Dredging Up the Ghostly Secrets of Slave Ships

On the way down I saw nothing. The water was a blur of teal fringed with rusty shadows, darkening, about twenty feet below, to a sickly emerald. I followed a rope strung between a buoy and a stake in the seabed, pausing occasionally to pinch my nose and adjust my sinuses to the pressure. Just beyond the thermocline, where the temperature abruptly drops, a hand emerged from the murk and grabbed me by the wrist, dragging me the last few inches to the bottom. The silt was as soft as tapioca pudding. It swallowed my hand, then my arm and shoulder; the deeper I pushed, the more I suspected that it might go on forever. Finally, I touched wood, feeling a chill colder than the water’s as I ran my fingertips over the grooves and splinters of submerged planks. This was the slave ship Camargo, which carried five hundred souls across the Atlantic before it burned.

It was the sixth of November, and I was diving with a group of maritime archeologists in Angra dos Reis. A verdant bay three hours from Rio de Janeiro, it’s a kind of Brazilian Hamptons, where yachts fill the marinas and Vogue once sponsored a party for New Year’s Eve. But in the nineteenth century it was mostly plantations—sugarcane near the water and coffee just beyond the jagged mountains that ring the area like snaggleteeth. They thrust up around me as I resurfaced, pressing a button to inflate my scuba kit’s buoyancy-control device. The researcher who’d guided me to the wreck showed me the soot under our fingernails. Then we swam back to the dive boat, a creaky, flat-bottomed rental whose Portuguese name meant “With Jesus I Will Win.”

On board, preparations were under way to disinter the Camargo, a two-masted brig that sank in 1852. A storm had buried the ship shortly after its discovery the previous December; now it was time to clear away the mud. Divers had spent the morning setting out buoys, running submarine guidelines, and surveying the site, working creatively with modest tools. Two men assembled a dredge from a PVC pipe and a household grease trap. Another hailed a nearby megayacht to borrow its “sub-bottom profiler,” a costly sonar device that exposes buried features. “We’re using the rich,” he said. “It’s reparations.”

Ten years ago, not one ship that sank in the Middle Passage had ever been identified. The African diaspora’s watery cradle was an archeological blank, as though the sea had erased all trace of what the poet Robert Hayden called a “voyage through death / to life upon these shores.” Then, in 2015, a Portuguese ship called the São José was discovered off the coast of Cape Town. Three years later, the Clotilda, America’s last known slave ship, turned up in Alabama’s Mobile River. The most recent find is believed to be L’Aurore, a French vessel that sank off the coast of Mozambique after an attempted uprising. Meanwhile, in Dakar, researchers are closing in on the Sénégal, which exploded after its capture by the British Navy, in 1781.

Behind this fleet of revenants is a network called the Slave Wrecks Project. Coördinated by the Smithsonian—along with George Washington University, the Iziko Museums of South Africa, and the U.S. National Park Service—the S.W.P. combines maritime archeology with reparative justice, tourism, and aquatic training in Black communities. Its work is too new to gauge its impact on scholarship, but it has already made a meaningful contribution to public history. Artifacts from the São José have become a centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (N.M.A.A.H.C.). The Clotilda inspired a Netflix documentary and a new museum in Africatown, Alabama, and similar hopes are riding on the Camargo in Angra dos Reis. The enthusiasm reflects an oceanic turn in understandings of heritage among diasporic writers, artists, and scholars, who are increasingly preoccupied with what the influential theorist Christina Sharpe calls slavery’s “wake.”

Before my descent, I spoke with Gabrielle Miller, a maritime archeologist at the Smithsonian, whom I found strapping a stainless-steel knife to her muscular calf. A thirty-two-year-old with cowrie shells in her long box braids and a pierced septum, she teared up describing her underwater work. “There was a hush over it, almost like a church,” she said of her first dive to a slaver’s wreck. Feeling the Camargo was even more uncannily intimate: “The black stayed on my hands for a long time.” Miller works for the N.M.A.A.H.C. and contributed to an ongoing exhibition, “In Slavery’s Wake,” which features beads and shells that enslaved Africans likely carried to Brazil. But she’d rather talk about being in the water than about what divers can retrieve from it. “It’s very antiquarian to put all of the emphasis on a physical object,” she said. “The ship is a catalyst.”

Miller started off in terrestrial archeology and once worked for the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho. But a research trip to St. Croix, where her family originated, led her to become a scuba diver, and to apply her skills to the histories of her own people. In 2021, Miller enrolled in an S.W.P.-affiliated internship program, which she now helps to run. She also teaches the basics of maritime archeology through the Slave Wrecks Project Academy, which works with archeology graduate students in Senegal and Mozambique. The academy’s two-pronged goal is to diversify the ranks of archeologists, a minuscule fraction of whom are Black, and to include people from across the diaspora in the study of its history. Yet it’s also a kind of exorcism—an exercise in dispelling history’s haints.

“They say that the African diasporic relationship to water equals ‘trauma,’ ” Miller told me, alluding to an all too familiar tale of Middle Passage drownings, contaminated taps, and segregated beaches. It wasn’t exactly false, she conceded. But didn’t Black people also have a privileged connection to the sea? She spoke rapturously of coral architecture in the Caribbean, of water spirits venerated by Senegal’s seafaring Lebu, and of work by the artist Ayana V. Jackson, who was inspired to learn diving by the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya. Created in the nineties by a Detroit electronica duo, it imagines a Black Atlantis populated by the water-breathing issue of women who drowned in the crossing. The idea fortified me when I sat on the dive boat’s rail and prepared to fall overboard. Within the siren call of the sunken place is an invitation to courage, Miller suggested: “Our ancestral relationship to water is not one of fear.”

