Paul Cuffee, Black Whaler and Self-Made Man

Brian Balogh: Today on the show we’re returning to the history of whales and whaling in America.

Ed Ayers: We’ll be hearing about women who passed as men on whaling ships.

Nathan Connolly: And we’ll find out how a whale visited the Midwest in the 19th century.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll learn about the African-American roots of sea shanties. While 19th century literature made whaling sound exciting and heroic, the reality was often a lot less romantic.

Nathan Connolly: What do you mean? The long hours, the great food, what’s not to love on a whaling ship?

Brian Balogh: Well let’s just say years at sea, really dangerous conditions on deck, and certain pay. Those aren’t the best selling points but some people saw it as an opportunity. Whaling was appealing to many black men with few other alternatives ashore. Some were already free but others were trying to escape slavery.

Nathan Connolly: Just so we’re clear, they went from being enslaved to being stuck on a whaling ship.

Brian Balogh: Well they were paid a small share of any profit, but the question of whether whaling was a means of escape or further imprisonment lies at the heart of the black whaling experience.

Jeffrey Fortin: [inaudible 00:07:46] sort of intimately involved in the transatlantic slave trade sending ships over to collect slaves, to purchase slaves and bring to the Caribbean and then up along the East Coast of the United States.

Brian Balogh: That’s Jeffrey Fortin Associate Professor of History at Emmanuel College.

Jeffrey Fortin: As the 18th century sort of wears on and New Englanders begin to question the morality of slavery, especially Quakers who were particularly involved in the slave trade early on in funding it. They begin to think, maybe this isn’t exactly what God may find as being ethical. At this same sort of moment there’s a lot of overlap.

Ed Ayers: That is that whaling ships out of New England followed similar transatlantic routes as earlier slave ships.

Brian Balogh: And there are even a few horrific instances of ships leaving New England as a whaling ship, picking up slaves in Africa and dropping them off in South America before returning home.

Ed Ayers: I had no idea.

Brian Balogh: Did whaling ships perpetuate similar types of racism that people of color would have experienced on land?

Ed Ayers: Not necessarily. Ships were a bit of reprieve from racism based on a kind of meritocracy, mostly because well everyone is stuck on a ship together for a pretty long stretch of time, and they had to depend on each other to do their jobs. If they did their jobs well they won respect and gratitude.

Jeffrey Fortin: The Native Americans for example in their journals when they’re on land discuss race all the time, when they’re on board ships ideas and discussions about race sort of take back the back seat. You can see that on board the ships there maybe wasn’t equality, but there certainly was a leveling effect that persons of color experienced.

Brian Balogh: Interesting but did willing ever help people of color access greater opportunities back on land?

Ed Ayers: Sometimes it did for the earliest and perhaps most striking example we can turn to the story a Paul Cuffee.

Jeffrey Fortin: Paul Cuffee was born in Cuttyhunk, which is a small island that’s a part of the chain of Elizabethan Islands in Buzzards Bay, which is on … it’s right next to Cape Cod, but it doesn’t get quite the fanfare as Cape Cod does today. And he was born to a former enslaved African man named Cuffe and his Wampanoag mother.

Ed Ayers: Cuffee shows incredible promise and determination from a very early age.

Jeffrey Fortin: He does become literate at the very least during his teenage years, where he takes over his father’s exercise book, which is a book that he would use to practice writing in. And so when his father dies when he’s about 14, he takes that book over and teaches himself how to write.

Ed Ayers: But Cuffee quickly realizes that being literate won’t be enough to give him a shot at success, and so he sets his sights on whaling as a means to become a self-made man.

Jeffrey Fortin: He actually as a teenager does go to the sea on a whaling voyage to the Gulf of Mexico. And on this voyage he sort of gets a sense of what the possibilities are, and he ends up on another voyage in the Gulf of Maine. From there he takes his earnings and buys the hardware to build his first ship called the Ranger.

Brian Balogh: He’s basically going from being a whaler to being an entrepreneur.

Ed Ayers: Absolutely Brian and just as important Cuffee comes to believe in the Quaker value he’s encountering, and becomes convinced that he has an equal stake in the society emerging around him.

Jeffrey Fortin: On one of his whaling voyages he is said to have killed five or six whales himself as the ship’s captain. I think there was a little bit of aggrandizement there but he can see that power and the money certainly that could be made. But also that he could go out there and demonstrate that he had the skill and the abilities to do the same thing that other whalers did.

Ed Ayers: And so when the time comes to further his own ambitions and to help create a society in which ambition like his can be rewarded, he joins the American Revolution.

Jeffrey Fortin: Then he also takes another step in joining the cause if you will in building a small dory, which is a little rowboat in rowing out through Buzzards Bay to Martha’s Vineyard, and providing Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Islands with supplies because they’re being squeezed out by the British blockade. He is celebrated in newspapers. One of the stories that newspapers always tell about him when discussing him are his daring raids at night through Buzzards Bay to get supplies to fellow patriots.

Ed Ayers: Cuffee was actually captured and held prisoner by the British during one of these risky trips.

Brian Balogh: So it sounds like even as a African-American he had just as much stake in the country getting free.

Ed Ayers: Well not really. He believed in it but he couldn’t vote, but he was determined to try to hold America up to its ideals.

Jeffrey Fortin: He writes a few petitions along with his brother and a couple of other men of color in his hometown of Dartmouth, which later becomes Westport Massachusetts, demanding the right to vote. He’s essentially arguing if you’re not going to give us the right to vote then we shouldn’t pay taxes.

Brian Balogh: It seems like I’ve heard that somewhere.

Ed Ayers: Yeah Brian. Cuffee was trying to hold America up to the ideals espoused by the patriots a few years earlier during the Boston Tea Party.

Nathan Connolly: You might say it’s Cuffee attempt at a black tea party.

Ed Ayers: Well that’s a terrible pun Nathan, and his petitions didn’t yield immediate success. They may have helped sway public opinion, but it was another 20 years until free black man won the right to vote in Massachusetts all the way in 1800.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, two decades is a heck of a long time to wait, but we’ve got to point out that still well in advance of a lot of other African-Americans in the new nation.

Ed Ayers: Certainly, but Cuffee continued to feel the harsh sting of racism throughout his life despite all that he accomplished.

Jeffrey Fortin: Then he comes back from a voyage and his ship gets impounded by the American government because of the war of 1820 and the embargo act. And he travels to Washington DC to meet with Secretary of State to try to get his ship back. And on his way out of DC, he gets on board a stage coach and is relegated to the back of the stage coach. It’s a harsh reality if you will of what his status really was. And this was probably the wealthiest African-American in America at that point if not close to it. And here he is still sitting in the back of a stagecoach.

Ed Ayers: Toward the end of his life Cuffee started worrying about how newly freed slaves would be able to support themselves in America. He had a proposal for what he thought newly free black men could do. He encouraged them to go whaling.

Ed Ayers: (silence)