“Most maps would lead you to believe that people were escaping over land by foot or by horse or by wagon from the Deep South, but the historical record doesn’t back that up at all,” said Timothy Walker, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and editor of the book “Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad.”
Escaping to a border state more than a couple of days’ walk away was impractical, Walker said, and the most that anyone could travel was 20 miles in one night. “Without a proper pass or permission to go a very long distance through the Deep South, you risk being stopped and challenged and recaptured,” he said.
It’s hard to know how many enslaved people escaped by sea, Walker said, since the people fleeing rarely left a paper trail. But some estimates say that as many as 100,000 people escaped U.S. enslavement by various methods. Abolitionist William Still kept a record of the people he helped, and his book “The Underground Railroad” details many arriving to freedom by boat.
In the early 1800s, shipyards in Alexandria, Norfolk, Charleston and as far south as coastal Florida became hotbeds of escape — and rumors.
Ships departing such ports, including those headed north to cities such as New Bedford, Mass., were often manned by enslaved people who knew the waterways well. Enslaved Black people had worked in the maritime industry as early as the Revolutionary War, and for parts of the 19th century, they worked on most fishing boats and merchant vessels and in shipyards.
Their enslavers sometimes loaned them to work for pay under Quakers, who generally opposed slavery, and free Black men, said Lee Blake, president of the New Bedford Historical Society.
On sea voyages, some sympathetic captains and crews stowed away enslaved people and helped them reach a free state.
“They can escape very quickly by water, because a ship that is sailing 24 hours a day up the Gulf Stream can travel 200 miles in a day,” Walker said. “So a ship passage is relatively quick, relatively safe, and you're not in danger of being recaptured when you're at sea.”