NARRATOR: On the 9th of July 1860, under the cover of darkness.
A schooner slips into Mobile bay, on the Alabama coast.
She's called Clotilda.
And she's carrying illegal cargo.
Human beings.
109 enslaved men and women.
The last consignment of African Captives ever to reach the United States.
But this will be her final voyage.
That night she disappears
and is never seen again.
The story of the Clotilda marks a defining moment.
In the disturbing history
of the transatlantic slave trade.
DAVID: Life was brutal, it was violent, it was constant, people lived their entire
lives under fear of punishment.
It was probably as close as we've come to producing hell on earth.
NARRATOR: Today, nearly 160 years since her mysterious disappearance,
a group of maritime archaeologists are
searching for the Clotilda, here on the Mobile River.
Very few slave ships have ever been found.
But in Alabama and in sites all around the planet,
archaeologists are making discoveries, finding physical evidence,
of a trade that sees 12 million Africans carried to the New World in chains.
But these wrecks also lay bare a story of hope,
revealing acts of rebellion and dramatic escapes.
Re-writing the history of America.
JAMES: 52 years after the United States Congress banned
Americans from being involved in the slave trade,
a group of people in Mobile decided to place a bet.
JOCELYN: The bet was maybe $1 million equivalent today.
That we can go over to Africa and bring back slaves
Um, right under the US Marshall noses.
Just a drunken night and they just decided to make a bet.
NARRATOR: In 1860, the importation of enslaved Africans into America is
strictly forbidden, though slavery itself remains legal in many states.
But ship owner, Timothy Meaher, is prepared to take the risk.
He sends one of his vessels, the Clotilda to Ouidah, in modern day Benin,
on a mission to buy human beings.
West Africa has for centuries been at the rotten heart of the slave trade.
Clotilda's captain negotiates a fee for his living cargo,
$12,500 or $375,000 in today's money.
In America they will be worth $5 million.
After a six-week voyage, Clotilda returns to Alabama,
and disappears.
Finding this ship,
could transform our understanding of the last days of slavery.
So, for decades, archaeologists have been desperate to track her down.
James Delgado is leading a major new investigation.
He knows it will be an immense challenge.
JAMES: What you're contending with is a hot,
humid environment, in and out of the water.
But also, to be clear, we're in a bayou.
There are gators, there are water moccasins,
so you're always mindful that the
environment you're working in is not necessarily a welcoming one.
NARRATOR: Based on Clotilda's last known position,
the team focuses upon the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta,
a vast region of wetlands a few miles North of the city of
Mobile and discovers that one stretch of the bayou has never
been scanned with modern equipment.
JAMES: This little bend in the river was the only one where no one had looked.
NARRATOR: Using underwater sonar, they search for any sign of a wreck...
ALEX: Right, so there's your bow.
Here.
NARRATOR: It soon throws up a frenzy of hits.
JAMES: This area was full of wrecks, it was a ship graveyard.
NARRATOR: The team identifies 12 possible "“targets."”
Clotilda is known to be an 86-foot long wooden ship,
so the archaeologists can eliminate anything larger
and anything made of metal.
ALEX: It's almost as if we're right in the center of the vessel.
JOE: We are, we are in the center.
JAMES: Target 10 turned out to be an iron or steel
hulled sailing ship that had been cut down.
Target one also appeared to be one of those.
NARRATOR: In the end, just one target remains.
JAMES: Target five was a wooden wreck.
Not only was it a wooden wreck but the sonar showed it to
have about the right kind of shape I expected for the bow.
NARRATOR: They focus all their efforts on '‘target five.'
JOE: Bow's right here, that's the bow.
NARRATOR: It looks promising but to find more evidence,
they must plunge into these murky waters.
One of the dive team, is Kamau Sadiki, lead instructor of '‘Diving with a Purpose'
a group dedicated to protectin the remains of slave ships.
KAMAU: This was actually the Clotilda.
Clotilda being the last vessel to bring Africans into the US.
