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Canadian Sailor Settled in Pascagoula
Gulfport Daily Herald, Gulfport, MS, Oct. 11, 1919
The grandfather of "Jimmy Buffett, the son of a son of a sailor."
James Buffet, who sailed from his native town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1911, after going to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1911, on the ship A. F. Davidson, which was recently libeled at Gulfport and seized under a writ of attachment issuing from the Biloxi federal court, reached Moss Point in April, 1912, and Martin Turnbull, then immigrant inspector examined him and admitted him into the United States. Mr. Buffet went into the local shipping of Pascagoula and Moss Point, making occasional trips to Mexican and Central American ports.
He finally married Miss Hilda Seymour, a native of Pascagoula and has resided in this country and state since that time. He came as second mate on the A. F. Davidson, which was then a new ship and run by the father of the present owner.
Mr. Buffett has been going to sea 13 years, or since he was 13 years old, and at 19 he was engaged in fur seal hunting in the South Atlantic, which was exceedingly exciting. He says that they were pretty when sleeping, but when aroused are vicious and pugnacious, being known among the native islanders as “sea wolves.” When the sealers would go ashore in boats approaching them and attacking them on the rocks, the excitement and novelty was extreme, he said. One thousand skins per season were considered a good catch; they were sent to London and brought $40 each for a raw skin.
He found the best sealing off the Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic, southeast of Cape Horn, which are British possessions, and was the scene of the battle in 1915 when the British sank all of the seven ships of the Germans except one – the Emden, which escaped and became a celebrated raider, destroying much shipping, and had the English and French navies looking for her, but she was finally sank by the Australian cruiser Sidney. Another good sealing ground was the South Georgia’s, also British Territory.
Mr. Buffet made a declaration of intention to become a citizen before the clerk of the supreme court of New York in November 1917, and he visited the federal clerk’s office in Biloxi Friday for the purpose of making preliminary application for filing his petition for naturalization. He declares that the world recognized that there is a great future in the American Merchant Marine for young men, and that a young man who goes into that service or into the American Navy, will make no mistake.
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