Public Humanities Focus

Overview

The Black Pacific Project’s major public humanities project Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific examines 16th – mid-20th century maritime practices of people of African descent including whalers, commercial mariners, dockworkers, shipbuilders, fishers, explorers, soldiers, and sailors who settled along the Pacific Coast of what is now the United States. This new public humanities project includes three formats: public exhibitions, hands-on-activities, and media projects to investigate a less explored oceanography in Black history—the Pacific Ocean. The project extends our understanding of the origins of Black people in America and the essential nature of the roles they played in the maritime enterprise and the U.S. Pacific region. Take Me to the Water represents important new scholarship from Dr. Caroline Collins (UC San Diego [UCSD]) and her collaboration with key partners including the Maritime Museum of San Diego, UCSD John Muir College, the San Diego County College and Career Readiness Program, Native Like Water, Exhibit Envoy, and the Democracy Lab at UCSD. An Advisory Committee of Humanities Advisors comprised of scholars and culture bearers also support the project.

Context

“[T]he first navigator to sail from the Americas to Asia and back—the man who truly ‘opened’ the Pacific…was an extraordinary pilot almost entirely forgotten in the annals of exploration. It was Lope Martín, an Afro-Portuguese mariner, who in 1564-1565 finally transformed the Pacific into a vital space of contact and exchange, weaving all continents together and launching our global world.”

Andrés Reséndez, Historian, “How History Erased the Black Mariner Who ‘Opened’ the Pacific”

Given the meritocracy based systems of many early seafaring industries, archives indicate that Black mariners joined, and at times led, multicultural crews. Take Me to the Water examines their stories and restitches them into the cultural narratives that define early maritime activity including its sociocultural, economic, and political import on the U.S. Pacific region. 

These seafarers include Allen B. Light who emigrated from Philadelphia to Mexican California in 1835 by ship, settling in San Diego and eventually becoming principle representative of the National Armada’s Otter Fishing branch and Capt. William T. Shorey (right), a whaling captain based out of northern California who occasionally brought his family on voyages with him throughout the Pacific.

Image Credits: (ABOVE): Officers, apprentices and crew of the sailing ship Rathdown photographed in San Francisco after completing a six-month voyage around Cape Horn from Belfast, 1892. [073]. Miriam Matthews Photograph Collection, African American Museum and Library at Oakland. (RIGHT): Capt. William Thomas Shorey with his wife Julia Ann Shelton and daughters Zenobia Pearl and Victoria Grace in studio portrait at Oakland, Calif., after 1886. San Francisco Maritime Research Center / NPS, SAFR 21374.

Objectives

  • Identify, locate, and recover historical primary or derivative documents and/or popular culture (e.g. photos, letters, diaries, artwork, cultural ephemera, maritime records, Indigenous materials, periodicals, etc.) illustrating the presence of early Black mariners in the geographical areas of inquiry including any Black/Indigenous relations of note. 

  • Examine how these mariners may have communicated, interacted, and culturally exchanged with Indigenous peoples through professional and personal capacities. 

  • Highlight what is gained by moving beyond the trans-Atlantic master narrative including providing a more adequate framework for understanding the making of race in these specific regions as opposed to traditional U.S. frameworks of racial formation that center the American South, enslavement, and Jim Crow. 

  • Trouble and revisit cultural canons that continue to shape understandings of settlement, extraction, ‘exploration,’ and environmental histories of race in the American West. 

  • Educate the public of this history through accessible, public-facing interpretation that celebrates this Black historical past through traveling exhibit and permanent fixture at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. 

  • Engage with communities, especially Black and Indigenous youth participants of the vessel build, in order to make real world, contemporary connections to this material and foster and/or rehabilitate ancestral relationships to the natural world (including nautical practices). 

  • Document research, design, and exhibition processes via academic writing and media production.