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Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World
Kevin Dawson
| Long before a single coastal or interior West African was enslaved and cargoed off to toil the length of his days under the skies of the New World, many had become adept swimmers and underwater divers. West Africans often grew up along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, many became proficient swimmers, incorporating this skill into their work and recreation. When carried to the Americas, slaves brought this ability with them, where it helped shape generations of bondpeople's occupational and leisure activities. |
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From the age of discovery up through the nineteenth century, the swimming and underwater diving abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants. Indeed, most whites, including sailors, probably could not swim. To reduce drowning deaths, some philanthropists advocated that sailors and others learn to swim. In 1838 the Sailor's Magazine, a New York City missionary magazine, published the inscription on a city placard titled "Swimming." It read: "For want of knowledge of this noble art thousands are annually sacrificed, and every fresh victim calls more strongly upon the best feelings of those who have the power to draw the attention of such persons as may be likely to require this art, to the simple fact, that there is no difficulty in floating or swimming." Similarly, Theodorus Bailey Myers Mason's 1879 pamphlet, The Preservation of Life at Sea, claimed, "The great majority of people cannot swim, and strange as it may seem to you, there are many who follow the sea as a profession who cannot swim a stroke." Mason then proclaimed that, as part of their instruction, all United States Naval Academy cadets should be taught to swim.1 |
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The history of slavery has largely been a history of fields—tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, and cotton fields. The most influential works on slavery have properly focused on agricultural bondage and how it shaped slavery's development and defined the majority of owner-slave relationships. A few historians, such as Richard Price, W. Jeffrey Bolster, David S. Cecelski, Michael Craton, and Thomas Buchanan, have studied maritime slavery, the work of enslaved people in sailing, fishing, and whaling.2 A handful of scholars have mentioned slaves as swimmers, but there has been no sustained study of their recreational and occupational swimming and underwater diving.3 Although most bondpeople were agricultural laborers, that did not preclude swimming. Most plantations were located near waterways to facilitate the transportation of slave-produced goods to market, and rice plantations throughout the Americas were typically situated on tidal waterways, which were vital to the irrigation of this crop.4 Thus, large numbers of plantation slaves had ready access to waters in which to swim. |
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Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have increasingly appreciated slaves' ability to transmit African skills and practices to the Americas and have examined how cultural retentions shaped the development of both black and white sociocultural institutions. In his 1933 book, The Masters and the Slaves, Gilberto Freyre asserted that slaves "Africanized" Brazilian culture by infusing it with African traditions. Melville J. Herskovits's 1941 book, The Myth of the Negro Past, challenged the assertions of U. B. Phillips and E. Franklin Frazier that slavery denuded bondpeople of their African heritage, arguing that shards of African culture, especially those pertaining to dance, music, religion, and art, were carried to the Americas.5 |
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