"For ten years I followed the sea to many of the places explored here. Along the way I listened to stories told by veteran skippers and seamen, many of them black West Indians recounting with the longing of old men their youthful exploits -- carrying cattle under sail from the eastern Caribbean to Santo Domingo; careening their schooners at Grenada; jamming a sloop hard on the wind from Virgin Gorda to St. Martin; and steering by the stars long before those islands had looming electric lights, and longer still before they had ever graced a souvenir t-shirt. One night in the 1970s, as we were rolling before the northeasterly trades on a passage to Cape Haitian, a shipmate aboard the schooner Harvey Gamage lent me the remarkable eighteenth-century autobiography of an accomplished slave sailor named Olaudah Equiano, who himself had once sailed that route. Where, I asked, was the bridge between historic slave sailors and the old black schoonermen I knew? How could one understand early black America without recognizing that plantations were connected to a larger world of black people, as well as to world markets, by black seamen? And given seaports' historic function as crossroads for people and ideas, what roles had sailors played in the formation of black America?