Black History Month: Absalom Boston, Whaling Ship Captain & Merchant

Posted on by February 25, 2024

Captain Absalom Boston

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 52 were men of color. In honor of Black History Month, here is an updated repost about Absalom Boston, captain of the whaleship Industry, which sailed in 1822 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 court and with the support of prominent whaleship owner William Rotch, won his earnings and his freedom, becoming the first slave to be set free by a jury verdict.  The impact of the lawsuit effectively ended slavery on Nantucket.

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Thomas Downing, From Son of Slaves to Oyster King of New York City

Posted on by February 23, 2024

Image: NY Public Library

In the decades before the Civil War, Thomas Downing, the son of slaves, became the acknowledged oyster king of New York City when New York was the oyster capital of the known universe.  He had learned how to rake oysters as a child on Chincoteague Island, Virginia. When he moved to New York in 1819 at the age of 28, he became an oysterman. 

There were hundreds of oyster cellars in New York City at the time, many associated with working-class bars, dance halls, and brothels. Oysters were plentiful, cheap, and thought of as a food of the lower classes.

Thomas Downing helped to change that perception, when he opened his own oyster cellar at 5 Broad Street, in the heart of the financial district, in 1825.  The restaurant was elegantly appointed with damask curtains, gold-leaf carvings, chandeliers, and mirrored hallways. Stockbrokers, attorneys, politicians, and others of the city’s elites ate raw, fried, or stewed oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, or poached turkey stuffed with oysters.

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Black History Month: Paul Cuffe — African-American Captain, Ship Owner & Shipbuilder

Posted on by February 22, 2024

During Black History Month, it is worthwhile to remember early African-American shipmasters. Who was the first? That is hard to say. Paul Cuffe is a good candidate.  An updated repost.

Paul Cuffe was born on Cuttyhunk Island, MA on January 17, 1759, the seventh of ten children of Kofi or Cuffe Slocum and Ruth Moses. His father, a free black man, was a member of the Ashanti people of Ghana. His mother was a Native American of the Wampanoag Nation of Martha’s Vineyard. Cuffe Slocum was a skilled carpenter, farmer, and fisherman, who taught himself to read and write. In 1766, Cuffe Slocum was able to purchase a 116-acre farm in Westport, Massachusetts.

Paul Cuffe went to sea at 16 on whalers and merchant ships, where he learned navigation. During the American Revolution, his ship was captured by the British and Cuffe was imprisoned for three months in 1776 in New York. He returned home to Massachusetts and in 1779 built an open boat that he used to run the British blockade, bringing trade goods to Nantucket and ports on the Massachusetts coast.

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Hornblower Group Files for Bankruptcy Reorganization, Shuts Down American Queen Voyages

Posted on by February 21, 2024

The Hornblower Group; a diversified ferry, cruise, marine hospitality, and services organization; has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The filing is expected to help cut the company’s debt load by $720 million. The company enters bankruptcy with assets of up to $1 billion and liabilities of roughly $1.2 billion. Its debt load rose from $630 million in 2019 as the business tried to maintain liquidity during the pandemic.

In the voluntary court-supervised and pre-arranged bankruptcy, Strategic Value Partners, LLC (SVP), a global alternative investment firm, will acquire majority ownership of Hornblower in a proposed debt-for-equity swap while providing a significant equity investment in the business.

As part of the agreement, Hornblower’s overnight cruising business, American Queen Voyages (AQV) will be shut down, and sold if possible. American Queen Voyages operated the American Queen, said to be the largest river steamboat ever built, as well as the American Countess, the American Duchess, and the American Empress.

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Celebrating Washington’s Birthday — a Brief Look Back at Washington’s Navy

Posted on by February 20, 2024

Admiral Washington?

