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“Negro Navigators” in The Edinburgh Evening Courant.
Edinburgh, [Scotland], August 12, 1811. Half column on p. 4 of The Edinburgh Evening Courant, folio (20.75” x 14.5”), 4 pp. CONDITION: Very good. A newspaper article published in Scotland, reporting on the fascinating arrival and activities of Paul Cuffee and his all-Black crew in England on the heels of their first voyage to Sierra Leone, the focus of Cuffee’s dawning colonization efforts. The article, “an extract of a letter from Liverpool,” where he landed, opens with a brief biography of the remarkable captain of the Traveller (“son of ‘Cuffee,’ a negro slave imported into America”), an account of his crew (“all…negroes, or the immediate descendants of negroes”), and the early expansion of his business and his entrance into the Religious Society of Friends before “Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade fell into his hands” and “awakened all the powers of his mind to consideration of his origin, and the duties he owed to his people.” English readers owed the sensational arrival of Cuffee and his all-Black crew to the British African Institution, the governmental successor to the Sierra Leone Company, which itself had taken over the failure-riddled but ever-hopeful cause of colonization from the St. George’s Bay Company. The directors of the Institution, hearing of Cuffee’s journey to Sierra Leone, were eager to obtain “his co-operation and instrumentality” in their shared cause, and invited him to England, where he also brought, “at the express wish of the colonists,” a young Sierra Leonian “whose father (a negro) is of considerable property, and in a large way of business, whom he taught to navigate: “it is but justice to the diligence and intellect of this young man to say, that, in the short voyage to England, he has learned most surprisingly fast, and shews that intellect is by no means controlled by the colour of the skin, and that the blacks are worthy of being the brethren of the fortunately more cultivated whites.” The piece closes with a brief description of Cuffee’s “very pleasing” appearance: “he is both tall and stout,…dresses in the Quaker style, in a drab-coloured suit, and wears a large flapped white hat.” During his brief 1811 stay in England, he spent time in London (visiting, among others, William Allen and William Wilberforce, directors of the African Institution), Manchester, and Liverpool, working to establish a produce trade out of Sierra Leone in order to undermine the slave trade (this scheme was ultimately shuttered by Sierra Leonian authorities). He then returned to Sierra Leone, staying until the spring of 1812 before traveling home to America. Born on the island of Cuttyhunk, off New Bedford, Paul Cuffee (1759–1817) was the son of freed slave Kofi Slocum (who, originally from the Ashanti region of West Africa, took the name of the Quaker man who freed him, John Slocum) and Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag woman. Exceptionally energetic and ambitious, Cuffee took to the sea at an early age, served on a privateer during the Revolutionary War, and, following the War, took to whaling and commercial voyages. Despite a number of serious setbacks early on, including losses at the hands of pirates, he persisted and became quite prosperous. In 1780, objecting to Massachusetts laws that required free Blacks to pay taxes while they had no rights as citizens, Cuffee and several others petitioned the General Court for exemption, resulting in a law making “all free persons of color liable to taxation…and granting them the privileges belonging to the other citizens” (“The Late Captain”). During the War of 1812 he attempted to organize domestic Friendly Societies and stir interest in colonization, and in 1815 spent some $4000.00 of his own money to transport and settle thirty-eight people there. Cuffee’s support was solicited by the American Colonization Society, which was established in 1816, shortly after his last return from Sierra Leone, but he could not align himself with the overt racism of so many of its members. He died in 1817. Fascinating newspaper evidence of the keen interest stirred across Great Britain by Paul Cuffee’s arrival in Liverpool after his first trip to Sierra Leone. REFERENCES: “Memoir of Captain Paul Cuffee, Liverpool Mercury” at Africans in America (PBS) online; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Who Led the First Back-to-Africa Effort?” PBS online; “Who was Captain Paul Cuffee,” The Bulletin from Johnny Cake Hill (New Bedford Whaling Museum, Winter & Spring 2017), p. 4; Senders, Charlotte. “Paul Cuffe Memorial,” Rhode Tour online.
Item #10484
On Hold
Price: $950.00
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