Amistad (1997)

Pete Postlethwaite: Holabird

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Quotes 

• Baldwin : Cinque describes the cold-blooded murder of a significant portion of the people on board the Tecora. Mr Holabird sees this as a paradox. Do you, sir?

  Captain Fitzgerald : Often when slavers are intercepted, or believe they may be, they simply throw all their prisoners overboard and thereby rid themselves of the evidence of their crime.

  Baldwin : Drown hundreds of people?

  Captain Fitzgerald : Yes.

  Holabird : It hardly seems a lucrative business to me, this slave trading. Going to all that trouble, rounding everybody up, only to throw them all overboard.

  Captain Fitzgerald : No, it's very lucrative.

  Baldwin : If only we could corroborate Cinque's story somehow with evidence of some kind.

  Captain Fitzgerald : The inventory. If you look, there's a notation made on May tenth, correcting the number of slaves on board, reducing their number by fifty.

  Baldwin : What does that mean?

  Captain Fitzgerald : Well, if you look at it in conjunction with Cinque's testimony, I would say that it means this: the Tecora crew had greatly underestimated the amount of provisions required for their journey, and solved the problem by throwing fifty people overboard.

• Holabird : I am looking at the same inventory, Captain, and I am sorry, I don't see where it says 'Today we threw fifty slaves overboard', on May tenth or any other day.

  Captain Fitzgerald : As, of course, you would not.

  Holabird : I do see that the cargo weight changed. They reduced the poundage, I see. But that is all.

  Captain Fitzgerald : It's simple, ghastly arithmetic.

  Holabird : Well, for you, perhaps. I may need a quill and parchment, and a better imagination.

  Captain Fitzgerald : And what poundage do you imagine the entry may refer to, sir? A mast and sails perhaps?

• Holabird : Your Honor, on Spanish Plantations, slaves always choose to live surrounded by their own ways and simple languages. Pray tell, what need they know of Spanish? Fetch? Carry? Stop? Oft times, gestures suffice for slaves as, in deed, for any other beast of burden.

• Holabird : Slavery, Indentured Servitude, whatever they want to call it, I don't mind, the concept - is the same. Now, he is familiar with the concept. After all, when you come down to it, it's all about money, isn't it? Slaves - production - money. I mean that's the idea of it. Whether it's here or there.