It wasn't just people who were brought from Africa
during the transatlantic slave trade,
it was knowledge.
Knowledge that helped give birth to the world we live in
without most of us knowing anything about it.
We brought our ways with us.
It's not in the history books.
We're going to find it in the bottom of the ocean.
They have an opportunity
to rediscover their ties to the past,
and their connection to the enslaved Africans
who were here.
Woo!
You look at this, and it's beautiful,
but it's also a mathematical.
Exactly.
There were 2,500 enslaved Africans
that ran away to join the pirates.
Here was a world where they had an equal vote
and an equal say alongside their white counterparts.
Your life depends on your skills,
your equipment and your attitude.
Why are you the first Black person I ever seen
play a banjo?
It was known by everybody
as a Black instrument.
All those things have been considered for so many years
to be slave food,
right now, everyone wants to celebrate it.
The memories and talents of the enslaved Africans
who arrived here
helped to create the culture of the new world
in a way we have only just begun to understand.
This community was started by the Africans
who were on the last illegal slave ship
to arrive in America, "The Clotilde."
Five years after they were brought here,
the end of the Civil War set them free
and they started the only African-run town in America.
Grammy award-winning musician, Rhiannon Giddens and I
are here with Joe'l Billingsley
who brought us here to see the monument
honoring her great-great- grandfather, Kazoola,
one of the founders of Africatown.
Kazoola happens to be the one we know the most about.
Right.
Because he lived longer and he shared his story
in a way that a lot of us are learning about it now.
Wow.
My grandmother was born in 18 something.
So her mother was a slave.
So she could talk to me about what that was.
That forms us in interesting kinds of ways.
I mean, people always talk about slavery
like it's ancient history.
- Yeah. - And it's not.
- Mm-mm - And lasted a long time.
That. Yeah.
In Africatown, they grew their own food.
They established their own community
based on what they did in their homeland,
based on their traditions.
And so as you sort of move through the decades,
you'll see that, that community at one time,
when it was thriving, had everything you needed.
Didn't have to go anywhere, to go to the grocery store,
see a doctor to be educated
or even have some entertainment.
Everything you needed to live
was right here in the community.
And so when you talk to people, they have so much pride
in what it used to be.
One time it was 12,000 people, now it's 2000.
Now we're trying to revive Africatown.
We have a place called Kazoola,
named after my great-great- great-grandfather.
So why are you the first Black
person I ever seen play a banjo?
- That's the question. - That is the question.
Because it was like, I grew up seeing white people
play the banjo and kind of going,
oh, that's cool, but it's not part of my culture.
And then I found there are some recordings
of the Black players of this music.
And then as I started to dig
and, like, this used to be a huge tradition.
It was an enormous tradition all across,
not just the south, but all across the country.
So I know the banjo as this, metal strings,
metallic instrument often played bluegrass style.
And then I learned that the banjo
was an African American instrument.
So it looked more like this.
It was known by everybody as a Black instrument.
The emblem of being Black was the banjo.
Then you have a change in the 1820s, and 30s,
and that's when white folk started going.
"That's really cool. I would like to play that."
So you have white entertainers picking up the banjo.
The reason why we don't talk about this shift
is because the white folks playing this banjo
would have been doing it in blackface.
This entire industry becomes the blackface minstrel show,
is the most popular form of entertainment
for, like, over 60 years.
Are you saying that what we know as bluegrass today
actually began with African Americans?
- 100% - Wow.
That's exactly what we're saying.
Wow.
So are you saying the original do-si-do
was an African American thing?
So, way back when you have nothing but dances
as entertainment, and you have plantations,
the musicians for these balls are African American.
Almost always.
And so they are forced to learn European dances,
European music,
and then they are themselves mixing it.
The thing that sets apart American square dancing,
and country dances from Europe is the calling.
You don't have callers.
And that's the thing that you think.
That stuff.
These are the innovations that make this music
uniquely American are African American.
Do it again now, come on!
Yeah!
We're here in Costa Rica,
because of a local group of young divers
believes that Africans contributed
to their history and culture.
This time we're not diving to investigate the deaths
of those that never made it.
This time, we're investigating one group
that may have survived.
Before we do any diving, Alannah, Kinga and I
are traveling through Southern Costa Rica
on our way to a remote village,
several hours from the ocean
into the rainforest of the Highlands.
We're meeting members of an indigenous group
called the Bribri.
