Harvard University Press/Black Jacks/Frederick Douglass

[Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, by W. Jeffrey Bolster]

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

"'Those beautiful vessels, robed in white, and so delightful to the eyes of freemen,' wrote Frederick Douglass of the sailing ships he saw daily during his boyhood slavery along the Chesapeake Bay, `were to me so many shrouded ghosts.' Douglass contrasted the ships, `loosed from [their] moorings, and free,' with his own condition -- `fast in my chains, and...a slave!' And he swore, `This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom.' As a skilled but still-enslaved ship caulker in Baltimore, Douglass worked shoulder to shoulder with black and white sailors and, in his own words, `knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to crosstrees, and could talk sailor like an "old salt."' No stranger to waterfront tales of hardship, brutality, and deprivation at sea, he nonetheless persisted in his metaphorical view of ships as `freedom's swift-winged angels,' because, unlike the white men who spoke movingly of the `slavery' aboard ship, he knew real slavery firsthand.

"As it turned out, Douglass employed a seafaring subterfuge instead of a ship to escape his chains. Rigging himself out in `a red shirt and tarpaulin hat and black cravat, tied in sailor fashion, carelessly and loosely about [the] neck,' he borrowed a Seaman's Protection Certificate from a liberty-loving black sailor and brazenly struck out for Philadelphia by train. He succeeded that September day in 1838 because free black seamen were then so common as to draw few second looks."

(pp. 1-2)