While the story of the rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad is widely known, little attention has been given to an equally monumental attempt at escape by enslaved people aboard another ship called the Meeriman in 1766, almost one hundred years before the Amistad rebellion. The PBS documentary Slave Ship Mutiny, part of the “Secrets of the Dead” series, combines the work of a marine archeologist (Jaco Boshoff), a historian (Nigel Worden), and a heritage site activist (Lucy Campbell) in South Africa to retrace the story of what the directors choose to term a “mutiny.” This decision to name what transpired on the Meeriman a “mutiny” rather than simply a “rebellion” is significant, because the term normally refers to the actions of subordinates conspiring against a ship’s captain. It points to the fact that, as the narrator comments, the man who led the effort, Massavana, did not think of himself as a slave. He was a warrior who resisted his enslavement, testifying during his trial that he and his fellow captives planned to become “masters of the ship.” Campbell remarks that “underneath the deck they believed they were going to take over the ship because they were free men in their mentality. They were not mentally enslaved.” The film intersperses interviews, voiceover narration, and historical reenactments to piece together a story about the experiences of people confronting the greed and corruption of the larger transatlantic system.
The film includes an overview provided by Campbell of the contemporary population’s linkages with the history of slavery as well as the general background of slavery in Africa with a focus on Madagascar, Massavana’s home country, where he was kidnapped by the king and sold to the Dutch. It also follows Boshoff’s attempts to locate the remains of the Merriman off the coast of South Africa. It then tells the extraordinary story of how a message in a bottle allowed the slave traders to succeed in their goal of delivering the slaves to the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie [VOC]), how an employee of the VOC managed to trick the captives into believing that he had sailed them back to Madagascar rather than to South Africa, and how the captives managed to acquire the weapons that allowed them to stage the mutiny. The film ends with the story of Massavana’s trial and sentencing, with documentation provided by Worden from the VOC archives. It shows that even though Massavana and his fellow freedom fighters failed in their attempt to return to their homeland, they were triumphant in striking a blow against the VOC and therefore against the institution of slavery. His words and actions live on in the history books. Today Massavana, who received a sentence of life imprisonment on the notorious Robben Island, is hailed as one of South Africa’s first freedom fighters.
Along with documentaries about The Amistad such as Amistad: The Federal Courts and the Challenge to Slavery (2002) or The Amistad Revolt: “All We Want Is Make Us Free” (1997), the film seeks to uncover a suppressed but important episode in history, although it diverges from these other films in its generous use of dramatic reenactment to tell a compelling story. In fact, dramaturgy is so central to the film that it is reminiscent of PBS’s The Middle Passage (2000), which straddles the divide between documentary and feature film. Since the film is only sixty minutes long there are many gaps in the narrative, but the shaping of the story as a kind of mystery plot makes it highly accessible and brings this important historical event, with its contemporary relevance, to an audience that is wider than that of just scholars and specialists. The film provides a powerful counternarrative to accounts that portray Africans as powerless objects, showing the agency they were able to exercise even under the most dehumanizing conditions.