That is absolutely profound.
NARRATOR: This is about more than archaeology.
Many people living on the banks of the Mobile River today are
direct descendants of the captives on board Clotilda.
LORNA: Some of them people that were on that ship would
never see their family again.
Their lives were turned upside down.
We need to know what happened to that ship.
Finding the Clotilda, it would bring closure
and it opens up the why, how and when.
NARRATOR: Conditions for diving are terrible, so the search proceeds slowly.
KAMAU: In the water he was giving feedback on what he was
basically feeling not seeing,
the visibility was a bit challenging.
NARRATOR: The divers can barely see their hands in front of their faces and must
rely on touch to find their way.
This is archaeology by brail.
NARRATOR: Maritime archaeologist, Alex DeCaro
communicates with the dive team guiding them to the site.
ALEX: Okay you're on a tree, you're about 15 feet south west of your bouyee drop.
NARRATOR: Maneuvering through thick mud, the diver approaches the wreck.
ALEX: Okay.
NARRATOR: Reaching through the dark waters, the divers
lay their hands on something important.
JAMES: OK let me take a look.
Jackpot.
NARRATOR: It's a large wooden centerboard.
A crucial part of mid-19th Century sailing ships.
Especially fast schooners like the Clotilda.
A centerboard is a retractable keel that's lowered to give
extra stability when sailing on open water.
In a shallow river, it can be raised up, leaving greater clearance beneath the ship.
KAMAU: When that center board was, was found and discovered it was significant,
it was a huge of course morale booster.
NARRATOR: Their discovery helps the team calculate the size of the wreck.
It's 13 feet long, meaning it must belong to a vessel
about 80 feet in length.
And, from shipping records, the team already knows that
Clotilda is an 86 foot long Gulf Schooner.
It's a possible match.
Wooden fragments from the site could also help explain its identity,
so the team bags up samples for laboratory analysis.
But what they really need to do is see the wreck site in its entirety.
Now, using their sonar data
it's possible to punch through the darkness.
Pulling the plug on the murky Mobile River
to open up a world hidden for over a century and a half.
Revealing an astonishing sight.
The bones of a spectacular wooden wreck.
Her bow is high and immediately visible,
while her hull lists, slightly to port.
Her stern lies buried in several feet of mud.
Given how long the wooden hull has been here, it's remarkable so much survives.
And buried beneath the silt, traces of something unusual.
This wreck may look like a schooner but most Gulf schooners have a shallow hold.
This one is huge,
more like a hold found in large, ocean-going ships.
Could this be an important clue?
JAMES: The typical Gulf schooner of that time had a low,
flat hull for navigating in the shallow waters of the Gulf.
Clotilda was built bigger and deeper.
NARRATOR: Clotilda's design means she can carry a large human cargo.
Finding such a hold on the wreck is another piece of encouraging news.
But still not enough to make a positive ID.
JAMES: The number one thing you have to remember in shipwreck archaeology,
is the most difficult game to play is called pin the name on the wreck.
NARRATOR: Before they can pin the name Clotilda to this wreck,
the team must go back armed with every tool at its disposal.
To scour every last inch of this site for clues.
The tiniest detail might provide vital evidence,
that this really is America's last slave ship.
NARRATOR: The search for Clotilda, America's last slave ship, is important.
Because slave ship finds are so rare.
Less than 10 have ever been identified.
That's why an intriguing story, over one and a half thousand miles
away in Costa Rica creates huge excitement.
Not one, but two unidentified wrecks.
According to local legend, they are slave ships
but are these rumors true?
LYNN: The locals have known about them for many, many years.
They could be slave ships, but they didn't know the names
of the vessels or when they'd actually wrecked.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist, Lynn Harris is leading an expedition to find out more.
Together with her team she heads for the coast,
15 minutes from the nearby town of Cahuita.
Local fishermen guide them to where they think the
first of the wrecks lies, around 800 feet off the shoreline.
LYNN: It is really unravelling a mystery.
These shipwrecks are particularly intriguing...