They're considered to be descendants of the Mayans,
but there might be another side to that story.
Their folklore tells of slave ships
that were wrecked on the Costa Rican shoreline,
and of Africans who came ashore
to make a new life for themselves in the forests.
But their African ancestry
has always been considered to be a mere tribal legend.
Maria Suarez Toro has invited us here to a Bribri feast
to see if we can help this community
reclaim its lost history.
I would like to thank everyone for inviting us here
to hear your story.
On some level I'm jealous
because my question is always where do you come from?
And the answer to that for me is always,
I don't know.
I don't have a connection to my home or my people
so to be able to assist
in answering those questions
is a connection for me.
I want to hear the local story.
What do locals say about what happened
or those shipwrecks?
I can't really imagine.
You've just wrecked up in the middle of nowhere.
You have no idea where you are.
You look to your left, and it's just ocean.
And then you look to your right, and you see dark forest.
You have to make a choice.
Do you try and go back to the wreck
or do you go into the rainforest?
That must've been absolutely terrifying.
- The Bribri adopted them. - Yeah.
And they went into the rainforest,
and the Bribri adopted them.
That's an amazing, an amazing story.
From time to time, these teenage divers
have seen artifacts off shore.
If we can connect them to slave ships,
we'll be able to back up the legends with hard evidence.
When enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas,
it wasn't just their bodies that came here.
They brought their memories and ideas with them.
And there's evidence for this transfer of culture
wherever Africans were taken.
In Brazil, tens of thousands of artifacts
have been discovered at a site in Rio de Janeiro,
that once processed
up to 1,000,000 newly enslaved Africans.
Archeologists here have unearthed
some of the most intimate objects
associated with the slave trade.
This is a cowrie shell.
You see these in the Gulf of Guinea
on the coast of West and Central Africa.
So an enslaved African would have brought this
with them right up to Brazil?
Yes.
- It's incredible. - Yeah.
So this is a pipe that an African
would have actually brought with them and smoked.
Yeah.
There's something quite intimate about that.
It's a very personal thing that you carry with you
that you use for comfort.
Oh wow.
These are the kinds of beads that African women wear-
Yes.
Right up till today, you see them in countries
in West Africa.
I'm just imagining a woman who was enslaved
clinging on to this vestige of her dignity,
of her style, of her culture.
Is it a spiritual thing?
Does it bring good luck or protection?
Protection, mostly perfections.
So that culture of wearing these survives till today
in areas where there's a lot of African heritage in Brazil?
Yes.
- It is a ring. - Yep.
As a woman, I know that a ring is a very precious thing,
no matter what it's made out of.
It's a very personal object.
Now looking at all of these things,
I feel that when we talk about the Africans
involved in the slave trade,
they're often these nameless faceless victims,
we don't have photos of them.
Their names were changed or forgotten,
but these things are so personal and intimate,
it really gives them a face.
Really brings them to life as living people
who had their own style, their habits and their culture.
Most people in Costa Rica don't take the folklore
about the Bribri's ancestry very seriously,
but marine archeologist Andreas Bloch does.
He thinks he might even have identified
the exact ships the legends are talking about.
He found the clues in the archives
back home in Denmark.
I didn't know Denmark was involved in the slave trade.
I didn't know how large scale we were involved
in slave trade.
I couldn't believe when I started looking
at what had been written.
Scholars suspect that two specific slave ships
made it to this coast.
I think they're right.
Looking at the material, it's the first time
that Denmark ever sends two ships
on the same sort of voyage.
They left Copenhagen and 1708,
"Christianus Quintus"
and "Fredericus Quartus."
They're going to go to West Africa,
get slaves and then transport them to the West Indies.
When they leave West Africa,
they are in bad weather conditions,
but they're completely lost.
They're in open waters for days and days and days.
And they end up about here.
- Ola. - Hi, guys.
One of the reasons that we know that the two ships could be here
is because in the archives,
the name Caretto is mentioned.
That was where they ended up, but that doesn't exist.
So Caretto sounds a lot like Cahuita.
And that is one of the reasons that it could be here.
From the historical records, we know that the crew
of "The Fredericus" and "The Christianus"
anchored the ships close to shore
and then mutinied against their captains.
The conditions on board were horrendous.
There was no food, no water,
and they were afraid to die.
"The Fredericus" was set on fire
and the crew on "The Christianus"
cut the anchor and the ship ran aground.
