Peter Fleet

Peter Fleet (died later than 1743) is the earliest known Black American woodcut artist, typesetter, and newspaperman.

According to Isaiah Thomas, who wrote the first history of early American printers, Peter Fleet was "an ingenious man, and cut, on wooden blocks, all the pictures which decorated the ballads and small books of his master.

[2] Around 1736, an illustrated pamphlet entitled "The Prodigal Daughter" was published from Thomas Fleet's address.

[3] The first illustration in the pamphlet includes the initials "PF," which were identified by print historian Sinclair Hamilton in 1958 as those of Pompey Fleet or "his father,"[4] whose name was not known at the time of Hamilton's work; more recent scholarship identifies the work squarely as Peter Fleet's due to its date.

This single print is currently the only known signed example of Peter Fleet's work, though there are believed to be many examples of his unsigned work throughout Thomas Fleet's imprints held in print ephemera collections.