Today the Episcopal Church remembers Paul Cuffee, 1759-1817, witness among the Shinnecock of Long Island.

                                        The Venite  

                                            said each day 

                                               at Morning Prayer 

   

  The 

   sea 

   is 

   his 

   for

   he 

   made it,

   and his  hands 

   have molded the dry land.

When I Googled him, it said that he was “a Quaker businessman, sea captain, patriot, and abolitionist who   helped colonize Sierra Leone.”  The website of the Paul Cuffee School says that he was the 

7th of 10 children of Kofi Slo-cum, a freed slave who had been brought to America from Africa, & Ruth Moses, a Wam-panoag Indian.  As an adult, Paul dropped Slocum as his last name, which his father had taken out of respect for the man who freed him, & adapted his father’s first name instead, changing Kofi, an Ashanti word meaning “born on a Friday,” to Cuffee (though often spelled with just one “e”). The school has a maritime theme, which “ is a vital thread running throughout Paul Cuffee School’s programs, the purpose of which is not only to honor our namesake but also to inculcate in our students a respect and reverence for Rhode Island’s richest natural resource, as well as an understanding of how best to sustain our waterways and the life they support.”