The Captain Who Paid for Everyone — Paul Cuffe
The brig is his. He built it, registered it, and paid for the cargo in the hold. It is December 10, 1815, and the tide at Westport harbor is turning, and thirty-eight free African American men, women, and children are asleep below decks. He has paid their passage out of his own pocket. The republic that printed the words all men are created equal has not made good on them. He has decided to work with what he has.
It is 1815.
He does not just go to sea. He teaches himself navigation as a teenager on a boat he built himself, loses an early vessel to British privateers, and by the time he is forty owns a fleet of oceangoing ships and is among the wealthiest men of any color in New England.
He does not just protest. In February 1780, he and his brother John and five neighbors petition the Massachusetts legislature — no taxation without representation, they write, using the Revolution’s own argument against the Revolution — and when the legislature ignores them, they refuse to pay and go to jail, and the argument goes into the record and stays there.
He does not just build ships. He builds an integrated school on his own land in Westport after the town refuses to fund one that will teach Black and Native children alongside white ones, because the alternative is that the children go untaught.
He does not just meet the President. He walks into the White House in April 1812, documented as the first Black American to formally meet with a sitting president, and argues for the release of his seized brig and the right to trade with Sierra Leone, because the embargo has interrupted the plan he has spent years building.
His Spark of Liberty was the conviction that if the republic would not act, he would.
He financed the Sierra Leone voyage entirely himself — four thousand dollars of his own money — because he was one of the few men in America who could, and because someone had to be first.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born on January 17, 1759, on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, his father was Kofi, an Ashanti man from West Africa who had purchased his own freedom, and his mother was Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag woman. Both heritages shaped who he was and how he moved through the world. He took the surname Cuffe from his father’s name after his father’s death in 1772. He joined the Society of Friends around 1808. In 1810 he made an exploratory voyage to Sierra Leone; in 1812 he published a brief account of the colony; in 1815 he captained the brig Traveller from Westport to Sierra Leone with thirty-eight free African American settlers organized as nine families, financing the entire voyage himself. The American Colonization Society, which later organized a separate and differently motivated emigration to Liberia, was not founded until 1816 and made its first voyage in 1820 — three years after his death. He died in Westport, Massachusetts, on September 7, 1817.
His name was Paul Cuffe.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
Some names keep the watch while the world sleeps.
Night Watch is a wordsearch collection built for quiet hands and long evenings.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H35V5JDM
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