It tells you how big the trade was in the 2000s, 400 years, yeah.
The thing that really stood with me or stuck with me was realizing 12,000 ships.
When I was growing up, I couldn't tell you the name of a single one of them.
And yet I could tell you about the Mayflower.
I could tell you about other ships.
Why was that?
That didn't feel right to me.
When I think about the number of people who died just in the ocean, we're not talking about the number of people who died on the march to the ships or the number of people who died once they arrived and were enslaved.
Just in the crossing from Africa to the Americas, it's 1.8 million people.
That is a huge number.
It's an enormous amount of loss.
So that's also a number that I didn't know until I started this work.
So one of the things that I've been trying to do with the storytelling that I'm doing is one to bring that history back into memory because it's important history.
And the other thing is to honor those people whose lives were lost, whose names we will never know.
But they weren't just victims.
They weren't just cargo.
They were people.
They were mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.
Maybe some were writers.
Maybe some were farmers or scientists or poets or whatever.
They were people and they deserve to be remembered.
From your book, Written in the Waters, on the wintry afternoon of December 19th, 1827, the Guerrero, a Spanish pirate ship, sailed down the coast of Florida toward Cuba.
Night fell and the weather turned bad.
None of the hundreds of captive Africans on the Guerrero would have known what was happening that night.
They wouldn't have known where they were.
Terrified and crammed in the hold, they were helpless.
41 Africans drowned as water rushed into the hold that night.
Maybe the water came in initially as a deluge, relentless waves growing higher and higher as they quickly took feeble and sick.
I think about them letting go, offering prayers to their gods as they breathed out and sought Yemiah's release.
Their contributions to the world still exist some sort of way.
I know that a number of the Guerrero Africans got distributed to different places.
Yes, the majority ended up in Cuba.
And I like to think, even though I won't know the names of the people who were on that ship, when I think about the culture in Cuba, the Afro-descendant culture that exists there, I think that their contribution, like they do still live some sort of way there.
So I'm actually on staff with National Geographic right now.
I didn't start off on staff.
I started out with a grant which funded me to travel around the world with the divers.
And originally I was writing blog entries about my journey.
And then I became a storytelling fellow with National Geographic.
And that allowed us to do the podcast that we did.
We did a podcast called Into the Depths.
It's a narrative podcast.
It's still streaming.
And it tells the audio version of the journey.
You get to hear from the divers.
You get to hear, like, you know, out in the field, what it sounds like when we're actually underwater.
It's a really beautiful story.
So I did the podcast.
And then just last year, National Geographic invited me to come in-house so that we could continue this work in a bigger way.
We're planning a part two of this work.
I just spoke about how important memorialization is, telling the stories of the ancestors who perished under the waters and those who didn't perish, who survived, but still had this experience.
So we've got something coming up that's going to be pretty big and pretty exciting that will help honor and memorialize this past.
You know, pardon me, in good National Geographic fashion, and this is published by National Geographic, your book has maps on the front and back covers.
Ah, well, excuse me, partly because the journey took me all over the world.
So we wanted people to see where the journey happened.
But even more importantly than that, there's a way that I think people think that the transatlantic slave trade is black history or it's American history, but they don't think that it is global history.
The transatlantic slave trade impacted the world.
There were some 70, they estimate between 70 and 90 nations were involved in the trade in some way.
So Europe, Africa, South America, North America, the Caribbean would not be what they are if not for the trade.
But we don't tell a global story really about it.
So part of the work of this book is to really show that this is a big story.
It involves all of us.
It is not just one thing.
And I think seeing the maps of it help you begin to get that visually.
I think it's about, it's about a mile off the coast.
Maybe it's a little more than a mile.
So that was the first ship found, and they found a lot from it.
But again, this is in the 70s.
It's been a long time.
But when Doc Jones found out about the Henrietta Marie, he worked with other members of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to put a plaque.
They raised money to build a plaque and put it down at the site of the wreck.
And it was a pretty big plaque.
But over the years, again, the ocean, you know, it's kind of covetous.
It is now covered that plaque.
So I'm not exactly sure where it is, quite honestly.
They know the general area, but people have to go down and clean it off and find it again.
And this is one of the other things that I didn't know about the slave trade until the transatlantic slave trade until I started this work.
I didn't realize that East Africa was a part of the trade.
I thought it was only West Africa.
But Mozambique is all the way on the other side.
And that was a hub for the Portuguese.
Like over 500,000 people were trafficked out of Mozambique.
And they would travel the route around Mozambique or down the coast of Mozambique around the Horn of South Africa.
And they would go on to Brazil and to the Caribbean because the French were also trafficking from that area.
So one of the ships that came from Mozambique, wrecked in South Africa, it's a ship called the São Jose Paquette d'Africa.
And this ship is like it's such a beautiful story.
It was found by an archaeologist who's with the Ezeko Museums in South Africa.
And the journey or the work to find the ship was headed off by a group called the Slave Wrecks Project.
Diving with a Purpose is a member of that group.
It's a group of organizations from around the world who are part of discovering and documenting these ships.
So the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was the museum where I saw the picture, helped to spearhead this work along with George Washington University.
But other organizations like the National Park Service are part of it, the Zico Museums, DWP.
So anyway, they're all these organizations that are working to find and document the Sao-Jose Paquette de Africa.
And they find it and they determine that it is indeed the ship that they thought it was.
