Times of the Islands Winter 2018/19

Network of black mariners
The triumph by the oppressed in Haiti reverberated
throughout the slave communities in the West Indies,
as well as among slaveholders fearful that insurrections
might come their way too. While slaveholders, merchants
and government authorities typically got their information
through the press, letters, official reports, visitors
and sometimes plantation owners fleeing the strife in
Haiti, slaves received their updates in a very different
manner. Excluded from standard forms of communication,
slaves relied instead on black sailors who picked up
news in the ports they visited and passed it on, effectively
creating a parallel structure.
Dr. Kevin Dawes, Professor of History at the University
of California, Merced, explores this dynamic in his paper
“Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolution: Challenging
Notions of Race and Slavery between the Boundaries of
Land and Sea.” He writes:
“Atlantic ports were market places for news and pilots
funneled intelligence between mariners, passengers, and
shoreside communities, serving as the overseas eyes and
ears of urban and rural slave communities. News was
passed by word of mouth along maritime routes . . . free
black sailors linked black communities in New England to
the West Indies.”
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Professor Dawes goes on to assert that “these murmurs
of liberty rippled across the greater Caribbean inspiring
corollary slave rebellions.”
During this era of political and social upheaval in
the Americas, black mariners, slave and free, occupied a
unique and liberating space on the water with far fewer
constraints than slaves on land. Able to roam, these men
of the sea witnessed and absorbed the fissures of instability
and change in the region that they passed on. In
the fluid environment, black mariners also understood
how their specialized skills could be exploited for more
privileges and to redefine notions of race and status. As
Professor Dawes explains, the independent character of
the labor of free and enslaved black mariners “undercut
white dominance, allowing them to use the ocean as a
transient sphere of opportunity where they severed terrestrial
ties . . . and gained economic advantages and
racial parity deprived ashore.”
Nowhere was this equality more conspicuous than
with enslaved pilots who gained the trust of white shipmasters
to safely guide the lumbering sailing vessels into
tricky harbors after crossing the Atlantic. Shipmasters
P
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HUGH G. O’NEILL
ATTORNEYSN
AT
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P.O. Box 267
Hibernian House
1136 Leeward Highway
Providenciales
Turks and Caicos Islands
B.W.I.
Tel 649-946-4514
Fax 649-946-4955
Email hugh.oneill@hgoneillco.tc
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Times of the Islands Winter 2018/19 45