Content area
Full Text
Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. By W. JEFFREY BOLSTER. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 310. $27.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
W. Jeffrey Bolster's book, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, is an attempt to add a particular nuance to the recent challenges of the once standard narrative of slavery as a system of constant, direct supervision and mindless toil for all slaves on plantations. Bolster's investigation of slave laborers and emancipated blacks employed in the water transportation trade finds workers in and out of slavery who were independent, worldly, and highly skilled. Bolster is not the first historian to make these assertions, but Black Jacks does stand out as a landmark: the first published history of the American black men that documents their lives as sailors in a broadly conceived Atlantic world.
Bolster's account begins by establishing that, from the earliest days of slavery in the Americas, there were black bondsmen employed as sailors on oceangoing vessels. European and later colonial reliance on African watermen began with the canoemen of Africa and extended to deep-sea voyaging sailors as well as local boatmen transporting goods on the internal waterways and coastal passages of the Caribbean and North America. These seamen were able to straddle the lines between slavery and freedom, and between isolation and worldliness. Unlike their plantation counterparts, slave sailors were appreciated for their skills and rewarded with respect and privilege meted out by...