As a volunteer in the Digital Initiatives Department at the New Bedford Whaling Museum I am involved with transcribing whaling ship crew lists from the handwritten originals to a spread sheet format to be included in an international data base of all whaling crews from any country involved in that industry.
The years presently being worked on are from 1810, when the requirement to submit such lists to the Customs House before each voyage was enacted, to the 1830s.
Along with the names, the place of origin, residence at the time of the voyage, age, skin color, and hair of each crew member are included for a very practical purpose. If the body of any crew member lost at sea is found by another ship, these details are listed before the body is returned to the sea respectfully, and, upon the return to port at the end of a voyage, the details of the body found are cross referenced with the crew members lost from other ships for identification.
Whaling was a lucrative business for those who owned the ships, and the Quakers of New Bedford who were making fortunes, knowing whaling was a dangerous trade, felt an obligation to the families who lost a loved one to give them closure. These names would also be added to the plaques in the Seaman’s Bethel as a memorial.
Because the New Bedford whalers rode the winds and currents at the beginning of voyage, the first stop to resupply provisions where the islands of the Azores where new members were often added to the crew. Other stops were along the coast of South America and the Sandwich Island, now Hawai’i. Whether by choice or the winds, some of these foreign crew members returned to New Bedford which became their home rather than their place of origin.
Before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, New Bedford was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad, and often for safety sake, self emancipated people would go on whaling voyages for a time.
I have transcribed a portion of the crew lists to be done as there are a number of people working on the project, and as a personal side project add the names of anyone identified as Black, Coloured, Negro, mullatto, yellow, and Copper with Black, Wooly, Curly, Black Curly, or Black Wooly hair on an additional list. On my lists alone I have found, so far, close to 900 men with these descriptors. With the exception of one ship with an all black crew, there was on average 5 men of color on each ship, some of whom were obviously self emancipated judging from their places of origin.
As more voyages ventured into the Pacific, the New Bedford Quakers encountered places like Hawai’i, Oahu, and Maui which, until they became more familiar were spelled phonetically and often with comic results.
When manufacturing began to replace whaling and Europe was experiencing wars and famines, people began to arrive in both New Bedford and the other city in South Coast Massachusetts, Fall River. Many Irish and French arrived for factory work, and when, in 1958, as a result of the eruption of the Capelinhos Volcano on the island of Faial in the Azores and the law passed to allow those affected an expedited entrance into the United States, there was a second wave of immigration from there.
In spite of the passage of time, both these cities retain their international and multi-ethnic populations and languages mostly from Portugal, the Azores, and Cape Verde into the 21st Century.
The poverty of their populations is not the result of an unwillingness to work, but the result of the death of whaling and the owners of the mills moving production out of state and out of the country.
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And this, while ignoring history, is what the sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts misuses and misrepresents in his attempt to garner support by mischaracterizing those who remained in the two cities.
The people in New Bedford and Fall River are generational, a good number living in the heart of the city in the neighborhoods their ancestors first came to, even in the same homes.
And, unlike the suburban towns with predominantly White populations, they are made up predominantly of those who are Brown.
They are the “Other”. They are what the sheriff uses to scare the people in the smaller towns in the county by warning about non-existent rampant crime and the immigrants responsible for it.
He tells those outside the cities that he is protecting them from the criminals, implying all those Brown people, those immigrants, are a threat to their person and property, and speaks of the cities as if they are still in their worst days when manufacturing left.
When he refers to “Criminal illegal aliens” as “victimizing law-abiding U.S. citizens and Massachusetts residents”, he uses dog whistles referring to the people in the two South Coast cities and presenting them as invading the suburbs to commit violent and property crimes, and, while at one of his taxpayer supported trips to Washington DC, he lied to the president on a televised meeting in the Oval Office claiming part of the problem with New Bedford was its drug overdose rate quoting a figure seven times what it actually is.
And those in the small towns, not seeing this invented invasion are under the impression he is living up to his pledge to protect them from the Brown people already wreaking havoc in the cities when they are not.
He is that character in the story who stands on the street corner snapping his fingers claiming he is doing it to keep the elephants away, and upon being told that is a stupid thing to be doing as there are no elephants, uses that as proof it is working.
The sheriff who claims his goal is to keep the people of the county safe, uses one group to scare another with falsehoods about others.
This is abhorrent behavior at best
The people of Yemen have been bombed for over four years by a Saudi Arabia-led coalition. This has not been precision bombing, but reckless, with no concern about where the bombs are dropped.