FISHERMAN^S LUCK 157 



1817, when he died, he owned a house, a farm, a wharf, and a 

 storehouse by the Westport River, and he had owned all, or 

 parts, of a number of other vessels in the merchant service. 



As a master. Captain Paul Cuffee appears to have had no 

 special trouble with his black crews; but on June 17, 1816, one 

 Captain Alley of the ship Potomac, of Boston, who sailed with a 

 crew of eleven Negroes, got into trouble off Nantucket. The 

 Negroes mutinied and the skipper lost control of the situation. 

 A band of men from Nantucket came to the rescue, and put 

 down the mutiny, but the Negroes stole a boat and part of them 

 ran away, and the voyage appears from the records to have been 

 a failure. 



A few years before his death, Captain Cuffee built the brig 

 Traveler, of 109 tons. In 1822, a brig Traveller, Captain Phelps, 

 of Westport, which made a brief whaling voyage in the Atlantic 

 and returned with seventy barrels of sperm oil, attracted 

 attention because every man in her crew was black. 



Early in the 19th Century a young man named Jonathan 

 Bourne came to New Bedford and went to work as clerk in a 

 grocery store. Having ability, thrift, and initiative, he succeeded 

 shortly in buying the store. He next began to invest money in 

 vessels. In 1839, when he was twenty-five years old, he and 

 certain others bought the bark Roscoe, and as managing owner, 

 young Bourne fitted her out for a whaling voyage. 



It was the beginning of one of the remarkable careers in the 

 history of New Bedford. From the clerkship in the grocery 

 store, Jonathan Bourne advanced to the head of one of the 

 great whaling firms of the greatest whaling city of the 19th 

 Century. In a single year, as owner or managing owner, he 

 had fourteen ships and barks at sea. 



Five years after he had bought the Roscoe, he bought also the 

 Lagoda, which was his favourite of all his fleet. He was thirty 

 years old when he bought her out of the merchant service and 

 fitted her for a whaling voyage. She had been built in 1826 ; she 

 was ship-rigged (not until 1860 was she converted to a barque) 

 and square sterned. For forty-four years Jonathan Bourne 

 held shares in the old vessel, and as managing owner directed 



