‘Gone Whaling’ at Connetquot State Park honors Long Island whalemen of color

After watching his older brother, Milton, sail the globe chasing whales for their blubber to make oil, Ferdinand Lee, of the Shinnecock Nation, joined a whaling ship in 1857 with eyes on the distant Pacific and Indian Oceans, beginning a career that Montaukett historian Sandi Brewster-Walker would chronicle over 160 years later in her museum exhibit, “Gone Whaling: Long Island Seamen of Color.”

The exhibit, open at the Connetquot State Park and Preserve through Jan. 6, tells the often untold stories of Long Island’s whalemen of color, over 400 of whom had took part in voyages throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that brought Long Island’s natives exploring sometimes uncharted islands in the Pacific Ocean after at times tumultuous journeys around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and Cape Horn, in Chile.

Brewster-Walker, who serves as the executive director and governmental affairs officer for the Montaukett Indian Nation, has researched the lives of whalemen like the Lee brothers for almost 20 years, compiling every document in every archive she could find in a nearly 500-page database. Throughout her life, Brewster-Walker has compiled more than 22,000 genealogy profiles.

“Most people think all the whalemen came from Sag Harbor and down east,” Brewster-Walker said. “But they were all over.”

In the exhibit, Brewster-Walker describes a selection of stories of those roughly 400 whalemen and women of color, who lived across Long Island from Brooklyn to Montauk, with other indigenous people from across the globe, including Cape Verde, the Azores Islands and Pacific Islands, migrating to Long Island throughout the 19th century after finishing their voyages.

For countless generations, the indigenous people of Long Island had hunted whales passing along the coast.

As European colonists settled on Long Island’s shores and pushed the native populations back farther inland or onto reservations, some members of the island’s tribes continued their sailing traditions on commercial ships to hunt whales around the globe to produce oil for lamps, soap, paint, rope, fishing poles, corset bones, machine lubricants and more, Brewster-Walker said.

Many Long Islanders of color during this time might have been drawn to the seas after hearing almost mythical stories of distant lands and treasures from siblings, friends, and acquaintances, Brewster-Walker hypothesizes.

“A lot of guys lied about their age. They would go out at 13 and 14 years old,” Brewster-Walker said. “Your brother comes home… and tells stories, and people weren’t traveling; this is the 1800s.”

To see it for themselves, or just to get off Long Island for an adventure of a lifetime, whalemen like Ferdinand Lee joined crews and rose the ranks until sometimes becoming captain.

Lee’s four brothers also joined the naval tradition, but the treacherous nature of whaling soon became reality.

“It was a young man’s game,” Brewster-Walker said. “Because they were in horrible ships that had rats, a lot of them got very sick. And if they didn’t have enough blubber and whale oil and all that, they didn’t make any money, because it was the lay system where they got a portion of the profits and stuff when they got back.”

In 1871, Ferdinand became a captain of the ship Callao, and along with braving the filthy conditions onboard, the 38-year-old captain had to deal with unruly crewmen. Several seamen were charged with disturbing the peace when docked in Australia after being too drunk at a bar, only three years after the British Colony was no longer considered a penal colony.

On another whaling ship that was near Iceland, the ship got frozen, prompting some crew members to attempt a mutiny.

“Then it got down where they didn’t want to sleep at night because whoever slept at night would get knocked on the head, and they would get eaten!” Brewster-Walker said.

The case was later tried in a Boston court after their return to the U.S.

In her years researching hundreds of whalemen of color, Brewster-Walker obtained a copy of Ferdinand Lee’s logbook, which she plans to have transcribed with the help of Hofstra University.

For Brewster-Walker, sharing the real stories of fellow indigenous Long Islanders is also a way to set the record straight about generations of myths that have spread about local indigenous tribes.

One of the most dominant myths Brewster-Walker pointed out was that of the “Five Nations” of Long Island: the Unkechaug, Setalcott, Matinecock, Shinnecock, and Montaukett.

Those labels and geographic boundaries that many Long Islanders today recognize only came after Europeans began to settle along the shore and tried to impose their rule of law and codification system on indigenous systems, which were more family-based and less structured, Brewster-Walker said.

Even formal definitions of property lines and words like “Sachem” were transcribed and given meanings by Europeans to make sense of the indigenous way of life, Brewster-Walker added.

“It’s just myths,” Brewster-Walker said. “Great stories—[well], some of them aren’t even great stories—they’re plain, outwrite lies!”

To separate fact from fiction in researching the lives of Long Island’s whalemen of color, Brewster-Walker consulted every historic newspaper, census record, and travel log she could find. While many online resources provided help, some recordkeeping, including race classifications on censuses and the seaman’s protection passport, at times disadvantaged indigenous people, by mislabeling them as Black, or their children as non-native.

Sometimes, the same problem happened in reverse.

“I chased one guy for years, and found out that he was really Italian!” Brewster-Walker said. “He had a suntan!”

For Ferdinand Lee, who saw his brothers both older and younger take to the seas alongside him for adventure and fortunes, he would meet his end somewhere between San Francisco and the Arctic, in 1885. Records showed that crews from across the shipping industry felt anxiety and sadness for the loss of Ferdinand and his ship.

Nearly 145 years later, a descendant of Ferdinand Lee, who is named after his almost mythical sailing ancestor, joined Brewster-Walker and other members of the Montaukett Indian Nation and Connetquot Park staff to cut the ribbon on the “Gone Whaling” exhibit.

“His whole life, everyone called him Ty,” said Suzanne Montefinise, environmental educator at Connetquot State Park. “But now, he’s embraced Ferdinand.”