The objects on board sank with the ships
and scattered across the ocean floor.
Most of the Africans were set ashore.
So these might be some of the first Africans
coming to this area and populating it.
So we have seen a lot of artifacts out there.
How can we link all these objects to that time period
in which the ship actually shipwrecked here?
Hopefully we'll find these clues that point to
these two wrecks being "Christianus Quintus"
and "Fredericus Quartus."
This looks like a cargo list. Is that correct?
Yeah, it is.
We can see there's loads of different stuff here.
These are canvas and there's clothes
and there's handguns and there's timbers
and there's bottles of wine and brandy.
What key pieces of information and evidence
do you have in these records that would connect them
to these two wrecks?
There's a lot of artifacts that would survive.
The ceramics would survive, the glass bottles
that are very specific in this period would survive.
That's what we focus on.
Sounds like we need to go diving.
Africa's contribution to world culture
has been pretty much ignored.
I'm traveling to Lalibela
to see one of the wonders of the world.
It's an 800-year-old Orthodox church
carved into the ground out of a single piece of rock.
- It's quite magical. - Absolutely.
I'm meeting the world's leading expert on African fractals.
So tell me about fractals. What are fractals?
Fractals are just the simplest thing in the world.
So it's simply a pattern that repeats itself
at different scales.
So when you were looking at a building like this,
you're saying the crosses on top big, medium, small.
Right. You've got the cross within cross within crosses
on the roof.
At the very center there's a sort of X form.
You can think of that as the self-reproducing heart
of the fractal, where the thing emanates from.
If you look down into the interior here,
you can see that the ripples of that cross
continue from the base of the church.
This is really a geometric theme
that occurs again and again and again
in these African structures.
This is a different way of looking at the world
than Westerners are used to.
Yes, that's right.
Nature has this fractal geometry.
It has this self similar geometry to it.
A tree for example, you could have a branch
and then that branch can have branches,
and those branches can have branches.
Clouds, the clouds are puffs of puffs.
You see that in mountains, peaks of peaks of peaks.
- Snowflakes. - Yes, exactly.
So you have this fractal scaling in nature.
But I was looking at these aerial photographs
of African villages, thinking to myself,
dang, those look like fractals.
And that's when I realized there must be something
culturally specific.
Some form of knowledge that's going into these.
Once you understand fractals, and you can sort of read them,
that whole African indigenous knowledge system opens up.
It's all over Africa.
You see them in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso.
I've seen them in Ghana, and Cameroon,
South Africa, East Tanzania,
just beautiful arrays of these fractal algorithms.
In Addis, there's a whole building
that's a fractal building.
It breathes.
It has a fractal perforation on the skin.
And so they've massively cut the need for air conditioning.
And it took the West a long time
to recognize these patterns.
It wasn't until 1977
that the first book on fractals was published.
Africans have been using it for centuries before then.
Did African fractals have an impact on the world?
Yes.
Through a mathematically related fortune telling system.
You're doing these random lines, you're counting them off.
Drawing all these lines in sand.
If there's an even number, you put down two strokes,
there's an odd number, you put down one stroke.
And when I went to these folks and asked them
if they could tell me more about it they said,
"nah, this is a secret."
"I can't tell."
So I had to go through the initiation ritual
to become an Abonnema divination priest.
So what I found was that back in the 12th century,
the system went up into Europe
and it was taken up by the Alchemist.
Now, Leibniz, the German mathematician,
when he invented the binary code,
he was actually studying the system.
And then it goes from Leibniz to George Boole
creating Boolean algebra.
Boolean algebra gets turned into hardware
by John von Neumann,
that's the birth of the digital computer.
So all those little ones and zeroes running around
in all of our digital circuits
really start with that African origin.
There are two different paths that you can take
in mathematics.
One is to think about how to impose order from the top down.
One is think how to allow order to emerge from the bottom up.
One of my hopes is that we can now recover
that process that was interrupted by the slave trade.
We're going to a dive site where young Costa Ricans
have noticed many different artifacts
that might shed light on their history.
Okay.
It's finally time to get in the water and start hunting.
We're going to snorkel around first,
and do a survey of the area.
I hope that it might help to actually put together
like all the pieces of the puzzle
to give the voice to all those people.
It seems easy, but it's not.
This is a huge area to cover.
And over 300 years, tides and storms
would have moved the artifacts around.
