Julian Lucas writes about the efforts of maritime archeologists and the Slave Wrecks Project to locate and excavate slave shipwrecks, focusing on the Camargo and its connections to the transatlantic slave trade and Brazil. He explores the historical context of the slave trade, the difficulties in memorializing such a painful past, and the importance of connecting these discoveries to the present-day struggles for justice and recognition.
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.