The British Mariner Friend of Robert Smalls

The British Mariner

I have long felt that there is a special hatred for the Negro in the American. Why this should be, I have never fathomed. The poor Negroes are so beaten down, so broken, you would think the whites would pity rather than despise them. Why would one not despise the plutocrat and feel compassion for the downtrodden?

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But this is distinctly not the American way. The average American, unlettered, rough-hewn, and rough-mannered as he is, thinks of his wealthy oppressor as his friend and hero. The poor man he thinks of as a problem, and the lowly Negro is a thing to be feared, despised, and humiliated at every opportunity. This is as much a part of American culture as the Fourth of July. It is perhaps a defining component of American culture. The Indian must be exterminated. The Chinaman is a subhuman that must be exploited. But they have a special hatred for the Negro.

That hatred manifests itself in the cataclysm of self-destruction in which they now find themselves embroiled. What is that war but a fight over their black men? The Southerners want to keep the poor creatures in their pitiful condition of chattel servitude. The Northerners, angry at the fight, riot against the draft in New York City and attack poor Negroes on the street as the cause of the conflict.

Missionaries flock to Port Royal, to educate and convert the Negroes, one imagines, into prim New Englanders, to turn them into dark-skinned, white people. Nowhere is there the concept that these are already fully-formed, human beings, with their own language, culture, music, art, and family structure. I have never yet met the white American who can look a black man in the eye as his equal and fellow citizen. And Robert Smalls, who is so clearly the superior of most men around him, leaves the American white man as disoriented as a landlubber in a Grand Banks fog.

So it took a while, I suppose, for Smalls's fellow officers to compose themselves and react to his sudden elevation. At first, they dressed him in a Captain's uniform and afforded him all the rights and privileges of that rank. But this could not last long. They could not salute a black man without cringing. It only took a few weeks before they started talking among themselves about his comeuppance. They muttered secretly at first. Later, it became a matter of regular conversation in the public houses of Beaufort, a conversation held openly, if in low voices, among all white speakers. When the colored servants approached, the subject was dropped. But the coloreds, who worshiped Smalls, knew what was happening.

The order was cooked up for Smalls to take the Planter to Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for refitting. Everyone knew Smalls was illiterate. He knew the waters of South Carolina and Georgia better than any Navy cartographer had ever surveyed them. But he could not read a chart, could not begin to handle a sextant or compute a sight, and the thought of his navigating from South Carolina to Philadelphia was absurd.

The Planter herself was not suited for the voyage. Her low free board, shallow draft, wide beam, and top-heavy house would make her a death trap in a Hatteras gale. The mission was a suicide run. It is difficult to believe no one up the chain of command had the decency to belay the order.

Smalls, by far one of the cleverest men I've ever known, was fully aware what they were doing to him. In his situation, I'm not sure what I would have done. It would be one thing if my fellows were plotting my potential death. It would be another if they were willing to sacrifice two dozen of my crewmen in the bargain. I don't know how Smalls contained his ire. But he did. He took the order as if they had told him to ferry a load of troops up the coast to Georgetown. And then he came to me.

I was amazed at his request. He had three weeks to prepare for the voyage, three weeks in which he had also to fulfill his normal duties of command. He wanted me to teach him all he would need to know to navigate the Planter to Philadelphia. I was at a loss how to teach him what he needed to know in that period of time. And he insisted, quite rightly, that we keep our lessons confidential.

Yet within three weeks, Smalls was as able a navigator as any green lieutenant emerging from the naval academy. He could reduce a sight with confidence, working his way through the tables and computing the lines of position with surprising accuracy. We were only able to practice his use of the sextant from the steady deck of his ship anchored in the Beaufort River, and I'm sure taking real sights at sea posed some difficulty for him, as it does any novice navigator.

He had years of experience as a coastal pilot behind him, and I learned a thing or two from teaching him. In no time, he had memorized the coastline all the way to Long Island, poring over the charts as if he were surveying the forested shore. He couldn't read the names of the capes and towns and lights and islands, but he memorized them all. He asked what vegetation the shore had, what elevation it had. He studied the pictures of the lighthouses in the light list until he could identify each one by its paint patterns. He asked about the color of the water, its depth, the currents, and the way the sea rose and fell in which wind patterns at each location. The man thought of the sea in ways I never had, although as he questioned me, I realized I knew the route myself in much the same way, as many times as I had traveled it.

Robert knew the sea as well as a shore person knows the landscape of their home county, so that he could look out upon a familiar seascape with no land on the horizon and know where he was. By questioning me in this unexpected way, he quickly learned the sea from Charleston to Delaware Bay nearly as well.

I was not surprised to hear the Planter hailed a pilot off of the entrance to Delaware Bay three days after its departure from Port Royal, having encountered nothing untoward in her voyage up that treacherous, war-torn coast.