The character of the black cook in Kipling's Captains Courages was based on two real people, identical twin brothers John and George Maxwell from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. They both spoke Gaelic as their mother tongue and both were great Gaelic singers. These two men worked on the salt bank schooners . Before Kipling wrote his book he sailed on a schooner to the Grand Banks fishing ground and based his novel , although fiction, on some real life people.
John and George were sons of a runaway slave who escaped from a plantation to Cape Breton, where the common language of the day was Gaelic. That was the enviroment in which these brothers were raised.
                   Sandy