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In Conversation: Uncovering slave-ship wrecks, a diver puts lost souls to rest · Apple News Today

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  Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News Today." I'm Duarte Geraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
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  Tara Roberts: You know, they say that the Atlantic is one of the most turbulent oceans on the planet. And some people say that that's because of all of those lost souls that haven't been put to rest.
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  During the transatlantic slave trade, more than 36,000 ships sailed from Africa to the Americas carrying enslaved people. About 12 and half million men, women and children were on these ships. Roughly a thousand of these vessels sank. The majority of them have never been found.
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  Roberts: So, there's a whole lot of history that's just out there, hasn't been found yet, that's waiting for more people to discover it on the ocean floor and to bring it back into memory.
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  That's Tara Roberts. She recently joined an organization called Diving with a Purpose. This group trains primarily Black Americans to become divers, to swim down to the ocean floor to document what remains of sunken slave ships.
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  Roberts: So, it feels like part of this work is about acknowledgement, honoring and allowing those souls to rest, finally.
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  Tara is a journalist by trade. But a few years ago, after she learned about Diving with A Purpose, she quit her job, gave up her apartment in Washington D.C., and joined the organization's training program. She's now a "National Geographic" explorer. Her article about the efforts by divers to document slave shipwrecks, it was recently the cover story for "Nat Geo."
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  Roberts: Nobody will know exactly how many lives were lost, but the estimate is that 1.8 million Africans lost their lives in the Middle Passage. We're not talking about the people who lost their lives in the march to the ships or who lost their lives once they are arrived in the Americas. Just in the crossing, 1.8 million people lost their lives. And if you can take that number in; not ten people, not a hundred people, not even a hundred thousand people, 1.8 million people. But who's mourning them? Who's grieving them? Where are the memorials to all of those lives? So, part of what is happening with this work is acknowledging those people, who were people. They were more than statistics, more than bodies in a cargo hold. They were mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, maybe they were scientists, poets, dreamers. They were human beings. And part of what we're doing is helping to bring their stories back into memory.
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  Geraldino: It's so moving and stirring. [SIGHS] One of the things that strikes me about this work is that we have all these sunken ships, and you are trying to track and map the locations of where these ships sunk. What might that teach us?
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  Roberts: So, I don't know about your education growing up and what you learned about the global slave trade or about the Middle Passage. I will say that I learned very little. It was very much a sort of footnote, a sidebar to the rest of history. So, there's a lot of information that we just don't know. And the global slave trade was a monumental event in history. There were four continents involved in the global slave trade. It was Europe, Africa, South America, North America. Four continents over 400 years. The transportation of 12.5 million people across the Atlantic changed coastlines. It changed landscapes. It created wealth. It diminished wealth. This is not just Black history. It is global history. But it's a footnote everywhere. So, part of this work of diving for slave shipwrecks is beginning to add to the historical record. It's saying that this history is important and it's important for us to examine it if we wanna understand how we got where we are today, and if we wanna build a different kind of future.
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  Geraldino: Why are these ships so hard to find?
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  Roberts: Most of the ships were built in the 1600s, 1700s, so they were built out of wood. And when they wrecked, and many of them wrecked. Sometimes it was navigational eras, sometimes it's weather, sometimes it's, quote unquote, "bad luck," but they wrecked for a lot of reasons. And when they do, those pieces end up on the ocean floor. So, it's not like you go to search for a slave shipwreck and you find an intact wreck. You're finding scattered pieces across the ocean floor. And surprisingly, you might not know this, but there are actually a lot of records about these ships. And it's primarily because many of these ships were insured. So, when they wreck, their financial backers, ships' captains file claims with the insurance companies. And you know what happens when an insurance company has to pay out a claim …
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  Geraldino: All this due diligence. They're investigating.
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  Roberts: Yes, they've gotta investigate. So, they review the captain's log records, the crew's logs. There's sometimes court documents where people were interviewed. There's all this paper trail. And so, historians and archeologists go through the archives, and it helps them narrow down a section. Because the ocean is huge, and trying to find something on the bottom of the ocean is not easy. So, they narrow down the area where a wreck might have happened, and then archaeologists come in with major equipment like magnetometers and sonar scans and they search for anomalies on the ocean floor. So, Diving with a Purpose is helping with the search and helping with the documentation of the wreck.
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  Geraldino: One of the ships that you write about is the Clotilda. It's the last known ship to bring captive Africans to the U.S. It's also the most intact slave ship ever found. What do we know about this ship?
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  Roberts: So, the Clotilda is super unique. The story of the Clotilda is that a Mobile, Alabama plantation owner and shipbuilder made a bet after the slave trade had been made illegal that he could build a ship, sail it to Africa, fill it with captives, and bring them back to be enslaved. And he did exactly that. And when the captain got back to the Mobile River, he tried to burn the evidence so that they could hide what they did. But the thing about the Mobile River is that it's a very muddy river. And so, when he burned the ship, and he did, and it sank, it sank in mud and the mud preserved the ship. So, they found it in 2019. And what is also amazing about the story of the Clotilda is that 32 of the Africans who were brought over on the ship were enslaved in Mobile, Alabama in 1860. And then the Civil War happened in 1865. Those who were enslaved were freed. So those 32 Africans who had just recently come over from West Africa didn't have the means to be able to sail back to Africa. And so, they decided to build a version of home right there in Mobile. So, they worked for about nine years. They were sharecroppers, selling vegetables, doing that kind of work, but they managed to amass enough money collectively to buy about 57 acres of land. And they turned that land into a community that they called Africatown. And what is astonishing about Africatown is that it still exists today. So, these Africans who were brought over within like a 14-year time period managed to buy land and establish a community that, in the 1960s, had as many as 12,000 residents in it. This is a community that had barber shops. It had churches. It had schools. It had cemeteries. Like, it was a full-on community. And that's, I think, a really incredible story. And also, the people who grew up in Africatown, some of them could trace their stories back to those 32 enslaved people on the boat. And so, those descendants today know where they came from. They know who they came from. They know exactly who their ancestors were.
