"He Could Not Be a Slave"

SLAVE MUTINY (312 pp. -William A.

Owens -- John Day ($4).

One fine day in April 1839, the strapping son of a West African chieftain set off happily down the jungle path that led from the ricefields to his village home. He arrived three years later, the survivor of an almost incredible adventure that had carried him through slavery and mutiny on the high seas to freedom and a place in history. The story of Cinque and the band of enslaved Africans he led is told with competence in Slave Mutiny, by William A. Owens, a 47-year-old assistant professor of English at Columbia University.

Cinque's great adventure began when three husky bucks leaped at him from the brush beside the trail and carried him off to be sold to a Spanish slaver. From the Spanish barracoons he was shipped to Cuba, and there sold with 48 other Negroes, many from his own tribe, to a Senor Ruiz. Ruiz loaded his human goods aboard a schooner named Amistad (Friendship), Captain Ferrer commanding; later a Senor Montes took passage. On June 27, 1839, the schooner weighed anchor and headed eastward along the coast of Cuba.

Cinque, by plain force of character, took command of the captives and organized a mutiny. He found machetes stowed in the hold, and with them one hot night the slaves, having ripped out their shackle bolts, cut the captain and his half-breed son to pieces. The Spanish crew ducked overside into the dinghy, and were gone. The slaves were masters of the ship.

Ashore on Long Island. That night they set out to drink everything on board, including the ship's medicine. Next day, cracking the white man's whip, Cinque put everybody to work, headed the Amistad back to Africa with Montes at the wheel. By night, while Cinque slept and less alert men kept watch, Montes eased the schooner north, hoping to land in the U.S. These tactics brought the vessel, about a month after the mutiny, within sight of Long Island, in the main sea road to New York.

Several merchantmen sighted the bedraggled schooner, and came alongside to help, but were driven off by musket fire. Twice the Africans went foraging ashore, while the isolated yeomen of Long Island barricaded themselves behind locked doors. In the end, the Amistad was captured off Montauk Point by the Navy surveying brig Washington.

Friends in New York. The commander of the Washington claimed the slaves and their ship as salvage. So did a retired sea captain, who had palavered a little with Cinque near Montauk. Ruiz and Montes claimed everything for themselves, and the Spanish government endorsed their claim. President Martin Van Buren made up his mind that the Spaniards had the right of it.

At this point, the Abolitionists, led by a New York merchant named Lewis Tappan, began to protest. To return the Africans to Spain was to sentence them to death. A legal staff was assembled to defend Cinque and his people. Sketches of Cinque, suggesting a rare nobility of nature, roused public support in the North; friends of the Africans quoted William Cullen Bryant's poem:

Vainly, but well that chief had fought--He was a captive now; Yet pride that fortune humbles not

Was written on his brow . . .

A prince among his tribe before,

He could not be a slave.

A circuit court in Connecticut ruled that the U.S. had no jurisdiction over the Africans, but refused to return them to Spain. The Government appealed. John Quincy Adams, the aged lion who had been President and now sat in the Congress, came roaring to the Africans' defense before the Supreme Court, which decreed that Cinque's people should be freed immediately.

Back to West Africa. The Africans had at last been delivered from their enemies. It was almost harder to escape their friends. For still another year the Abolitionists kept Cinque's people in New England, drilling them in Calvinist hymns, training them to wear clothes and shoes and to preserve decorum, exhibiting them to the curious public to raise funds for a mission to be founded in West Africa.

At last they set sail for home. On the way, Cinqe quarreled with the missionaries, the other Africans grew restive. At Sierra Leone, when they saw many of their countrymen, they flung off their clothes to show their tribal tattoos. The missionaries were aghast. Worse yet, some of the Africans deserted the mission, hit out for home. Cinque went with them.

From this point to its end, the story is a play of ironies. Cinque arrived home to find his village burned, his family sold into slavery. Wise now in the white man's ways but primitive as ever in his ethics, the black apostle of freedom turned slave runner to recoup his fortunes. He died old and famous in his country, and was buried, by his deathbed wish, in the cemetery of the little mission.

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