A Black Whaling Captain Escaped Prejudice at Sea
Arriving in New England in the 1870s, Shorey, like many African Americans before him, was drawn to the whaling industry. To be sure, few had prospered like maritime trading titan Paul Cuffee or achieved the fame of Frederick Douglass, who worked as a caulker on whaling vessels when he first arrived in New Bedford, Mass., in 1838.
Unlike on other vessels, an ambitious young man, even an ambitious young man of color, could still expect to rise through the ranks on a whaler—that is, if he survived the whaling fleet’s typically arduous and highly dangerous journeys into the Arctic. Shorey very nearly did not. He nearly died on one of his first hunts when a sperm whale he was pursuing attacked his boat. Shorey was saved when his crewmates succeeded in firing a bomb into the whale.
It was interesting to learn this about whaling.
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