversed, but in all other respects affirmed.

And 99 years plus 26 days after the Brig Washington spotted the ghost ship at anchor off Culloden Point near Montauk on the easternmost point of Long Island, a ship described by one of the men aboard the Washington who first visited it as "such a sight as we never saw before and never wish to see again... bottom and sides of this vessel are covered with barnacles and sea-grass, while her rigging and sails presented an appearance worthy of the Flying Dutchman, after her fabled cruise...": 99 years plus 26 days after an American first laid eyes on that, this hurricane came storming out of the Atlantic basin, formed a few hundred miles west of Dakar in the roiling, briny wash westward across the treacherous three thousand mile voyage through landless turbidity, to the islands of the Caribbean; northward then it turned from there, outlining the Atlantic coast, swaying and jutting just as the land also sways and juts, by the Lighthouse at Hatteras, then fast, fast, striking land on Fire Island at Davis Park, Great South Beach, in the North.

The nickname of a storm pouncing on New England and Storm Troopers, in formation, readying themselves to pounce on Czechoslovakia, bore identical acronymic sigla of the day--Big Sigla--this day, full of coincidences, in 1938.

FROM MONTAUK POINT.

"There is nothing here but land, sea and sky," was the way a reporter described the scene in the Great Salt Pond section, containing the settlements of Jerusalem and Galilee, after the great hurricane had swept over diminutive Rhode Island. A while before it there had been the trappings of a sort of civilization, and then came an immense and a terrifying wind, wildly shrieking, obliterating all before it and leaving nothing but the land, the sea and the sky.

And in a time like that, all concerns lesser than the simple preservation of life and escape before the resistless wind and the mountainous waters piled up by the wind, are obscured. Man, puny little man with his vain pretensions, is brought into violent contact with the elements from which, when they are kind, all life is derived, and to which, when they are angry, life returns.

There is a lesson in it, probably, but there is no use stating it, for it will be forgotten, just as the lesser concerns of these harried people will again, that the storm has passed, become paramount. But for the moment they are experiencing the blessed relief of merely being alive and finding it sweet. Come to think of it, it is; only, we come to think of it so seldom.