The Bay region is mourning the loss of a well-known Chesapeake Bay skipjack captain who sailed through the working skipjack era, Captain Kermit Travers.
Capt. Travers passed away this week at 86 years old while in hospice care after an illness, according to Dr. Clara Small, who wrote the book The Last Black Skipjack Captain about his legacy on the Bay.
Small, a retired Salisbury University professor who spent 36 years at the university on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, made it her mission to tell Travers’s story along with the histories of many other influential African Americans on Delmarva.
Small tells us that Travers fell into a life on the water out of necessity. “He was a man who loved his family and was trying to find a means for them to survive,” she explains.
Travers lost his father at a young age and dropped out of school to help support his mother and siblings. “They were almost destitute,” Small says. “He worked shucking oysters and doing whatever was necessary to help the family and take care of his siblings.”
Soon, Travers was working on boats and learned everything he could about dredging for oysters on skipjacks. He became a capable captain. “He always checked the wind and the clouds… he knew the environment and learned everything he possibly could about those boats and working on the water,” Small says.
Along the way, Travers fell in love with the water. Even after injuries and accidents forced him to stop captaining a skipjack, he said his main love was the water. He continued teaching about skipjacks on the skipjack Nathan of Dorchester in Cambridge, Maryland.
He was one of very few Black skipjack captains, and despite his nearly 60 years on the water, Travers was never able to buy his own oyster boat. He always captained for other boat owners. Vince Leggett, founder of the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation (BOCF), says it is indicative of how difficult it was for Black watermen to raise the capital needed to purchase a boat. And often, Small adds, banks wouldn’t grant loans to these captains.
In Leggett’s words, “Kermit sharecropped the Bay.”
Still, Leggett says, Travers’ command of other peoples’ oyster boats reflects the deep trust both the owners and the crew had in him: they all depended on the captain for their livelihood.
Leggett calls Kermit Travers “an all-American hero”, telling Chesapeake Bay Magazine that he was a link to the Bay’s African American maritime history going back a hundred years. “Someone to have the knowledge and bandwidth going back that far is very informative and inspirational,” he says.
Skipjack Heritage, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of America’s oldest working sailing vessel reflects on Travers’ passing, “The skipjack community has lost an icon… He was captain of the H.M. Krentz and the Ida May at one time in his career… Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
Dr. Clara Small’s book The Last Black Skipjack Captain is available online from Salt Water Media, a Berlin, Maryland-based publisher. They plan to print additional copies of the book for those interested in learning more about Travers’ impact on the Chesapeake.