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  Tara also told me the story of the São José Paquete d'Africa shipwreck. In 1794, traffickers took more than 500 people captive from Mozambique. They forced them onto the ship. Many were from the Makua ethnic group. The ship set off for Brazil, but it never made it there. It hit rocks off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. About half of the captive Africans on board died when the ship sunk.
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  For hundreds of years, the ship was lost at the bottom of the ocean. That is until Kamau Sadiki helped identify the shipwreck. He's a lead instructor with Diving with a Purpose. He spoke on Tara's podcast, "Into the Depths," about what it was like for him to be part of finding this once long-lost ship.
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  Kamau Sadiki: It was like you can hear the screams and the hollering and the pain and suffering that people must've went through, and the agony of being on a vessel, in shackles, that's sinking and breaking up in the sea.
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  After the ship had been identified as the São José, a team including Sadiki traveled to Mozambique Island. They told the descendants of these enslaved people, "We found the lost ship." The descendants celebrated the news. Finally, they could properly honor their ancestors.
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  Roberts: So, there are dances. There are songs. There are speeches. And the Makua chief, who is the highest-ranking person who was there, gave to the dive team what he called a sacred vessel. It was made out of cowrie shells. And he filled the vessel with soil from Mozambique. And he charged the team with going back to South Africa and distributing the soil across the wreck site, so that his ancestors could touch home for the first time in over 200 years.
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  Geraldino: Wow.
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  The team returned to South Africa to carry out the Makua chief's request. Kamau and three other divers delivered the soil to the wreck site. Other team were watching members from the shore.
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  Roberts: Kamau tells the story of how that day, it was a really turbulent day. Like, the seas were choppy and rough. It was overcast. It was rainy. It was a dark and sort of dreary day. And when they went out on the sea, they were holding onto each other, so they wouldn't be swept away.
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  Kamau Sadiki: Once we got out into the surf it was so … the intensity of the emotions was so … Between the three of us. And we could just see it in our faces looking at each other.
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  Roberts: And they go out, they distribute the soil. He said that all three of them were in tears. Like, it was such a sacred, beautiful moment.
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  Kamau Sadiki: [SIGHS] Nothing needed to be said. I was speechless anyway. Couldn't nothing come out. I tried to say something, but it was a moment to be quiet, I guess. And so, I couldn't speak at all.
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  Roberts: Kamau says that as soon as they did that, and he swears to me that he's not lying and not exaggerating, he said that the seas calmed down and that the sun came out. I think that Kamau would say this, I think the other divers, the other participants that were there would say this, that something got healed that day.
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  Lonnie Bunch was also there that day. He's the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.
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  Lonnie Bunch: What it really did was tell me the power of remembering. Even though my ancestors did not come from Mozambique, more than likely, I felt the pain of my own ancestors. I felt their voyage across the Atlantic. Suddenly, I saw one people, regardless of tribal differences, regardless of regional differences. And that that moment allowed me to feel what it must have been like to be connected to a place and then to be taken from that place.
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  Roberts: You've got people from the present reaching out into the past, connecting these two things, and bringing closure to this traumatic moment in history. And that is something that I think happens as we connect with descendants and we work with these ships.
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  Geraldino: Did this experience make you wanna know more about your own family story?
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  Roberts: Absolutely. And that was not a given at the start. When I started this journey, I was afraid to look back at my history, at Black folks' history, because I was afraid of the pain and the trauma. But because of the experiences that I had encountering these rituals with the ships, meeting descendants, learning stories of rebellion, of courage, really understanding what happened in broader strokes, it gave me the courage to be able to look back. So, I ended up hiring a genealogist and she did some digging in my past. And we were able to find out information that I'd never heard about an ancestor who was enslaved. He was born in 1837, so he was born enslaved, and he manage to amass over 175 acres of land. I found out he fought in the United States Colored Troops. He fought in the Civil War! Like what? I didn't know this. My family didn't know this. [CHUCKLES] I also found out he was a delegate to the Freedman's Convention, which was the first Black statewide assembly after the Civil War. They created that convention to talk about the constitutional rights of those who had been newly freed. And my ancestor was a delegate, which means he was chosen to help represent and think this through. But this is an ancestor that previously I was like, "Oh, he was enslaved. I can't even wrap my brain around that." And it felt too painful to really face that, that he had been someone else's property.
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  Geraldino: Hold on one second because that's important. I'm not saying that you would dismiss him because he was enslaved, but you just didn't want to get too close because it was too painful. But now that you have, you saw so many more dimensions of who he was, what he became before he died.
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  Roberts: I think that's perfectly said. And I think that there is a way that we look at the past of Black folks through one dimension and we don't see it fully. But because of this work, I got a chance to see him as fully human. And so, now I feel really enthusiastic and excited to see more of the humanity of my ancestry and to understand more of the humanity of Black folks' history overall.
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  You can read Tara Roberts' article for "National Geographic" on Apple News. And check out her podcast, called "Into the Depths." Across six episodes, you get to meet some of the people who are searching for these ships, and you get a sense of how that journey is affecting their lives. You can find it now on Apple Podcasts.
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