Essay 3

Since olden times, the narrative of Blacks at sea has been tightly strung on the cusp of slavery. Yet has the narrative been true? I believe it to be and according to historian Jeffery Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, men of descent from the African and Latin American states have been encapsulated in the narrative. These men had sailed the Atlantic Ocean from the times that many Europeans just began to travel to Africa and the New World. Hence were African Americans different from Africans and African Latinos that were discussed in Thornton and in McKnight and Garafalo books? Yes, but the emphasis of this paper is to discuss men of African descent, which were “creole” sailors of the golden age of piracy, which would strengthen the seafaring bonds of many future African American men of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. And the new African American sailor or seaman would establish the driving force of freedom for all men and their families, thus the growth and stability of a new nation would begin with the help of the sailor of African descent.
In Jeffery Bolster’s book, he makes the case that African American sailors and seamen should be perceived as Americans first, African "creoles" second. During the golden age of piracy, many men from different countries who wanted to live by their own rules became privateers of merchant vessels. As the treatment of seamen was often cruel and not always certain of a trip back home then these privateers became freedom-fighting pirates. Most pirates lived up to the merciless reputation that was placed upon them. Most would steal and fight for a pirate booty of pieces of eight from the wealthy Spanish Armada, but their system of order or codes had developed into a democratic vote amongst the entire crew of the ship. African and European sailors of the Americas are portrayed in Bolster’s book working “ ‘In honest service quipped Captain Bartholomew Roberts, ‘there is thin Commons, low wages, and hard labor; in this Plenty and Saiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power’ “(14). Sailors from Coastal Africa had knowledge of how to work a sailing vessel or smaller sailing craft; so many African men were kidnapped and enslaved by others. Pirates that marauded the Caribbean or Latin America could treat these talented seamen with unkindness, yet it would behoove the captain of a pirate ship, like Black Bart or Bartholomew Roberts, to have an unworkable crew. How could they raid another ship or island for the wealth of its contents? Thus to keep the civility of the ship and gain a pirate booty, in effect, all of the crew had the freedom to choose which task they would complete and they would all vote upon it. The vote of the crew was an amazing concept. This vote of a common man was not permitted in the society of the age, because an official vote had to be made by a gentleman whom was a property owner too. Thus Jeffrey Bolster’s argument of African American “Americanism” is the perception of liberty, as a vote on a pirate ship was the first displayed, repeated behavior of men of African descent. The men of African descent had a strong sense of the sea as a second home. Recall that many tribesmen thought of the spiritual world of the land but the sea- the Kalunga line. The Kalunga line was an invisible line of the distance of one’s soul could travel. Now the sea gave these men of African descent a broader world to discover. New possibilities had became accessed. The possibilities became new power for the men of African descent. No longer the voice unheard. Men like Olaudah Equiano, grew strong from the belly of a sailing vessel. But these new Black Jacks would be the voice crying out in the wilderness to the lost.