Atlantic Creole
Black Folk Don’t Sail
Introduction To A Black Sailor
I am a San Franciscan who has lived outside of the US for most of my life researching our maritime history. I am a sailor. It is my lifestyle and holds my perspective in my research. I am a maritime heritage preservationist and I research Black maritime history and heritage and try to get us interested in this the most important aspect of the human migration out of Africa. I have started or initiated four maritime heritage organisations- one in San Francisco and three in the Caribbean. I have organised the building or restoration of over thirty African Diaspora sailing vessels. I also published two Caribbean lifestyle magazines for a couple of years covering five cultures on four islands-Haiti, Turks and Caicos, Cayman, Dominican Republic and Key West always with a boat on the covers and have published one maritime heritage illustrated book on the Cayman Islands.
There is a lot of work to do still in my area of research. When I started concentrating on our maritime history I began a self-funded Invisible Sailors Invisible Ships (ISIS) Project that took me to the Caribbean to research and document our commercial sailing (under sail) contributions to the history of sailing. My Project started in San Francisco with the encouragement of three people- Mary Crowley, Karl Kortum and Lester Stone who kindled my interest to create the Black Maritime Heritage educational section of the Bay Area Marine Institute in San Francisco. As a result of the light amount of scholastic concentration on our contributions to maritime history and heritage I decided to go to the Caribbean to research the still working sailing cultures as a centre for hands on study.
This ended up as thirty plus years in the Cayman Islands and in the Turks and Caicos Islands with my interest voluntarily moving up to our contributions in the USA, more specifically New England and the Chesapeake Bay Area, with the interchange of concepts with the Caribbean before, during and after the Western Hemisphere enslavement era. From there back to mother Africa through Europe. The sailing design concepts of the lateen rig and the multi-hull were easily proven to be African. The migration out of Africa, when examined, also shows an inclination toward primary coastal and riverine movements but usually awarded the strange concept that that movement was only by foot? To me history was played backward from Europe’s vision of their mainly land-bound migrations as to how this blue planet received its inhabitants.
You might wonder why I have the sub-title, Black Folk Don’t Sail, and to answer a long time ago while I was giving a talk on our maritime heritage a Black person in the audience spoke, saying that the only folk he knew who were on sailboats were slaves and then added you know black folk don’t sail. The phrase is a reminder to me that some do think that we have no maritime history beyond arriving in the Western Hemisphere aboard slave ships. This actually brought to the fore in my consciousness that most of the histories that we are taught about Africa have to do with the greatness of the upper classes. This, to me, limits the relativity of the contributions of normal people living normal lives and they become historically invisible. The reality of sailing is that it started with the outcasts, adventurers, fisherfolk who did not hire writers to make them heroic.
This Site is to share our information on how we not only moved out of Africa but what we contributed largely to thousands of years to moving about the oceans, seas, bays and rivers that make up almost 80% of our blue planet.
Vision
The above sailing designs are of direct African and African Descendant origin. They have been gleaned from a book that should be on every maritime preservationist's bookshelf: Aak to Zumbra - A Dictionary of the World's Watercraft by The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia. The wonderful illustrations were accomplished by M.H. Perry, who holds the copyright and I hope finds my copying agreeable.
The Atlantic Creole Project focusses broadly from the early contributions of Africa to the relatively contemporary design of vessels and the skills involved with movement upon the waters of this planet. In answering a basic question about why this should be considered important it is easy to say- why doesn’t the history we are taught about human migration out of Africa start at its beginning? How did the human being go to the first landings out of the continent known as Africa? I do not see the migrations out of Africa that we are told to be factual have any logical progressions without the consideration of movement by water.
And, along that thread of restricted thinking and why would people travel up from Ethiopia to an unknown land bridge into Arabia when they could float across the short 20-mile distance at the entrance to the Red Sea with a sometimes visible stretch of land on its other side? Which would be more comfortable walking hundreds of miles with supplies on your back or sitting with your supplies on a raft or canoa and drifting, paddling or even sailing across a few miles in a few hours? We are basically told that being African we would prefer the struggle and would be afraid of the water.
Olokun, Kalunga, Agwe are three of the spirits that still cover an area on the African continent from Nigeria to Senegal. These ageless deities lead from the sea to rivers and lakes and all bodies of water as a strongly defined reverence and respect for the substance that fills us all and coincidently is a word for spirit in most languages- WATER. Even in the contemporary religions of today water blesses and purifies. So, we would put some type of reverence to water but we would never explore it?
I hope you see where I am going with this. We have been moved away from our maritime heritage that presented a vast horizon that needed and needs real freedom to explore and without external controls. The sea cannot be controlled and to move across it entails your individual balance of practicality and intuition. An enslaver does not want their enslaved people to venture into their individual courses without supervision by their forced and enforced control mechanisms.
Maritime history is made up of all the ingredients set in perspective. The concept is not to have a singular maritime history, as is done at present, but to tell as inclusive a maritime history as is possible. All maritime histories need to be included in a world maritime history. For our needs we will look at what has been excluded and add that to a world history.
Why have we been taught that we don’t have any real maritime history? We are almost all continually bombarded the reference to the enslaved crossings from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. Does it have something to do with the message written by the enslaved ships caulker, Frederick Douglass when looking out at vessels sailing that they were “…winged angels of freedom.”? For us, does sailing mean to be free at last?
