Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The 1694 Capture of the Henrietta Marie: Slave Ship Wreck
Transcript
- Lucas: So, Luna, we've talked a lot about ships that made it — the Zong, the Elizabeth, the Amistad. But I want to focus today on a ship that didn't make it. A slave ship that sank, and whose wreck was discovered centuries later, becoming the most important underwater archaeological site of the slave trade. Luna: The Henrietta Marie? Lucas: Exactly. The Henrietta Marie. A 300-ton British slave ship that made three known voyages between 1697 and 1700. On its final trip, it was returning from Jamaica to London, loaded with sugar, indigo, and a little bit of gold — and it sank off the Florida Keys in a storm. All hands lost, including the captain, a man named John Taylor. Lucas: But the ship itself wasn't forgotten. In 1972, a treasure hunter named Mel Fisher — the same guy who later found the Spanish galleon Atocha — was searching for Spanish wrecks in the Keys. Instead, his crew stumbled across a pile of iron ballast bars and what looked like cooking pots. They didn't think much of it at first. But then they brought up a strange iron bar with a loop on the end. Luna: Shackles. Lucas: Yes. Manacles. And not just one — they found dozens. Plus iron neck collars, leg irons, and hundreds of glass beads of the kind used to trade for captives on the Gold Coast. They also found elephant tusks — raw ivory — which was a common trade good brought from Africa to England. The wreck was clearly a slave ship. Luna: How did they identify it as the Henrietta Marie specifically? Lucas: It took years of archival detective work. The ship's bell was recovered, and it was inscribed with the words 'Henrietta Marie' and the year 1699. That was the clincher. They also found a pewter tankard marked with the initials of the ship's owner, a London merchant named John Taylor — not the captain, but a different John Taylor who was part of a syndicate that owned several slave ships. Lucas: Once they had the name, historians could trace the ship's movements in the Royal African Company records. The Henrietta Marie made its first slave voyage in 1697, leaving London, stopping at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast — that's modern-day Ghana — where it took on 190 captives. Then it sailed the Middle Passage to Jamaica, where it sold the survivors. It made a second, similar voyage in 1699. And on the third, returning from Jamaica, it went down. Luna: So 190 captives per trip — that's about average for the time. Lucas: Right. And we know something about those captives from the cargo manifests. They were mostly Akan people — from the region around the Gold Coast. Some were likely prisoners of war from conflicts between the Ashanti and their neighbors. Others were probably victims of the slave trading networks run by African brokers. The ship's log doesn't survive, so we don't have names, but we do have numbers: 190 embarked, and based on typical mortality rates, maybe 150 to 160 survived to Jamaica. Luna: What about the wreck itself? What did archaeologists find? Lucas: It's a remarkable site because the ship broke apart on a reef, so the artifacts are scattered over a wide area. The wood of the hull is mostly gone — eaten by shipworms — but the iron fittings and ballast survived. They found cannons, anchors, a ship's pump, and thousands of trade beads — tiny glass beads in blue, green, yellow, and red, made in Venice and Amsterdam, that were used as currency on the African coast. They even found the ship's apothecary chest, with medicine bottles still intact. Lucas: But the most striking find, the one that really hit people, was the pile of shackles. There were over 80 pairs of manacles, plus neck rings. They were laid out in rows, as if they'd been stored in the hold. And they were all different sizes — for adults and children. One set was so small it could only have been for a child under ten. Luna: That detail alone... it's hard to sit with. Lucas: Yeah. And the decision about what to do with those shackles became a controversy. The state of Florida, which owned the wreck, wanted to display them in museums. But many African-American communities, especially in Florida, argued that the shackles should remain on the seafloor as a grave marker — that bringing them up would be like disturbing a cemetery. In the end, a compromise was reached: some shackles were recovered and are now in the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, but the majority were left in place as a memorial. Luna: That's an interesting debate — between archaeological preservation and cultural respect. Lucas: Exactly. And the Henrietta Marie became a focal point for that. In 1993, a memorial plaque was placed on the site, and a replica of the ship's bell was installed at the museum. There's also a traveling exhibit called 'A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie' that has toured the country. It's one of the few places where you can actually see physical objects from the slave trade — not just documents, but the chains, the beads, the ivory. Lucas: But here's the thing: even with all that material evidence, there's so much we don't know. We don't know a single name of the 190 people on board. We don't know where exactly they came from, or what happened to them after they were sold. The ship's cargo manifests list them as 'negroes' — a number, not human beings. The only individuality we have is in the size of the shackles. Luna: It's a reminder that the slave trade was designed to erase identity. Lucas: Exactly. And the Henrietta Marie's story doesn't end with the wreck. In 1994, a descendant of one of the ship's owners — a man named John Taylor — came forward. He had researched his family history and found that his ancestor had been a slave trader. He donated money to the museum and publicly apologized. It was a small gesture, but it opened a conversation about responsibility and memory. Luna: Honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It keeps these conversations going, ad-free. Lucas: Yeah. And it means we can keep digging into stories like this. The Henrietta Marie is a reminder that the slave trade wasn't just an abstraction — it was a business, with ships, cargo, investors, and human cargo. And the wreck gives us a tangible connection to that past. Luna: So what's the final legacy of the Henrietta Marie? Is it a memorial, a museum exhibit, or a warning? Lucas: I think it's all three. It's a memorial to the people who died in the Middle Passage and in the fields of Jamaica. It's a museum exhibit that educates people about the scale and brutality of the trade. And it's a warning — about what happens when we treat human beings as commodities. The shackles on the seafloor are still there, rusting slowly, a silent testimony to a crime that we're still grappling with. Luna: And the ship itself — it's not just a wreck. It's a grave. Lucas: That's exactly right. And that's why the Henrietta Marie matters. It's not just a shipwreck. It's a place where history and humanity intersect, and where we can't look away.