or on the ubiquitous black boatmen 

 who plied the waters, fugitive slaves 

 often followed rivers to those ports. 



Most could not risk a long canoe 

 or flatboat trip, even traveling only at 

 night. But slaves escaped frequently 

 enough by boat that when a Slocumb 

 Creek man discovered a cypress 

 dugout deserted by his home on 

 Christmas Day, 1828, he simply 

 assumed that the craft "must have 

 been last in the possession of a run- 

 away Negro." If they could not com- 

 mandeer a boat, runaways depended 



Nowhere was the magnitude of African-American 

 influence on maritime life greater than among the vast 

 sounds and estuaries that stretch 1 00 miles from the 

 Outer Banks into the interior of North Carolina. 

 Between 1800 and 1860, blacks composed about 45 

 percent of the total population in the 1 9 tidewater counties. 

 Their importance in boating and shipping surfaces again 

 and again in newspapers, plantation ledgers, personal 

 diaries, court records and travel accounts of the day. 

 By drawing on those sources, we can see how fugitive 

 slaves and their collaborators, at sea and ashore, created an 

 oceangoing route to freedom on the North Carolina coast. 



on sympathetic fishermen and 

 ferrymen, occupations usually held by 

 slaves, to transport them across rivers, 

 creeks and sounds. 



The largest town and finest 

 harbor in antebellum North Carolina, 

 Wilmington, had a special reputation 

 as "an asylum for runaways." This 

 was owed to its location near the 

 mouth of the Cape Fear River, its 

 steady sea traffic, its strong ties to 

 New England and its majority black 

 population. 



Fugitive slaves followed the 

 Cape Fear River to Wilmington 

 from rice and turpentine plantations 

 throughout southeastern North 



Carolina. They fled to New Bern 

 along the Neuse and Trent rivers from 

 cotton and tobacco fields as far inland 

 as Kinston. And they trailed the Tar 

 River to Washington and the Roanoke 

 to Plymouth, from timber and herring 

 camps stretching to the Virginia 

 border. Slaves confined in the remote 

 wetlands east of those major ports — 

 in soggy Hyde and Tyrrell counties — 

 often fled west to their wharves. And 

 men and women who escaped from 

 the Albemarle Sound vicinity fre- 

 quently headed north through the 

 Great Dismal Swamp to rendezvous 

 with seagoing vessels in the Virginia 

 ports of Norfolk or Portsmouth. 



The larger ports were not the only 

 destinations for fugitive slaves. Run- 

 aways and their allies extended the 

 Underground Railroad into fishing 

 hamlets and seafaring villages up and 

 down the North Carolina coast. Henry 

 Anderson, for example, escaped from 

 a slave trader in Beaufort by ship. 

 Miles White, only 21 years old, 

 stowed away on a vessel carrying 

 shingles from Elizabeth City to Phila- 

 delphia after convincing the captain to 

 take the risk. Harriet Jacobs escaped 

 by sea from Edenton in 1842. And in 

 July 1856, Peter Heines, Mathew 

 Bodams and James Morris all escaped 

 on a schooner captained by a man 

 named Fountain who met them at one 

 of the rough-hewn villages along the 

 Roanoke River or Albemarle Sound. 



No matter which ports runaway 

 slaves sought out, they faced many 

 dangers before reaching the open 

 sea. Bloodhounds, bounty hunters and 

 port inspectors stood between their 

 first steps in flight from bondage and 

 the safety of the Gulf Stream's warm, 

 northward currents. Escaping slaves 

 risked life and limb around every 

 turn. Slave catchers and patrol squads 

 pursued them, and anyone could turn 

 them in for a substantial bounty. 

 Inspectors searched many seagoing 

 vessels and, at points, regularly "fumi- 

 gated" ships to drive hidden runaways 

 onto the deck. 



NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1994 



