Frederick: For the one reason or other, we found ourselves at Nantucket and as we got off the boat in Nantucket, I never will forget it. Ray Charles was singing and we went to the museum. That’s just, you know, that’s how crazy things are. And the first picture when we got to the museum was of a black naval captain of a whaling ship.
And we just liked the fellow, which of all the things that, you know, you have to do…to run your boat around in the Atlantic Ocean and get back — that’s quite complicated. And here I guess in the 16th century, maybe the 16th century, is an African-American who was a captain of a naval ship.
Well this doesn’t fit with the facts that we had been given! Not at all, so we got interested in whaling and from there, we found out that African-Americans had been in whaling, I guess since the 1700s. And in the later days of the industry, they comprised 90 percent of it that.
Patricia: Yeah, and it took us all over looking for them. We went to Seattle. We went to Monterey to the Maritime Museum there — down to Barbados. We just went wherever we could find…because there wasn’t that much written about it, so we had to do original research, which means you have to go to the places and actually dig it up and find it yourself.
So we did that, but we were so proud of the outcome of that book, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and I’m very proud of that. We also learned that these whaling ships were the…Underground Railroad was not a railroad or a train, but a ship.
Frederick: But a ship.
Patricia: And that they were the ones that did a lot of the runs with slaves down in the barrels and in the holds of those ships. So that was good to find out, too.
