ABSTRACT
Set in the French West Indies, Edward Stirling’s The Cabin Boy combines the tale of a pirate plantation owner with that of an inter-racial romance. The play challenges traditional thinking that associates slavery with skin color. Children born of free white men and black women might become free, both mother and child, and some freed children, supported by their fathers’ wealth, studied abroad. In addition to exploring racial themes, The Cabin Boy touches on issues of gender in its treatment of the pirate Vincent, contrasting his unmanliness with the genuine manliness of Henri and Julian. The play models its notion of manliness on the behavior required of a gentleman, but with no connotations of social class, marking the poor cabin boy as manly, the wealthy planter pirate Vincent as effeminate.