Happy Washington’s birthday, or close to Washington’s birthday, at any rate. Since 1879, the third Monday in February has been celebrated as a federal holiday in the United States in honor of the Founding Father George Washington, who led the Continental Army to victory in the American Revolutionary War, presided at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and was elected the first US president. (In many states, the third Monday is also celebrated as “President’s Day”.)  

The third Monday was chosen to give federal employees a three-day weekend. This year the holiday fell on February 19th. George Washington was actually born on  February 11, 1731, using the Julian calendar or February 22, 1732, based on the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted by the British in 1851, causing much confusion to all concerned.

So we are close to the anniversay of Washington’s birthday, whenever you may celebrate the event, and accordingly, it seems worthwhile to look back on General George Washington’s navy of 1775 and 1776.

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Crew of Bulker MV Rubymar Abandons Ship off Yemen After Houthi Attack

Posted on by February 19, 2024

On Sunday evening, anti-ship ballistic missiles, launched by Houthi rebels from Yemen, struck the MV Rubymar, a  32,211 DWT, Belize-flagged, UK-owned, and Lebanese-operated bulk carrier in the Gulf of Aden near the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The attack caused sufficient damage that the crew was forced to abandon the ship.

US CENTCOM reported on X, that the ship issued a distress call and a coalition warship along with another merchant vessel responded to the call to assist the crew of the MV Rubymar. The crew was transported to a nearby port by the merchant vessel.

UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency said it had received a report of the incident from an unnamed ship about 35 nautical miles (65km) south of the Yemeni Red Sea port of Mocha. “Vessel at anchor and all crew are safe,” it said.

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Remembering Robert Smalls – Former Slave, Pilot of the Planter, First Black Captain in the US Navy & US Congressman

Posted on by February 11, 2025

Here is a story well worth retelling; an updated repost in honor of Black History Month; the remarkable story of Robert Smalls.

On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, a 23-year-old slave, who served as the pilot of the Confederate armed transport, CSS Planter, led eight fellow slaves in an audacious flight to freedom. They seized the CSS Planter, steamed it out past the batteries and forts of Charleston harbor, and turned it over to the Union naval blockade.  Smalls would go on to become the first black captain of a U.S. Navy vessel, a South Carolina State Legislator, a Major General in the South Carolina Militia, a five-term U.S. Congressman, and a U.S. Collector of Customs.  

Harper’s Weekly of June 14, 1862, recounts the escape:
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Black History Month — First Black Liberty Ship Captain, Hugh Mulzac, Says No To Jim Crow

Posted on by February 16, 2024

Hugh Mulzak served as the first Black Liberty ship captain in World War II. When offered the command, he refused to sail with a segregated crew. An updated repost in honor of Black History Month.

Born in 1886 on Union Island in Saint Vincent Grenadines, he went to sea at 21 and served on British, Norwegian, and American sail and steam-powered ships. After studying at the Swansea Nautical College in South Wales, he earned a mate’s license in 1910. He served as a deck officer on four ships during World War I.

In 1918, he became a naturalized US citizen and in 1920 sat for his Master’s license, earning a perfect score on the test. Despite his experience and qualifications, he was generally only able to find work aboard American ships as a messman or cook. Mulzak has been described as “the most over-qualified ship’s cook in maritime history.”

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Russian Landing Ship Caesar Kunikov Sunk Off Crimea Sunk by Ukrainian Drone ‘Wolfpack’

Posted on by February 15, 2024

Newsweek reports that Ukraine’s latest strike on Russia’s naval forces in the Black Sea was inspired by World War II submarine tactics, according to one Ukrainian military expert, as the Kremlin counts the cost of yet surprise maritime attack.

Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and now an adviser to the Ukrainian parliament’s national security, defense, and intelligence committee, told Newsweek on Wednesday that the overnight sinking of the Ropucha-class Caesar Kunikov landing ship took lessons from history.

