The Return
- The First Whalers
- The Pequod
- Paul Cuffe
- Crispus Attucks
- The Same Routes
- The Same Land
- Two Names, Same People
- The SS Daisy
- Seventy Percent
- The Harpooner
The First Whalers
Long before European ships reached Cape Verdean waters, the Wampanoag of southeastern Massachusetts were whaling. They had developed techniques for hunting whales from shore, processing whale oil, and using every part of the whale for tools, food, and trade.1
When English colonists arrived in the 1620s, they learned whaling from the Wampanoag. The indigenous knowledge became the foundation of New England’s most profitable industry. The first whalers were American Indians.
Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The Pequod
Pequots, Wampanoags, and other New England natives “crewed the whalers that sailed out of New London, New Bedford, Nantucket, and other New England ports in the 18th and 19th centuries.”1
Herman Melville named his fictional whaling vessel the Pequod. That wasn’t an accident. He was acknowledging what the industry was built on — indigenous maritime knowledge and indigenous labor. By the 1770s, more than 100 Nantucket whaling vessels competed for laborers from native populations.
Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Paul Cuffe
Paul Cuffe was born January 17, 1759, on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts. His mother, Ruth Moses, was Gayhead Wampanoag.1 The Wampanoag were matrilineal — Cuffe’s Indian identity came through his mother’s line. His marriage to a Wampanoag woman ensured his children had the same clan status.2
Cuffe rose from sailor to own and command an entire fleet. He is routinely described as African American. His son titled his own memoir Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian — not African, not Negro, not “man of colour.”3 Cuffe spent his last years planning a colony in Sierra Leone. His Wampanoag wife refused to go.4 She was indigenous to this land. The Indian line held. The wife stayed. The son wrote himself as Pequot.
Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 89. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Paul Cuffe Jr., Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian (Vernon: Horace N. Bill, 1839). ↩ ↩ ↩
Crispus Attucks
Crispus Attucks — the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, the first American killed in the Revolution — was not African. Contemporary eyewitness testimony from 1770 “did not refer to Attucks as black nor as negro.” He was described as “aboriginal” and “a giant in stature.”1
Most historians agree he was a Wampanoag from the Natick praying town near Framingham, Massachusetts. His ancestor was “John Attock Indian,” executed in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Paul Gilroy references Attucks in The Black Atlantic but “fails to note that Attucks was Native, his mother a Massachuset.”2 “Cuffe, like Crispus Attucks, represents a quintessential participant in both the black and Red Atlantics.”3 The first revolutionary martyr was indigenous.
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans (1993); Kurimeo Ahau, The “Mulatto” Indigenous American Revolutionary Martyr Crispus Attucks. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7. ↩ ↩ ↩
The Same Routes
Cape Verdean whalers recruited onto New England ships found themselves working routes that may have been familiar to their ancestors. The same wind patterns. The same seasonal cycles. The same island-hopping techniques between Cape Verde, the Canaries, the Azores, and the North American coast.1
The whaling industry wasn’t introducing Cape Verdeans to American waters. It was providing them with a way back. They brought maritime knowledge that complemented the whaling techniques the English had learned from the Wampanoag — because it may have come from the same source.
Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The Same Land
Cape Verdean “immigrants” were contracted as seasonal pickers on the cranberry bogs of Harwich and Falmouth — Cape Cod, traditional territory of the Mashpee Wampanoag.1
American Indians had been managing cranberry resources in these exact places for generations. The cultivation techniques, the seasonal flooding and draining cycles, the community labor systems — all indigenous American technology. Cape Verdean cranberry pickers weren’t learning European agriculture. They were participating in an industry built on indigenous knowledge, in indigenous territory.
Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Two Names, Same People
Two populations occupied the same land, did the same work, followed the same seasonal patterns, but they were called by different names.1
American Indians working cranberry bogs in Harwich were “natives” engaged in traditional seasonal labor. Cape Verdeans working the same bogs, using the same techniques, following the same migration patterns, were “immigrants.” The only difference was the label. The legal machine had made sure of that.
Analysis of Cape Verdean migration patterns and indigenous American territorial continuity. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The SS Daisy
On March 16, 1914, Antonio Raymond Bento arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on the SS Daisy. His immigration papers listed his country of origin as Portugal.1
He came from São Nicolau in the Cape Verde Islands — islands that had been populated by displaced indigenous Americans, Sephardic Jews, and Moors for four centuries. He settled in New Bedford — a whaling port built on Wampanoag knowledge, in Wampanoag territory.
He didn’t know he was coming home. Nobody told him.
SS Daisy immigration manifest, March 16, 1914, Port of New Bedford. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Seventy Percent
Seventy percent of the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation is Cape Verdean mixed with Native American heritage.1
The Mashantucket Pequot — the same Pequot whose women were shipped on the Desire in 1637, whose captives were labeled “cannibal Negroes” in the Caribbean, whose nation was nearly destroyed by manufactured war. Three hundred years later, the people who came back from the islands and the people who survived on the land found each other. Because they were the same people.
Mashantucket Pequot tribal enrollment documentation; Gina E. Sanchez, “The Politics of Cape Verdean American Identity.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
The Harpooner
Paul Cuffe Jr. went to sea at twelve with his father in 1808. He sailed the exact Atlantic circuit — New Bedford to the Azores to Cape Verde to the Brazil banks and back. At Buenavista in Cape Verde, he wrote: “These people are of a very dark hue, and speak the Potuguese language.”1 A Pequot Indian, sailing the same waters, visiting the same islands.
He harpooned six whales in two weeks on the Brazil banks. He fished for cod at Cape Harrison, Labrador, latitude 65° north — the same waters where Beothuk had been taken centuries before.2 It is widely assumed he was Melville’s model for Tashtego, the Gayhead Wampanoag harpooner in Moby-Dick.3
Anthropologist Jack Campisi called Cuffe Jr.’s Pequot identification “a simple mistake.” Weaver disagrees: “I think we must be careful before we call it a mere error that a son misidentifies the tribe of his father, mother, and grandmother. Instead, I believe the misidentification may have been deliberate and strategic.”4 He was definitely and definitively Pequot.