![[Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, by W. Jeffrey Bolster]](images/banner.gif)
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CAPTAIN ABSALOM BOSTON"Northern free blacks in the early nineteenth century looked to exemplary mariners as role models and community leaders. Men of color rarely achieved the pinnacle of command, but when they did, class distinctions among blacks were subordinated to racial pride. Born in 1785, Absalom Boston became a mariner and laborer who at one time obtained from the Nantucket county commissioners a license to run a `public inn.' He gained notoriety in 1822, however, as the master of an all-black crew aboard the whaling schooner Industry -- something `quite strange,' according to one of his sailors. Upon his death at age seventy, Captain Absalom Boston owned three houses, a store, a garden lot, and a mowing lot on Nantucket. Few black seamen approached such wealth."(p. 162) Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.