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Celebrating Frederick Douglass on Valentine’s Day — “I Will Take to the Water”

Posted on by February 14, 2024

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of both the day and Black History Month, here is an updated repost about Frederick Douglass. But what does Valentine’s Day have to do with Frederick Douglass?  As a slave, Douglass never knew the date of his birth, so he chose to celebrate it every year on February 14th.

Frederick Douglass was born around 1818. From an early age, he developed a close attachment to ships and the sea. His path to freedom led directly through the docks and shipyards of Baltimore, Maryland.

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Update: Ship’s Bell Recovered from Wreck of USS Jacob Jones, First US Destroyer Lost in Combat

Posted on by February 13, 2024

In August 2022, we posted that British divers had located the wreck of the USS Jacob Jones in over 100 meters of water, 40 miles off the Isles of Scilly. The ship, a Tucker Class destroyer, was sunk during World War I by a German U-boat on December 6, 1917. USS Jacob Jones was the first US destroyer ever to be lost to enemy action and went down in 8 minutes. 64 of her crew of 110 were lost in the attack.

Now, the ship’s bell of the USS Jacob Jones has been recovered by the Salvage and Marine Operations (SALMO) unit, a special salvage unit with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense at the request of the US Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).

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On Lincoln’s Birthday — Lincoln’s Improved Camel Patent

Posted on by February 12, 2024

Nantucket Camel Ride

Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 20th, 1809.  He is know for rising from poverty, working as a rail splitter, and as a self-taught country lawyer before being elected as a congressman and ultimately as president. As commander in chief during a bloody civil war, he preserved the union and became known as the “Great Emancipator’ for his role in ending slavery. 

Lincoln is less well-known as an inventor, yet he is the only president in this country’s history to have a patent issued in his name. Here is an updated repost of the tale of a patent granted to Abraham Lincoln for a device to lift boats and ships over sandbars.

In the early 1800s, the entrance to the harbor of the great whaling port of Nantucket had shoaled in. Fully loaded whaling ships could not cross the bar and return to the docks beyond Brandt Point. For years the ships anchored offshore and were lightered, the barrels of whale oil loaded into smaller boats that could make it across the bar.

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Remembering Jesse L. Brown, First African-American Naval Pilot

Posted on by February 10, 2024

In honor of Black History Month, an updated repost about the first African-American pilot in the US Navy, Jesse L. Brown.

The story goes that when young Jesse Leroy Brown worked in the cotton fields of Mississippi beside his sharecropper father, whenever he saw a plane in the sky above, he would declare that one day, he would be a pilot. No one took him seriously.

Nevertheless, the young man, born in born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1926, made a name for himself as an athlete in high school and won honors as a math student. In 1944, Jesse Brown was enrolled as the only black student in the engineering program at Ohio State University.

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Has Amelia Earhart’s Long-Lost Plane Been Found in the Pacific?

Posted on by February 9, 2024

Image: Deep Sea Vision

In 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set off on a quest to circumnavigate the globe. Having completed most of their journey, Earhart’s plane disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.

In the intervening 87 years, neither of their bodies nor their plane have been definitively recovered — remaining a compelling mystery and generating countless theories as to what may have happened.

Recently, a high-tech unmanned underwater drone, operated by Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in South Carolina, surveyed more than 5,200 square miles of ocean floor between September and December. The drone captured compelling sonar images of what could be Earhart’s Lockheed Electra aircraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

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Black History Month Repost — William Tillman and the Privateer Jefferson Davis

Posted on by February 8, 2024

An updated repost in honor of Black History Month. 

William Tillman was one of the first black heroes of the American Civil War. He was not a soldier but rather a 27-year-old  cook-steward on the schooner S.J. Waring.  On July 7, 1861, the schooner was captured by the Confederate privateer Jefferson Davis while about 150 miles from Sandy Hook, New York.  Captain Smith, the master of the S.J. Waring was taken aboard the Jefferson Davis, and a five-man prize crew was put aboard the schooner, with orders to sail her to a Southern port where the ship and her cargo would be sold.

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