NARRATOR: But the usually crystal-clear Caribbean waters
have been churned up by recent storms.
They can't see anything from the surface,
and the team has no scanning equipment with them.
[splash]
Visibility is poor and at first there's no sign of a ship.
NARRATOR: After two hours underwater Lynn finds something
NARRATOR: The cannon appears to be muzzle-loading.
Typical of the 1700s, the right period for a slave ship.
But to understand these ships' true purpose,
Lynn needs a clearer picture of what's beneath these swirling waters.
And by using the data collected at the site, that's now possible.
As the ocean disappears from around the first wreck,
the sea floor emerges into the Caribbean sunlight.
At first, there's barely any trace of a ship.
But then, clearly visible, two intact anchors.
And 160 feet away, something striking,
lots more cannon.
Ten of them along with what could be more, buried in the silt.
The archaeologists think they have fallen to the ocean floor as the ship broke apart.
By measuring their landing points, they can get an idea
of the size of the vessel they were on.
And it's big, around 118 feet long.
That's the right size for a slave ship and it's armed with multiple cannon.
Both important clues.
JAMES: The rule of thumb on a slave ship was you would carry Armament,
to protect yourself when you went off the coast in case
somebody came along to try to
interfere with your business or to take your ship.
NARRATOR: But there's a problem.
This site is hundreds of miles from the main slave trade routes.
From the very start of the transatlantic slave trade in the 16th century,
slave ships set out from Europe.
Then sail over 3,000 miles to West African ports
that trade in enslaved people.
DAVID: The captains of slave ships are men who do multiple
things, they're sea captains, sometimes they're pirates,
sometimes they're people
engaged in wars but they're also salesmen.
They have to be able to barter on the coast of West Africa to
sell the goods they've got for as many Africans.
NARRATOR: At these African ports, they load up with captives,
as many as 700 on the biggest ships, and carry them to the New World,
where they will be sold and set to work.
The whole cruel enterprise comes about because
plantations make more money when the labor is unpaid.
DAVID: The land is in the Americas, the demand is in
Europe and the free labor, the cheap labor,
the slave labor is in Africa.
NARRATOR: The slave ships return to Europe from the new world,
laden with cargoes of sugar, rum and cotton.
All produced by enslaved people on plantations.
This whole network becomes know as the '‘slave trade triangle'
and Lynn's wreck site is 500 miles away from it.
There's nothing in the first wreck to explain what it's doing here,
so Lynn turns her attention to the second site,
just over half a mile away.
[splash]
Once again, there's no sign of the wooden hull of a sailing ship.
The only thing Lynn can find amid the mud and the silt,
is a single yellow brick.
It's not a promising start.
But there's more evidence hidden on the sea floor and we
can reveal it by draining away the Caribbean Sea.
Not just one yellow brick, but a trail of them.
Leading to an incredible sight, a vast pile of bricks,
tens of thousands of them. All neatly stacked.
Lynn concludes that they were in the hold of a ship that has
long since rotted away and are now the only visible remains.
So can the bricks unlock the identities of both ships
and help prove a link to slavery?
NARRATOR: Lynn takes a closer look.
In the early 1700s different nations favor different styles
of brickwork and these seem Scandinavian.
LYNN: We looked through archaeological ports and tried
to estimate the dimensions of the Danish brick which was
different to the Dutch bricks and the English bricks and the
Spanish bricks and they seemed to fit into the Danish
brick more than any other.
NARRATOR: Danish bricks suggest Danish ships. So, Lynn digs deeper.
She uncovers documents belonging to the Danish West Indies company
mentioning two Danish ships lost in 1710.
Their last reported sighting, is at Punta Cahuita,
the exact place where the yello bricks are lying on the seabed.
The Danish records show that both vessels are carrying
bricks for the repair of a fort at St. Thomas,
a notorious sugar-plantation in the Caribbean.
The archives also make clear that when they are lost,
both ships are also carrying a full cargo
[chains rattling]
of enslaved Africans.
