Up until this point, it had been the African Americans, specifically the sixty-year-old Richard Peterson, who had led the men in prayer. This was not uncommon at sea. White sailors often looked to blacks and their evangelical style of worship as sources of religious strength, especially in times of peril. In 1818, the captain of a ship about to go down in a North Atlantic gale beseeched the black cook, a member of New Bedford’s Baptist church, to seek the Lord’s help on the crew’s behalf. The cook knelt down on the tossing deck and “prayed most fervently for God to protect and save us from the
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