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 David S. Cecelski is an independent scholar living in Durham, North Carolina. A native of the North Carolina coast, he is author of several books, including Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South, and coeditor of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy.
Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (1994)
The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001)
Preface
The Waterman's Song
In October 1830 Moses Ashley Curtis arrived at the mouth of the Cape Fear River aboard a schooner from Boston. The North Carolina coast would be the young naturalist's first landfall of his first voyage into the American South. Emptying into the Atlantic, the Cape Fear was a tumult of heavy waves, strong currents, and dangerous shoals. Passage across the inlet's bar and outer shoals was folly without a local pilot. The schooner's master raised a signal flag and beckoned toward the village of Smithville for a pilot to guide him into the river. Curtis soon spied a pilot boat under sail, breaking through the waves toward him. Approaching the schooner, the fast, elegant craft turned into the wind and drifted alongside the larger vessel. "They boarded us," Curtis wrote in his diary that day, "And what saw I? Slaves!--the first I ever saw."[1]
Continued...
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