“The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness,” Marcus Rediker writes in his harrowing history “The Slave Ship.” The vessels were floating torture chambers that devoured more than twelve million lives, and their finely calibrated cruelties—lightless holds fetid with vomit and excrement, sick people bound to anchor chains and thrown en masse to waiting sharks—fuelled the global economy for half a millennium. They left a psychic imprint so deep that Black people still speak of them in terms of personal experience. “I remember on the slave ship, how they brutalized our very souls,” Bob Marley sings in “Slave Driver.”

One might have assumed that a handful of these vessels, at least eight hundred of which are known to have wrecked, would have turned up long ago. But those equipped to search for them have lacked incentives to do so. In 1972, commercial treasure hunters stumbled on the wreck of the Henrietta Marie, an English ship that sank near the Florida Keys after a slaving voyage—and moved on as soon as they realized that it wasn’t the Spanish galleon they were seeking. (It was later excavated.) Maritime archeologists, meanwhile, largely ignored the Middle Passage. Stephen Lubkemann, a professor at George Washington University, told me, “There were more archeological studies of cogs in bogs in Ireland than of slave ships.”

Lubkemann conceived of the S.W.P. in 2003. Slavery wasn’t his field, but he’d long marvelled that historians, who’d recently unveiled the monumental Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, were so far ahead of his social-science peers. Because of its expense, maritime archeology is reliant on funding from governments, few of which wanted to pay for the exposure of their historical crimes. An exception was post-apartheid South Africa, where Jaco Boshoff, a researcher at the Iziko Museums, was looking for a Dutch slaver called the Meermin. He and Lubkemann joined forces and expanded the search to other ships, shuttling between nautical archives and Cape Town’s wreck-strewn littoral.

For years, both dollars and discoveries eluded them. Then, in 2008, Boshoff encountered a scholarly citation about a Portuguese ship that sank en route from Mozambique to Brazil, carrying two hundred Africans to their deaths. Further research led to the captain’s testimony, which indicated a spot under a mountain known as Lion’s Head. Soon, Boshoff and his team were diving at what he called “one of the worst wreck sites I’ve ever worked on.” The archeologists were dashed against the very reefs that had sunk the vessel; one almost drowned. Still worse, the wreck was itself a wreck, having already been stripped by treasure hunters in the nineteen-eighties. (They found human remains, which have since disappeared.) Just enough remained to identify the vessel: crumpled copper sheathing from the period; iron ballast blocks that were mentioned in the manifest; and, most crucially, timber from a tropical hardwood that grew in Mozambique. By 2015, Boshoff and Lubkemann were confident enough to announce that they’d found the São José—the first known wreck of a ship that sank during a slaving voyage.

Their discovery was perfectly timed. In the early twenty-tens, Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the soon-to-open N.M.A.A.H.C., was determined to acquire a relic of the Middle Passage. “The slave trade was where the modern world began,” Bunch, who is now the secretary of the Smithsonian, told me. “I needed to be able to tell that story in an intimate way.” After realizing how few existed, he negotiated a partnership with the S.W.P. and supported its search for the São José. The museum opened, in September, 2016, with artifacts from the ship showcased in a subterranean gallery evocative of a slaver’s hold. Bunch attended a ceremony to honor the São José’s victims in Mozambique, where traditional rulers presented him with a container of earth to scatter over the wreck. When a young Mozambican tearfully thanked him for bringing her kidnapped countrymen home, Bunch had a revelation: “What we were looking for wasn’t about yesterday but today.”

Every morning before diving, and every evening afterward, the team excavating the Camargo dined on a local historian’s back porch. Her mint-green house in Frade, a gated condominium on the bay, served as a base for the expedition, whose members would relax around a table near a pool and a tree with fuchsia blossoms. Leaving their wetsuits to dry on the patio furniture, they’d feast on feijoada and other Brazilian specialties, speaking in a mix of Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish that they’d christened “Portuglaisñol.” Having no common language was no obstacle to camaraderie. Miller entertained the table with the story of the “Notilda,” a wreck mistakenly identified as the Clotilda. I was teased for having studied with the “wrong” dive federation. The expedition’s genial young field coördinator, Luis Felipe Santos, drew the most laughs, because he couldn’t pronounce “buoy.”

Santos is a stout thirty-five-year-old tattooed with nautical motifs, orisha symbols, and a demon’s head captioned “tropical punk.” He’s a professor of maritime archeology at the Federal University of Bahia and serves as the president of AfrOrigens, a nonprofit established to find the wrecks of slave ships. (Having found the Camargo, they’ve begun surveying near the town of Maricá for the wreck of the Malteza, which was sunk by the British Navy.) A self-identified Afro-Indigenous Brazilian, he co-founded the country’s first organization of Black archeologists. But his work hardly touched on slavery until he was invited to join a yearlong search for the Camargo, which then began appearing in his dreams. Several other archeologists experienced similar visions, and he speculated, half playfully, that “African cosmology” was responsible: “The energy of the wreck called all of us.”

Nothing so dramatic had befallen me. Yet the prospect of coming so close to an “unknowable” history, which my own ancestors had survived, did inspire me to learn scuba. Just a month earlier, I’d enrolled at a hole-in-the-wall school in New York, where the instructor taught me and two white bankers to “maximize our bottom time.” Surrounded by decorative shark plushies, I couldn’t have felt farther from the grim story of the Camargo. I didn’t yet know that Manhattan was where its captain financed his slaving expeditions—and, eventually, met an unexpected end.