The Waterman's SOJ19 by David Cecelski, PhD
T
he Waterman's Song explores African American maririme life in North Carolina over rhe course of a lirtle less rhan a century, spanning rhe years from rhe consolidarion of American slavery around 1800 to rhe lasr days of Reconsrrucrion . This was rhe heyday of black maririme acriviry along rhe Atlantic seacoast and on rhe srare's inland warers. My research looks mainly roward the shoreline, ar slaves and free blacks who labored as boatmen, pilors, ferrymen, fishermen, sailors, and nautical artisans in ports and on rhe sounds, rivers, and creeks wirhin maririme North Carolina. Those maritime occupations, not deepwater sailing, were the mainstay of coastal life in North Carolina and, with the exception of a handful of seaports, all of the American South. In October 1830 Moses Ashley Curtis arrived at rhe mourh of the Cape Fear River aboard a schooner from Boston. The schooner's master raised a signal flag and beckoned toward the village of Smithville for a pilot to guide him into the river. Curtis soon spied a pilot boat under sail, breaking through the waves toward him. Approaching the schooner, the fast, elegant craft turned into the wind and drifted alongside the larger vessel. "They boarded us," Curtis wrote in his diary that day, "And what saw I? Slaves!-the first I ever saw." When I began this study, I was no less surprised than Curtis ar the degree to which slave watermen marked maririme life in North Carolina. His words-"And what saw I? Slaves!'-co uld have been my own. Until recently, few historians have recognized rhe prevalence of generarions ofAfrican American maririme laborers along the Atlantic coastline. Scholars have tended to view the black South mainly in rerms of agricultural slave labor, but in recenr years a new generation of scholars has begun to explore (from different angles, in a variety of locarions, and in a number of eras) rhe complex and important roles played by black warermen and sailors in rhe Atlantic maririme world. Nowhere was rhe magnirude of African American influence on maririme life greater than along the perilous seacoast and vast estuaries that stretch a hundred miles from the Outer Banks into the interior of North Carolina. Slave and free black boatmen were ubiquitous on rhose broad waters, dominaring most maririme rrades and play-
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ing a major role in all of them . Along the Albemarle Sound, prodigious gangs ofblack fishermen wielded mile-and-a-half-long seines in what was the largest herring fishety in NorthAmerica. Nearby, on the Roanoke River, slave bateauxmen dared harrowing rapids and racing currents to transport tobacco from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains all the way to seaports. Far to the east, at Portsmouth Island (one of the Outer Banks), slave crews piloted vessels through Ocracoke Inlet, lightered their cargo, then guided them to distam seaports on the other side of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Their slave neighbors at Shell Castle Island, a shoal at Ocracoke Inlet, ranged up and down the Outer Banks with their nets in pursuit of jumping mullet and botdenosed dolphins. In every port, slave stevedores trundled cargo on and off vessels, while shipyard workers in bondage built some of the sweetest sailing cedar and white oak boats afloat, as well as caulked and rebuilt them to stave off rhe steady rot that plagued wooden vessels. Still other slave watermen hawked firewood to steamers anchored in the Cape Fear at night; rafted lumber down the Lower Neuse River; guided duck hunting parties along the freshwater marshes of Currituck Sound; tonged for oysrers on frigid winter days; poled shingle flats out of the Great Dismal Swamp; shoveled coal in the sweltering firerooms of steamboars; and manned the sloops and schooners that traded both within and beyond North Carolina. As I waded through the archival records, I was first struck merely by the sheer magnitude ofAfrican American involvemem in maritime sociery. I soon realized, however, how remarkably varied maririme life was wirhin North Carolina waters. A bustling seaport like Wilmington, a quiet river town like Camden, a remore piloting village like Portsmouth, a mullet fishing camp at Core Banks, and a canal-digging outposr in the Great Dismal Swamp represemed virtually different maritime worlds. Yer I also gradually recognized common patterns in African American maritime life. No pattern emerged more forcefully than that ofblack warermen serving as key agents of antislavery thought and militant resistance to slavery. The nature of their labors frequently meant that they could not be supervised closely, if at all, for days or even weeks. For all their grueling
toil and severe hardships, many maritime black laborers traveled widely, grew acquaimed wirh slaves and free blacks over a wide rerritory, and dealt with seamen who connected rhem to rhe revolutionary politics that coursed the black Atlantic. Almost invariably, black watermen appeared ar the core of abolitionist acriviry, slave insurrecrions and other antislavery activism in North Carolina. When I first began the research for this book, I had difficulry reconciling the enslaved status ofAfrican American watermen with what I knew of maritime labor in my childhood. I grew up among seafaring and fishing people in a quiet tidewater community in North Carolina. A waterman's life was our greatest symbol of freedom and independence. As a child I warched my elders cling tenaciously to their boats and their poverry rarher than forsake rheir liberry for factory or farming jobs. I do nor mean to draw a rigorous parallel between maritime life in rhe South in my day and before rhe Civil War, but this at least seemed clear to me from the outset: a waterman's life could exist only in a dynamic tension with a system of human bondage, ar least in the tidal creeks, estuaries, and salt marshes within rhe Ourer Banks and our other barrier islands. Above all, every waterman thar I have ever known has a part of himself that is restless on land and belongs to the sea. If all rhis was no less true in an earlier era, then what, I wondered, did it mean for coastal slaves and their masrers, for tidewater plamation sociery, and for the black struggle for freedom? And no matter how much maritime life has changed from the slavery era to today, I will always suspect that African Americans, slave and free, found their hopes uplifted and their lives unbounded merely by the nearness of the sea, by working on the water, and by the vast horizon over Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic. I have never known a soul who did not. .t Excerpted with the permission of the publisher from the Preface to The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina, by David C. Cecelski (Greenville NC: University of North Carolina Press), appearing in October 2001. This and other titles by David Cecelski are available by calling 1 800 858-6224, or by visiting www. uncpress. unc. edu. SEA HISTORY 98 , AUTUMN 2001