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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2019
This essay discusses how maritime migrations contribute to movements of ideas across transnational ethnic communities. It focuses on actors from the African Grove, a New York City-based African American theatre company. Actors in this company worked as stewards on transatlantic packet ships where the architecture of the ship supported intercultural exchanges.
1 Smith, James McCune, ‘Ira Aldridge’, Anglo African Magazine, 2, 1 (January 1860), p. 29Google Scholar. Thomas Hamilton of Beekman Street in New York published a sketch about Aldridge in his magazine, ‘devoted to the history, condition and culture of the Colored Population of the United States, free and enslaved’.
2 Anglo African, 2, 3 (March 1860)Google Scholar, back cover.
3 McAllister, Marvin, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar, contains the most comprehensive analysis of the African Grove.
4 Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007)Google Scholar; Muskateem, Sowande, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
5 The Black Ball line initially consisted of four vessels: the Amity, Courier, Pacific and James Monroe. However the success of the industry grew quickly.
6 Original at G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut: The Log – January 1961. This vessel was built in 1801 in Philadelphia for Stephen Girard's packet line. It became a whaler about 1845 and was broken up about 1896.
7 Adkins, Thomas Francis, The Nautical Cookbook: Alphabetical Guide to Sailor's Cookery for the Use of Stewards and Cooks on Cargo-Carrying Vessels (East Ham: Wilson and Whitworth Limited, Steam Printers, High Street North, 1899)Google Scholar. The inside first page reads, ‘Silver Medalist, Universal Food and Cooking Exhibition, 1896. Instructor of Nautical Cookery under the Technical Education Board L.C.C. at The Sailors Home, Well Street and Dock Street, London E’. Accessed at Greenwich Maritime Archives, August 2017.
8 Sokolow, Michael, Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
9 New York Daily Advertiser, 993 (14 April 1820), p. 2. Accessed at the American Antiquarian Society, 2014.
10 Douglass, Frederick, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing Co., 1881), p. 246Google Scholar.
11 The Colored Freemen's Home, managed by William Powell in New York, provided housing for homeless seamen seeking shelter. Papers from the home archived at the G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut show an increasing number of impoverished black sailors coming to the home as the century progressed.
