What is Cape Cod's slavery connection?

Meadow Dibble asks a very provocative question, long avoided

Meadow Dibble at the Waquoit Congregational Church in Falmouth

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“As recently as 2016, I couldn’t put the words ‘Cape Cod’ and ‘slavery’ in one sentence,” says Meadow Dibble, born and raised in Brewster. Now, as creator of “Atlantic Black Box,” she spends a lot of time doing that, intent on ending what she calls historical “amnesia.”

The name is a reference to black box recorders commercial airplanes stow, meant to preserve a record in case of catastrophe. Her mission is forensic history, resurrecting details long suppressed about how the slave trade was integral to Cape Cod and New England, a reckoning meant to surface what she sees as generations of denial and coverup.

She lived in Africa for six years, and on return to Brewster was walking through a cemetery, taking a shortcut home, when she paused in front of the tombstone of Judith Crosby. What pulled her up short was a note about her husband, Benjamin, who had died in 1795, many years earlier -- in Africa.

“Why Africa?” she remembers musing.

As an historical researcher, with personal African interest, one question forced to the surface: Was he involved in the slave trade?

She visited the Brewster Historical Society, also stopped into the library looking for source material. Nothing much. There was acknowledgement of Cape Cod trade in the West Indies, sending salted fish, returning with molasses, rum. But people would say, “Didn’t everyone do that?” The infamous triangular trade route that slavery dominated, East Coast US/West Coast Africa/West Indies, was not invoked.

Returning to the historical society, she investigated the life of the man whose handsome home it had been, one of Brewster’s founders and most celebrated sea captains, Elijah Cobb.

“He was tall and straight, of fine figure, his face very pleasant to look upon. He loved children & was loved by them. Distinguished for his sturdy integrity, as well as talent, loved and respected by all who knew him, he died at the age of 80.”

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Cobb wrote a memoir published by Yale University, but Dibble realized something:

Nowhere did that narrative mention Cobb’s two trips to Africa, nor trips to Martinique as a third point in “the triangle.” The second voyage ended at Boston Harbor in August, 1819. His vessel, “Ten Brothers,” became infamous: It arrived empty of cargo yet stinking, infested with mosquitoes that spread deadly Yellow Fever. “The Diseased Ship,” it came to be called.

Cobb was accused of trafficking slaves, though he insisted gold dust and ivory were his goods. An investigation exonerated the powerful, well-connected captain, who returned to Brewster. Yet he omitted this chapter in his autobiography, and when Dibble went looking for original source material in Cobb’s sea chest, the papers had vanished.

This is circumstantial evidence; smoke, not firey proof. Given that, not everyone is ready to accept Dibble’s suspicions. The Brewster Historical Society acknowledges “assertions regarding shipmasters around New England, including Elijah Cobb, that involvement in the slave trade was potentially concealed by the courts and various government departments. The Brewster Historical Society firmly believes that our history is our history and that it is part of our mission to educate and inform the public about that history. To that end, the Society supports the pursuit of new factual evidence, which when discovered will be included in our narrative.”

For Dibble, the Cobb story linked to a broader investigation of the role of the Maritimes, Cape Cod a key part, in the slave economy. Research revealed many slave ships built in New England; she believes she can document 1740 known slave voyages on boats from the region. A slave census back to the mid-1700s shows dozens of slaves living in Cape Cod towns, “and these are only those that people were willing to acknowledge.”

There is strong scholarship suggesting that Massachusetts was at the periphery of slave trading, but there also seems to be a blindness about other connections. Cape Cod captains sent codfish and alewives, thousands of pounds at a time, to the West Indies; to this day Jamaica’s national dish is ackee (a fruit off a tree with a taste like avocado) and saltfish. But why was all this food needed?

“We provisioned the forced labor camps of the West Indies,” Dibble argues. “This was a deep investment in slavery” even if not kidnapping.

Other elements bolster her sense of avoidance, denial. The famous “Whydah,” the pirate ship discovered off Cape Cod with buried treasure, celebrated at a museum in Yarmouth -- where did its name originate? From a town on the African coast, “Ouidah,” and the vessel was not built to pirate, it was built to carry slaves. Shouldn’t that be acknowledged at least as much as the pirate history?

Dibble is not alone; there are calls to rename Boston’s famous Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil apparently made much of his fortune in and around the slave trade. But a Cape Cod focus sets her apart. She has come to think that people relate to the Cape like a romantic partner who is so good looking, so fine to be around, that you don’t want to know anything about your lover’s past that might besmirch.

She insists she loves her birthplace, still finds it beautiful, but now when she looks at handsome old sea captain homes she can’t help but wonder, “What was the source of the money?”

Her controversial conclusion: “There are no clean hands.”

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