So that ship they found originally came from Mozambique and they discovered that a group of people called the Makua were the people who were in the cargo hold of the ship.
And those are people who mainly come from northern Mozambique and from a tiny island.
Well, they come from northern Mozambique, but they found out that the ship left from this tiny island called Mozambique Island.
So what makes this story so beautiful?
And I think this shows the power of healing or the possibility of healing with these ships.
The team, when they discovered that the Makua were the people who were in the cargo hold, decided, well, why don't we go back and let the Makua descendants know what happened to the ship?
So they contacted the Makua and they told them what happened.
And the Makua people there decided to hold a big celebration because they finally knew what happened to their ancestors and they wanted to celebrate that.
So they have this celebration with music and food and dance and with speeches.
And at the end of it, the Makua chief hands a gift to Lonnie Bunch.
Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
And he's now the director of all the Smithsonian or the secretary of all the Smithsonian museums.
And he's a part of this work.
So the Makua chief hands to Lonnie this cowrie shell encrusted basket.
And Lonnie's like, why is he handing me this gift?
But before he gives it to him, he reaches down and he puts soil from Mozambique Island or Mozambique into the basket.
And then he says to Lonnie, I'm charging you with going back to that wreck site.
And I want you to pour the soil that I'm giving you now over that site so that my people can touch home for the first time in over 200 years.
It's an incredible story.
And then Lonnie and the team decide to do just that.
So they go back to South Africa and they choose an African-American, a South African, and a Mozambican.
And they, the three of them, walk into the water with the basket and they pour the soil over the site.
And what makes this story, I think, really extraordinary, again, I was not there when this happened, so I can't say that it actually happened.
But from many accounts, and I talked to a lot of people around this, and they all say the same thing, that when they started that day, it was a pretty terrible day.
It was rainy and the seas were rough.
The three people had to hold on to each other pretty tight as they walked into the water.
They also say that the clouds were like the sun was nowhere in sight.
It was really a horrible, horrible day.
But when they finished doing that and they walked out of the water and they got to shore, everybody says that the seas calmed.
The sun came out.
Our interpretation of that, you can like, maybe that was just the weather pattern that day.
Or maybe something got calmed that day.
Maybe something got solved.
Maybe something got put to peace.
So we like to think that the ancestors heard and the ancestors are at rest from that ship.
So that is an example of like this history.
It is, it's big, heavy history.
But it's history that we can move through.
That's why it's important for us to actually look at it, to actually know it, and then we can move to the other side of it.
You're making me do a lot of talking, but I guess that is the point of this conversation, right?
Oh, Cujo Lewis.
That's another really, really great story.
Cujo was one of the ancestors on the Clotilda slave ship.
And the Clotilda is the most recent ship to have been found and confirmed.
So that one is confirmed.
It was found off the coast of Mobile, Alabama in 2019.
So it's really, and it's taken some time to confirm it, but that's when they first found it.
The thing that is really unique, well, there are a couple things that are unique about the Clotilda.
The first thing is that it is the only ship that has been found intact.
So I know I said earlier, oh, they are always found in splinters, and that is the truth for most of them.
But what was different about the Clotilda is that it sank in the Mobile River, which is a different sediment than the ocean.
It's a muddy river, and the mud served to preserve the wreck.
So this one, we can really see the actual condition of the wreck.
So that makes it a very special case scientifically and archaeologically.
It's an amazing find.
But it's also just an amazing story.
I'll tell it very briefly.
So there was a plantation owner in Mobile who made a bet in 1860 when the slave trade had been made illegal.
It had been illegal since 1808.
But he made a bet that he could build a ship and sail it to Africa and get captive Africans and bring them back here to be enslaved.
And he did just that.
He managed to build a boat.
He had a captain who sailed it over and that captain bought 110, he bought more, but only 110 made it onto the boat and he sailed it back to Alabama without being caught.
So it's known that Clotilda is the last known American slave ship to come from Africa.
What makes this story super unique is that The 110 were sold off to financial backers of the Clotilda, but 32 of them were kept by the man who made the bet.
And they were kept right there in Mobile, Alabama.
So this happened in 1860, but then in 1865, the Civil War happened and these captives were freed.
When they were freed, they wanted to go home because they remembered where they came from.
You know, it had only been five years.
They still spoke the language.
They knew home.
They wanted to go, but they couldn't find a way back.
They couldn't afford it.
There was no way back home.
So these 32 people decided that they would band together and build Africa in their community.
So they worked for another nine years and managed to save up.
Again, 32 people, another nine years, managed to save up $300 and they were able to buy 57 acres of land.
And so they bought this land and then they christened it Africa Town.
And Africa Town grew over the years and Africatown still exists.
In its heyday, Africa Town had over 19,000 residents.
It had schools, shops, businesses, churches, cemeteries.
Like it was a full-blown community started by this 32 group of Africans.
And just to go back over some of those figures that we did at the beginning of the Golden Triangle, this is just a transatlantic slave trade, Europe to Africa to America to Europe.
From the 1500s to the 1800s, 12,000 slave ships made 36,000 voyages.
40 countries were involved carrying 12.5 million Africans, of which 1.8 million Africans were lost at sea.
Of those 12,000 slave ships, 1,000 of them were sunk.
Only 20 have been found as of today.
Our guest is National Geographic Explorer in Residence and author Tara Roberts.
Her book, Written in the Waters, a Memoir of History, Home, and Belong.
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