What can this astonishing discovery reveal about
the reality of life aboard a slave ship?
NARRATOR: In Costa Rica archaeologist Lynn Harris has
identified two extraordinary wrecks:
rare examples of early slave ships.
The bigger one, heavily armed with 24 cannon, is called the Fredericus Quartus.
It's 144 feet long, carrying a cargo of yellow bricks
and 433 African captives.
The other, is the Christianus Quintus.
It's smaller, at 118 feet, with a crew of 60 and
373 enslaved Africans.
Using contemporary records and data from the dive,
we can reconstruct exactly how these
floating prisons appeared and how they worked,
as they set sail on their final, fateful voyage in 1710.
CHERYL: People are herded below deck, they are often chained together.
The conditions on these ships are squalid.
You can smell the slaver coming.
NARRATOR: Air grilles around the hull offer extra ventilation
to keep the '‘human cargo' alive
Above deck is a barricado, a wooden barrier that
divides the ship in two, to protect the crew
in case the enslaved try to fight back.
Mounted near the captain's cabin, menacing swivel guns
intended not to fire against other ships but to rake
the deck and cut down any rebellious captives.
In October 1709, the two Danish slave ships set out for the
Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
But after five months of sailing they find themselves
1200 miles off course and desperately low on supplies.
By February 18th, 1710, disease, dehydration and
starvation have already claimed the lives of
135 Africans onboard the two ships.
They seek refuge near shore at Cahuita, where,
amid a raging storm, both crews abandon ship.
The fate of the enslaved men an women on board is a mystery,
but local legend maintains that some manage to escape
and find a new home among the indigenous community here.
If so, it's a narrow escape from a life of endless toil on the plantations.
By the 19th century, more than 150 years
after the trade first began, around four million African
captives are laboring on giant prison-farms across the
Caribbean and American South.
ANDERSON: Being demanded to work from sun up to sun down.
Being rationed food and water.
Being told when they can go to the bathroom.
The future was really grim.
CHERYL: It is a forced labor system that devoured children,
and decimated families.
DAVID: The people that ran this system ran it with terror.
People weren't just whipped, people were mutilated.
Bits of people's bodies were strung up, there were heads on posts.
NARRATOR: Many captives try to escape the plantations.
But get caught
and terrible punishments or death will follow.
And for those who do make it out, finding their way out of
the South is far from easy.
JOYCELYN: Going to a place unknown,
not knowing the language.
You had to hide out in swamps, limited amount of food.
Just the not knowing what was your next step.
NARRATOR: Safety lies in the anti-slavery states of the North,
such as Pennsylvania and New York or in Canada.
In the middle of Lake Michigan one breathtaking wreck may
help explain how a lucky few manage to cross half a continent,
to seal their freedom.
It's next to impossible to reach the North,
without the helping hand of a secret organization.
Called '‘the underground railroad'.
A clandestine network of individuals prepared to risk
their own lives aiding runaways
Members guide those fleeing slavery through a series of
backroads and safe houses, towards freedom.
CHERYL: Whether they're hiding in the false bottom of a wagon,
whether they're men who are dressing up as women,
whether they are women cutting their hair off and being men.
They've actually gotten themselves into freedom but
not necessarily into safety.
NARRATOR: Some of the most important Underground Railroad
routes cut across the Great Lakes.
MALLORY: This would have been one of last legs of the
journey for them and they potentially were only
hours away from knowing what true freedom was like.
NARRATOR: Everything about the Underground Railroad is secret,
which means evidence of it is hard to come by.
But on Lake Michigan, a team of archeologists
is looking for a ship that may play a vital part.
If they're right, she will be one of the first so-called
'‘freedom runners' ever discovered.
Their target is named The Home.
She's one of countless '‘lake schooners,' the workhorses
of the Great Lakes in the mid-19th Century.
Rumored to be part of the Underground Railroad,
she sinks in October 1858 somewhere between
Manitowoc and Chicago.
