The Egyptians had the belief that a person had immortality so long as people remembered their names. That would explain why the pharaohs and other noblemen put their cartouches on as many things as they could.
Once nobody remembers someone ever lived, it is like they never were.
Graveyards are filled with headstones with many names of people whose families have petered out. So, while there is no one around who remembers them, or has a reason to, anyone who reads the headstone at least acknowledges the name.
Unless a street is named after a tree, most times they are named after people who did something important at one time, and, although no one around now might know what they did or who they were, everyone has seen their name. There may be an afterlife, or death may bring oblivion, but at least people know the names and will, until the street name changes or the world ends.
I am involved in a project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum that is part of an international project in which every whaling voyage crew list from any country involved in the now thankfully dead whaling industry is being transcribed and digitized to be placed on the web site www.whalinghistory.org for the record and for historical and genealogical research.
The lists exist in the original hardcopy and microfiche, but the handwriting is often difficult to read, and with cursive writing dying out will be impossible for future generations to decipher.
Most whaling ship crews were just regular people of little note who, unlike some of the ship Masters who went on to notable lives, simply returned from a voyage to be swallowed by the great amoeba of a quiet and ordinary existence. Some of their families petered out, and, as is the case of an ancient cemetery near my apartment where headstones have lost their names, are missing, are only partially there, or, because of the stone used, have missing layers you can tell there are rows of graves because of the placement of the remaining headstones in various states of disrepair, but most of the cemetery is open space with the unmarked, or once marked graves of unremembered people.
During the Revolutionary War, while they may not have held a rifle, local Quakers respectfully buried those British troops killed in the area there, but no one knows exactly where. No one knows their names.
Two days a week I walk down to the museum, open my computer, and transcribe the digital image of a hardcopy crew list and can very possibly be the first person to read and mentally say many of the names, if not saying them out loud if I need to consult with another transcriber.
I have actually had the privilege of “introducing” a present day resident of the city to an ancestor they knew existed but did not know the person’s first name or when they had first arrived.
Because New Bedford was a place that was safe for self-emancipated people to settle down in once they got away from the South before the Civil War, many families may know how they came to be here, but do not know the name of the person who originally came here.
For identification purposes in the event someone was lost at sea by death or accident, the crew lists contain the names, places of birth and residence at time of sailing, age, height, and hair and skin color.
Sometimes the crew lists are just lists of names, at other times they are doorways to a piece of forgotten history, or, related to a known historical event, but having just been in a file cabinet somewhere, or on a roll of microfiche with hundreds of other lists has remained unseen and unremarkable until a transcriber comes upon it and notices a detail that has been there, but was hidden in plain sight.
Sometimes a name piques interest and the museum is not adverse to a transcriber putting aside the actual work to pursue something they might have seen as possibly interesting. Museums are all about history, so pursuing it is welcomed.
Recently at the whaling museum I was randomly assigned three crew lists among five others to transcribe, and when I got to skin and hair color, it was obvious that the crew on these three lists was an all Black crew. The Masters of a ship may be listed on crew lists, but, unlike the crew, his descriptive information is not there, so I was curious if the Master was also Black.
I stepped away from the task at hand and did some quick research
The Master of the Rising States that shipped out of New Bedford in 1836 was Edward J. Pompey who was a leader in the Massachusetts Black Community who worked with William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent American abolitionist. In 1832 Edward Pompey had become a representative of Garrison’s publication, The Liberator, on Nantucket.
This would mean the entire crew was Black and not a Black crew under the command of a White man.
Being on Nantucket by accident or design put Pompey in contact with the whaling industry, and with his contacts with other prominent Black people, like Paul Cuffee, the seed of the idea of an all Black whaling crew might have been planted, again, by accident or design.
His First Mate on the 1836 voyage was William Cuffee, the son of Paul Cuffee who was a businessman, sea captain, and abolitionist who established the first racially integrated school in North America, and who, in the 19th Century was the wealthiest African American in the United States.
In 1837 William had moved up to Master of the Rising States that maintained the all Black Crew. Although, while on the 1836 voyage the crew was from the United States, the 1837 crew included two men from the Island of Fayal in the Azores who were Black with “wooly” hair and a man from Madagascar with the same skin and hair description.
Since the prevailing winds meant that on an Atlantic whaling voyage a ship’s first stop for supplies was the Azorean archipelago, it is possible these three boarded the ship for the remainder of the 1836 voyage, although their names would not appear on the crew list that had been submitted before setting sail from New Bedford, but may have stayed on board for the 1837 voyage where their names appear.
This is the sort of speculation that such documents engender that an historical researcher may investigate in the future.
Sadly, after serving as the Master of the Rising States in 1837, William Cuffee died in 1838 at age 39.
This whole history has been lying in the shadows until by happenstance the crew list was digitized from the microfiche.
Obviously, considering the date and Edward J, Pomey’s work on abolition, this was no ordinary whaling voyage, but one that purposefully made a point.
The voyage, although relatively short, the length of a voyage determine by the time it took to fill the hold with barrels of whale oil, returned with a full load, and showed how successful an all Black crew could be.
If there was some competition, this ship won.
But it would seem a point was meant to be made and was.
These are the are lists:
