--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: During the transatlantic slave trade, more than 36,000 ships sailed from Africa to the Americas carrying enslaved people. About 12.5 million men, women, and children were on these ships. Roughly 1,000 of these vessels sank. The majority of them have never been found.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's Tara Roberts. She recently joined an organization called Diving with a Purpose.
--:-- Tara Roberts: This group trains primarily Black Americans to become divers, to swim down to the ocean floor to document what remains of sunken slave ships.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So it feels like part of this work is about acknowledgement, honoring, and allowing those souls to rest, finally.
--:-- Tara Roberts: I'm a journalist by trade. But a few years ago, after I learned about diving with a purpose, I quit my job, gave up my apartment in Washington, D.C., and joined the organization's training program.
--:-- Tara Roberts: I am now a National Geographic Explorer. My article about the efforts by divers to document slave shipwrecks, it was recently the cover story for Nat Geo.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And we're not talking about the people who lost their lives in the march to the ships or who lost their lives once they arrived in the Americas. Just in the crossing, 1.8 million people lost their lives.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And if you can take that number in, not 10 people, not 100 people, not even 100,000 people, 1.8 million people.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But who's mourning them? Who's grieving them? Where are the memorials to all of those lives?
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: They were mothers, fathers, husbands, wives. Maybe they were scientists, poets, dreamers. They were human beings.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And part of what we're doing is helping to bring their stories back into memory.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's so moving and stirring. 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.
--:-- Tara 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I will say that I learned very little. It was very much a sort of footnote, a sidebar to the rest of history.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So there's a lot of information that we just don't know. And the global slave trade was a monumental event in history.
--:-- Tara Roberts: There were four continents involved in the global slave trade. It was Europe, Africa, South America, North America. Four continents. Over 400 years.
--:-- Tara Roberts: The transportation of 12.5 million people across the Atlantic changed coastlines, it changed landscapes, it created wealth, it diminished wealth.
--:-- Tara Roberts: This is not just Black history. It is global history. But it's a footnote everywhere.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So part of this work of diving for slave shipwrecks is beginning to add to the historical record.
--:-- Tara Roberts: It's saying that this history is important, and it's important for us to examine it if we want to understand how we got where we are today, and if we want to build a different kind of future.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Why are these ships so hard to find?
--:-- Tara Roberts: Most of the ships were built in the 1600s, 1700s. So they were built out of wood.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And when they wrecked, and many of them wrecked, sometimes it was navigational errors, sometimes it's weather, sometimes it's, you know, bad luck.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But they wrecked for a lot of reasons. And when they do, those pieces end up on the ocean floor.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So it's not like you go to search for a slave ship wreck and you find an intact wreck.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And it's primarily because many of these ships were insured.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So when they wreck, their financial backers, ship's captains, file claims with the insurance companies.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And you know what happens when an insurance company has to pay out a claim. Well, there's due diligence.
--:-- Tara Roberts: Yes, they've got to investigate. So they review the captain's log records, the crew's logs.
--:-- Tara Roberts: There's sometimes court documents where people were interviewed. There's like all this paper trail.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And so historians and archaeologists go through the archives and it helps them narrow down a section.
--:-- Tara Roberts: Because the ocean is huge. And trying to find something on the bottom of the ocean is not easy.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So they narrow down the area where a wreck might have happened.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And then archaeologists come in with major equipment like magnetometers and sonar scans.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And they search for anomalies on the ocean floor.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So Diving With a Purpose is helping with the search and helping with the documentation of the wreck.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: It's also the most intact slave ship ever found.
--:-- Tara 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, pick up captives, and bring them back to be enslaved.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But the thing about the Mobile River is that it's a very muddy river.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And so when he burned the ship, and he did, and it sank, it sank in mud, and the mud preserved the ship.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So they found it in 2019.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And then the Civil War happened in 1865. Those who were enslaved were freed.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And so they decided to build a version of home right there in Mobile.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So they worked for about nine years. They were sharecroppers, selling vegetables, doing that kind of work.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But they managed to amass enough money collectively to buy about 57 acres of land.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And they turned that land into a community that they called Africatown.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And what is astonishing about Africatown is that it still exists today.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: This is a community that had barbershops, it had churches, it had schools, it had cemeteries. Like it was a full-on community.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And that's, I think, a really incredible story.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And also, the people who grew up in Africatown, well, some of them could trace their stories back to those 32 enslaved people on the boat.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And so those descendants today know where they came from. They know who they came from. They know exactly who their ancestors were.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Tara also told me the story of the São José Paquete d'Africa shipwreck.
--:-- Tara Roberts: In 1794, traffickers took more than 500 people captive from Mozambique.
--:-- Tara Roberts: They forced them onto the ship. Many were from the Makua ethnic group.
--:-- Tara Roberts: The ship set off for Brazil, but it never made it there. It hit rocks off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa.
--:-- Tara Roberts: About half the captive Africans on board died when the ship sunk.
--:-- Tara Roberts: For hundreds of years, the ship was lost at the bottom of the ocean.
--:-- Tara Roberts: That is until Kamau Siddiqui helped identify the shipwreck.
--:-- Tara Roberts: He's a lead instructor with Diving with a Purpose.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: 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.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: It was like you can hear the screams and the hollering and the pain and suffering that people must have went through and the agony of being on a vessel and shackles that's sinking and breaking up in the sea.
--:-- Tara Roberts: After the ship had been identified as the Sao Jose, a team including Siddiqui traveled to Mozambique Island.
--:-- Tara Roberts: They told the descendants of these enslaved people, we found the lost ship.
--:-- Tara Roberts: The descendants celebrated the news. Finally, they could properly honor their ancestors.
--:-- Tara Roberts: So there are dances, there are songs, there are speeches.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And the Makua chief, who is the highest ranking person who was there, gave to the dive team what he called a sacred vessel.
--:-- Tara Roberts: It was made out of cowrie shells and he filled the vessel with soil from Mozambique.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: The team returned to South Africa to carry out the Makua chief's request.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Kamau and three other divers delivered the soil to the wreck site.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Other team members were watching from the shore.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Kamau tells the story of how that day was a really turbulent day.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Like the seas were choppy and rough. It was overcast. It was rainy. It was a dark and sort of dreary day.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: And when they went out on the sea, they were holding on to each other. So they wouldn't be swept away.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Once we got out into the surf, it was so, the intensity of the emotions was so between the three of us.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: And we can just see it in our faces, you know, looking at each other.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: And they go out, they distribute the soil.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: He said that all three of them were in tears.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Like it was such a sacred, beautiful moment.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Nothing needed to be said.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: I was speechless anyway.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: I tried to say something, but it was a moment to be quiet, I guess.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: And so I couldn't speak at all.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: Kamau says that as soon as they did that, and he swears to me that he's not lying and not exaggerating.
--:-- Kamau Siddiqui: He said that the seas calmed down and that the sun came out.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Lonnie Bunch was also there that day.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: He's the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: What it really did was tell me the power of a memory.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: Even though my ancestors did not come from Mozambique, more than likely, I felt the pain of my own ancestors.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: I felt their voyage across the Atlantic.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: Suddenly, I saw one people, regardless of tribal differences, regardless of regional differences.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: And that is something that I think happens as we connect with descendants and we work with these ships.
--:-- Tara Roberts: Did this experience make you want to know more about your own family story?
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: Absolutely.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: And that was not a given at the start.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: It gave me the courage to be able to look back.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: So I ended up hiring a genealogist and she did some digging in my past.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: And we were able to find out information that I'd never heard about an ancestor who was enslaved.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: He was born in 1837, so he was born enslaved.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: And he managed to amass over 175 acres of land.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: I found out he fought in the United States Colored Troops.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: He fought in the Civil War.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: Like, what? I didn't know this.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: My family didn't know this.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: I also found out he was a delegate to the Friedman's Convention, which was the first Black statewide assembly after the Civil War.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: They created that convention to talk about the constitutional rights of those who had been newly freed.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: And my ancestor was a delegate, which means he was chosen to help represent and think this through.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But this is an ancestor that previously I was like, oh, he was enslaved.
--:-- Tara Roberts: I can't even wrap my brain around that.
--:-- Tara Roberts: And it felt too painful to really face that, that he'd been someone else's property.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: Well, hold on one second, because that's important.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: But now that you have, you saw so many more dimensions of who he was, what he became before he died.
--:-- Tara Roberts: I think that's perfectly said.
--:-- Tara Roberts: 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.
--:-- Tara Roberts: But because of this work, I got a chance to see him as fully human.
--:-- Lonnie Bunch: 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can read Tara Roberts' article for National Geographic on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And check out her podcast called Into the Depths.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find it now on Apple Podcasts.