Archaeologist, Mallory Haas, prepares to dive on what she
believes to be The Home's last resting place.
MALLORY: We're about six miles off Sheboygan, Wisconsin in Lake Michigan.
[splash]
♪
I was really, really emotional seeing it for the first time.
It was just amazing.
Out of the gloom came this beautiful vessel in perfect condition.
NARRATOR: It's a spectacular sight.
Sitting upright in 170 feet of water.
But is it really The Home?
And did escaping captives use it, in their final run for freedom?
NARRATOR: In the Great Lakes, maritime archaeologists are
investigating a unique wreck.
Trying to discover if it's a rare example of a '‘freedom runner.'
A ship used to smuggle escaped slaves
across the Great Lakes.
Now, with data gathered from the lakebed, it's possible to
drain these waters
and reveal, the hull of a wooden sailing ship
84 feet long.
She's clearly an early Lake Schooner,
like the ship the team is searching for,
The Home.
And she's in remarkable condition.
But there is one unusual thing about the wreck,
a large impact hole in the hull
Evidence that she likely collided with another
vessel on the busy lake.
Archaeologist Mallory Haas thinks this could be important.
MALLORY: You can see the remnants and the wood pushing
inwards showing where both vessels came to impact.
NARRATOR: Mallory turns to newspaper reports from the time
She finds a story of a collision that takes place in
exactly this part of the lake on October 19th, 1858.
It describes a vessel loaded with wood and cedar posts
taking a blow to her starboard bow.
And the name of the ship?
The Home.
But are the rumors true, does she help people fleeing
slavery to reach freedom?
Can the drained wreck provide the answer?
Her forward cargo hold is large eight feet long by
six and a half feet wide.
Enough room for several people to hide inside,
alongside her official cargo of lumber.
Remarkably some stray timbers can still be seen today.
But there's nothing to distinguish her from
any other lake schooner, and for a ship that might
be carrying runaways, that's important.
Draw attention, and her Captain would face arrest.
With no firm evidence on the lakebed, the team delves into
archives for any scrap of information
and remarkably, finds records of the routes taken by Home's
captain James Nugent.
Between April 8th and October 14th, 1848,
he makes regular journeys between two ports on Lake Erie,
Buffalo and Sandusky.
CHERYL: We know Sandusky is a huge Underground Railroad port and here's Buffalo.
MALLORY: Right and that was a, that a really large port for The Home as well.
CHERYL: Oh really. MALLORY: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Both Ports are known escape points for fleeing
captives and form part of the Underground Railroad.
CHERYL: So, if you were to plot all of Nugent's movements,
you would probably hit every single Underground Railroad port that there is.
NARRATOR: The team also finds records showing
that from 1850 onwards, Captain Nugent is plying a
new trade route into Canada. It's another important clue.
Because in 1850, there's a dramatic change to
America's slavery laws,
under intense pressure from the South,
Congress passes the '‘Fugitive Slave Act.'
In a cruel twist, all escaped slaves must now be returned to their legal owners,
even if they are settled in one of the northern free states.
CHERYL: People are being seized, people who have been
free for five and 10 years are suddenly being hunted down
and dragged back into slavery.
NARRATOR: So now there's only one place left to run.
Is Captain Nugent carrying captives fleeing to safety in Canada?
The team digs further into his background
and stumbles on a remarkable clue.
A journal entry published by a Great Lakes historical society after Nugent's death.
It's proof that Nugent helped people escape from slavery.
So, his ship, the Home is a rare and astonishing
piece of physical evidence, connecting us directly to
the final desperate years of slavery in America.
CHERYL: It's a crime scene and in the United States
we have wiped that crime scene clean of all evidence.
There are no clues because we have gotten rid of them in this country.
NARRATOR: Ships like The Home help around
40,000 captives to freedom, and a new life in Canada.
Her wreck is a unique reminder of good deeds in a
time of violence and despair.
Tension is building between North and South.
Civil war is coming.
[cannon fire]
But before it does, slavers sneak one final
consignment into Alabama.
