Captain Absalom Boston

As Black History Month for 2017 comes to a close, we look at African American whaling ship captains. Over nearly three centuries of whaling, some 175,000 men went to sea in 2,700 ships. Of the 2,500 masters who captained these ships, at least 63 were men of color. Today we will remember Absalom Boston, captain of the whaleship Industry, which sailed in 1882 with an all black crew.

Absalom Boston was born in Nantucket in 1785 to Seneca Boston, an African-American ex-slave, and Thankful Micah, a Wampanoag Indian woman. Absalom Boston’s uncle was a slave named Prince Boston, who sailed on a whaling voyage in 1770. At the end of the voyage in 1773, Prince Boston’s white master, William Swain, a prominent Nantucket merchant, demanded that he turn over his earnings. Boston refused. He took Swain to to court and won his earnings and his freedom, becoming the first slave set free by an jury verdict. 

Absalom Boston went to sea in whale ships while still in his teens. By the age of twenty he had earned enough to purchase property on Nantucket and ten years later obtained a license to open and operate a public inn. In 1822, Boston became captain of the the schooner Industry and embarked on a six-month whaling voyage, with all-black crew, returning with all hands and seventy barrels of oil.

Captain Boston came ashore after the single voyage on the Industry to run a store and inn. He helped establish a school and a church and ran for public office. He became of the leaders of the abolitionist movement on the island.  In 1845, he successfully brought suit against the town to get his daughter Phebe Ann Boston admitted to the Nantucket public high school. When he died, Captain Boston was among the wealthiest African American on the island.