Linguistist

6 October 2026

Count to Ten

In the summer of 1839 a linguist at Yale named Josiah Gibbs went to the jail in New Haven where the Africans from the Amistad were being held, and found he could not talk to them. Nobody in the city could. They had taken over a ship and killed the men steering it, and now they were charged with murder in a language none of them spoke, in a country none of them had chosen.

So Gibbs sat down with them and a pile of pennies. He would hold up a coin. One of them would say the word. He would move the coin, hold up two. The words came back, and after a while he had ten of them. The language was Mende. Somewhere in West Africa, an ocean and a lifetime away, and he had ten of its numbers written on a scrap of paper like a man who has found a key in the street.

Then he did the thing I cannot stop thinking about. He went down to the harbor and started counting. One, two, three, out loud, in Mende, up and down the docks of New Haven and then New York, waiting for somebody to turn around.

That is how he found him.

James Covey. Born Kaweli, in the highlands of what is now Sierra Leone, and Kaweli means war road. When he was five or six he was taken in a raid and sold, and sold again, to a chief's wife and then to a European slaver, down through the Lomboko camp and onto a ship bound for Cuba, years after that trade was already illegal. The British stopped the ship. He came off it free. A mission school in Freetown kept him five years and taught him English, and by 1838, still a boy, he was in the Royal Navy. In June 1839 he stepped off HMS Buzzard in New York, carrying two languages the way a man carries water in both hands.

Then, on a dock, he heard a white professor counting in the language of his mother.

He answered.

Covey stayed in New Haven four months. He sat in that jail and translated. What he carried into the court, out of Mende and into English, was the thing the men had told him: that the cook of the Amistad had told them the crew meant to kill them and eat them, and that this is what they believed, on that deck, in those hours. That was the whole case. Not that they had been kidnapped. Half the room could see the chains. The case turned on what was in a man's head at the second he picked up a knife, and the only way to get what is in a man's head is to ask him, in his own words, through somebody who knows both.

The court found they were freeborn men who had defended themselves. The Supreme Court agreed. Not slaves who mutinied. Free men who fought.

The leader the newspapers called Cinqué was Sengbe Pieh. A rice farmer with a wife and three children. He had been sold to settle a debt. Even his name arrived broken.

In 1842 Covey went home with thirty-five of them, back to Freetown. He was not yet eighteen. He drifted, got into trouble, fell sick, and was passed between a village called Kaw-Mendi and a mission compound the people there had named America. He died on the twelfth of October, 1850, twenty-five years old, and was buried like a Christian.

Gibbs went back to his Hebrew and his dictionary and his library.

The truth was in the room the whole time. It just needed ten words, and somebody willing to stand in a harbor saying them out loud until a stranger answered.