And in Mobile, archaeologists are trying to identify the ship that they use.
The Clotilda, the last ship to carry African captives to the USA.
For 160 years her resting place has been a mystery.
Archaeologists have found a wreck on the bottom of the
Mobile River that could be her. It's the same size.
It's built of the same type of wood and it's
close to Clotilda's last reported position.
But all of this could be nothing more than coincidence.
The team needs something else to help nail her identity.
They head back to the wreck site to look for more evidence.
This time, they're deploying the very latest technology,
as well as results from the laboratory.
[splash]
Can they close this case?
NARRATOR: The team lowers a 3D high-resolution
scanner to the riverbed.
JOE: Just keep letting it out Barry.
BARRY: It's pretty slopey here.
NARRATOR: It should give them a much more detailed view of the wreck.
JOE: The sector scan takes a 360-degree
view of anything that's exposed above the bottom.
We should be about 100 feet aft of the bow,
of the exposed portion of the wreck.
NARRATOR: New data starts to emerge,
immediately giving them a bette understanding of the wreck.
Inside the remarkable drained landscape, the details of the
ship come into sharper focus. Revealing what's been learned
through the survey and in the laboratory, in perfect detail,
right down to the individual planks that once formed the ship's structure.
But that's not all...
Using the new data, we can zoom in to see intriguing
black marks on the ship's centerboard,
burn marks.
This ship has been on fire.
JAMES: This vessel has gone through a fire and a hot enough
fire to have taken wood and burned it at high temperature
leaving instead of thick oak frame,
something that looks almost like a carbonized bit of charcoal.
NARRATOR: The team turns to the log of Captain William Foster,
in command of Clotilda on the day she disappears.
JAMES: "“At 12-mile island, I transferred my slaves
to a river steamboat,
and sent them up to the cane break to hide."”
NARRATOR: He's delivered his cargo and won the ship owners
their multi-million-dollar bet.
But he has one more thing to do.
JAMES: "“I then burned my schooner to the water's edge and sank her."”
NARRATOR: The reason why Fosters burns his ship is simple.
JAMES: Captains understood that slave trading was equal to
piracy and punishable by death.
NARRATOR: As Clotilda sinks beneath the waters,
any incriminating evidence is consumed by the flames.
The dark, secret remnants settle on the riverbed,
lost from view for 160 years,
but not forever.
JAMES: You take a look at all of that and you say,
"“Well short of finding a name, it all starts to match."”
NARRATOR: This must be Clotilda.
To identify the wreck of America's last slave ship
is an astonishing achievement and it stirs up strong feelings
KAMAU: It was very emotional just being on the site, it puts you in that place.
You begin to think about the people and
the incredible suffering that they went through.
I have to admit, you know it brought some tears to the eyes.
NARRATOR: Just months after Clotilda sinks,
the bitter war between North and South begins.
When it eventually ends, four long years later,
the Clotilda's captives, along with the enslaved in
every state in America are free, finally, from bondage.
Clotilda survivors seek a return to Africa,
but they're unable to fund their passage home.
Instead, some choose to build a community on the banks of the Mobile River.
It's still here today: '‘Africatown.'
KAMAU: They created that, the space called Africatown out of a
sense of survival, to create space that they can call home.
NARRATOR: Lorna Woods is a direct descendant of one o
the captives on board Clotilda.
LORNA: These shackles are a legacy passed
down through generation. They are heavy.
These chains represent being bound down.
[Indigenous music plays]
ANDERSON: We needed something to validate where
we came from, who we are,
and that ship gave us that connection.
I mean I even get emotional now when I think about
the fact that they said, "“We've found the ship!"”
You could feel the energy of our elders talking to us and
saying we knew the day would come.
We knew this day would come!
KAMAU: The whole African slave trade was a crime against
humanity and the Clotilda is a critical piece of evidence.
We have to make sure that those who try to erase
it from history that, that never happens.
That that never happens.
We never erase this story from history.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.