Kermit Travers was born in 1937 in Cambridge, surrounded by marsh as far as the eye could see, where all roads figuratively and literally led to the sea.

Following them was a path to a certain kind of freedom for a boy from a poor Black family during a time of racial segregation. He worked his way up to become the captain of a skipjack boat, leading a crew that dredged oysters from Chesapeake Bay.

By the 1980s, Travers was among only a handful who could be counted as a Black skipjack captain, a fading profession with historic roots. Travers died July 22 in hospice care at age 86, almost certainly the last of his peers.

Services for Travers will be held Aug. 10 at the Living By Truth Ministries at 711 Bradley Ave., in Cambridge. Viewing is scheduled from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and the funeral from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

“He was a friend, someone I sought counsel from, someone I admired,” said Vince Leggett, a public affairs consultant in Annapolis and the founder and president of the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation. “He was also an all-American hero … an independent, swashbuckling Chesapeake Bay waterman.”

When Travers went to work on the bay, the gold rush days of the oyster harvest were long gone, but regulations and conservation programs had created stability in the industry.

“If you were a fishmonger or a crab picker, the system set your pay. But no one could set your pay as an oysterman,” Leggett said. “There was a brotherhood and a fellowship among that class of people. There was an egalitarian system on those vessels.”

The watermen who plied the bay for its bounty are venerated in the lore of state history. And in those stories, they are primarily white, Leggett said, while Black watermen were “minimized or airbrushed out of the picture.”

According to Travers’ biographer, Clara Small, he grew up in Dorchester County in the community of Crapo, by the Honga River. He hoped to become the first in his family to graduate from high school, but necessity interrupted those plans. His father died when he was young, so at the age of 13 he dropped out of school and went to work, although he earned his GED years later.

“He had to become a man much, much earlier than he wanted to,” said Small, a professor emeritus of history at Salisbury University, who wrote a biography of Travers called “The Last Black Skipjack Captain.” “The goal was to care for his family.”

Travers pulled oysters out of the bay from a small skiff with hand tongs, supplementing that seasonal work with another job in farm fields during summers. He also worked in restaurants shucking oysters, becoming very adept at it. He once lost a shucking contest by a single oyster, missing out on a chance to advance to an international shucking tournament in Ireland, Small said.

When he was 18, Travers started working on a skipjack as an apprentice, first to a captain named David Lewis. Then he apprenticed for Eugene Wheatley on a skipjack named Lady Katie, on an all-Black crew of five, according to a transcript of an interview he once gave to Pete Lesher, the chief historian of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

The skipjack is the state boat of Maryland, a single-masted sailing vessel made for dredging oysters in the shallow waters of the bay at a time when motorized vessels were forbidden or restricted. It is a descendant of the Sharpie sailboats that harvested oysters in Long Island Sound in the 1800s.

Skipjacks are wide and have flat bottoms with a centerboard instead of a keel for stability. The sails of a skipjack are relatively large, with the boom of the mainsail nearly as long as the boat itself, giving the boat the appearance of a person wearing a baggy coat and the horsepower to pull the heavy dredge. The big configuration of sails makes them fast; racing skipjacks in the offseason is part of the skipjack tradition.

Travers was nearly 80 when he and Small began work on the biography. He had come to recognize his role in the history and culture of the bay, she said. As a Black man, he was drawn to the water for the freedom it afforded. Not simply the feeling of freedom sailors often talk about wistfully, but for the practical freedoms that were unique to working away from land.

“Life on the water was relatively colorblind,” Small said. “On the water, Blacks and whites worked together, sometimes on the same boat. Their lives depended on trust and cooperation. You had a sense of freedom out there, until you got back to land.”

The oyster industry was a relative meritocracy. The skills needed to successfully manage a boat were rare and advancement was not dependent on race. Back on land, forward progress came slower, but the bay promised upward mobility for anyone who could do the job.

The one time Travers capsized in a skipjack was during a race, when he participated as crew, not captain. He and his wife were thrown overboard and rescued, Small said.

Travers worked primarily on two skipjacks, the Ida May and the HM Krentz. He was one of about four Black captains identified by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Lesher, the historian, said.

“We could probably identify 50 to 100 white skipjack captains,” he said.

Unlike many of his white counterparts, Travers did not own any of the boats he worked on. The barriers to accruing capital and borrowing money for all Black Americans also applied to those working on the water.

Lesher and Travers first became acquainted in 2010 when Travers came to him wanting to make sure his story was told.

“I’d heard about him for a number of years,” Lesher said. “He was really interested in seeing that his story was preserved. He was very conscious of that and his legacy.”

Lesher said Travers made a strong impression.

”You could see in the way he talked, in the way he moved, that this man did not stand still,” Lesher said. “I am sure he got this opportunity because he asked. He didn’t wait for someone.”