We can barely see anything down here.
The visibility is so bad.
Our job is to discover if there are any remains
of the two Danish slave ships left behind.
Woo! I found something.
It's actually kind of hard to see down here,
so I really didn't expect to find anything at all.
What we found here could be significant.
It looks like a period bottle.
It's brown in color.
It seems like it might have some
manufacturing defects on it,
but it's definitely not a modern bottle.
And one discovery leads to another.
Woo!
- You got something? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've never really seen so many artifacts
scattered around in the same place.
Archeologically speaking, this is a treasure trove, right.
There are items all over the place.
So now's the time where we need to get back in,
and start to document and record these things.
Great job, guys.
We don't yet know whether these artifacts
are from the slave ships we're trying to identify.
But finding so many so close together
is a giant step forward.
I've done a lot of research about time of slavery.
And I was looking at advertisements
where people were putting ads in the paper to sell people.
And I saw one in particular,
it was for a young woman who was for sale.
And at the end of the ad,
it said that she has with her a nine-month-old baby
who was at the purchaser's option.
And I don't know, those words just really...
Stuck with me
and thinking about her in particular.
You have this lineage here.
You have this connection historically to that last ship
that was sent over here.
You know where you come from.
I don't know necessarily where my family comes from
in the same way, but musically,
I know my lineage.
There's more than one way to be connected
to who we are as a community.
And it's not just blood.
In the gathering place right behind Kazoola,
the Africatown community has symbols
to commemorate their ancestors.
Family and friends, in the presence of God,
we come to pour our libation
in memory of our faith and blood.
Growing up not far from here,
I would never have imagined the traditional African ceremony
survived in Alabama.
When we pour libation, we awaken the ancestors.
We talk to them.
We're going to pour forth water to symbolize
the richness of our inheritance,
to symbolize how nourishing is the earth
which has fed our lives
and all our previous generations.
In response to each pouring,
I would like for you to respond "ashe",
which means, "so be it."
Repeat after me, ashe.
Ashe.
For many years, those Africans from "The Clotilda"
held rituals and rites and buried their kin
in this sacred space.
If you would, call out the names
of those who you have buried.
Kazoola.
Ashe.
- Ashe.
Ashe.
We found many different artifacts on our last dive,
but only Andreas can tell us if they match
the two Danish slave ships
that may have brought the enslaved Africans over here.
What do you think?
This plate, I'm quite sure that that is after 1850.
So if it's from after 1710, it's not related to the wrecks.
This is a broken piece of ceramic.
What do you think about that?
Could be from this period?
It could also be 150, 180 years more recent.
Also, this is an interesting bottle.
It's difficult to see in this photo,
but it looks like it has the shape of this onion bottle.
That's one of the things that we know from the cargo list
is that we have 66 bottles of wine.
And we also know that we have French brandy.
So this particular piece is quite promising then?
This is definitely an interesting object.
There are artifacts here from so many time periods
that we can't fully identify any of them
with the Danish ships.
So Andreas wants to focus on a kind of object
that could have only come from Denmark.
So we know that there are all these different types of cargo.
Handguns, and there's bottles of wine and brandy.
But one thing that is very specifically Danish
is the yellow brick.
The yellow brick?
We know from the archives that they usually carried
sort of around 40,000 bricks.
What would make these bricks Danish?
The size of the brick is specifically very, very Danish.
- I did bring one. - Can we see?
- Can we handle it? - You can handle it.
This is a brick found in Denmark,
and this size is specifically Danish.
And it's very often that they're yellow.
If you were to find bricks of this size, this color,
could be more reddish,
then it would definitely be a smoking gun.
So there would be a lot of bricks?
Probably not going to look like a gigantic pile
of 40,000 bricks,
but it will be sort of a substantial area of bricks.
So this is what we're looking for, huh?
This will be our smoking gun.
Jamaica was a plantation economy,
completely dependent on hundreds of thousands
of enslaved Africans.
Remarkably, some of them helped plant the first seeds
of democracy in the Americas.
- Dorrick. - Hey.
-Hi. - Hello
So good to meet you.
Yes. Welcome. Welcome to Port Royal.
Thank you.
And it all connects
to the original Pirates of the Caribbean.
What kind of city was here in the 1600s?
Port Royal was also full of brothels.
It was known as the wickedest city on earth.
But along with all that drinking and debauchery,
came freedom and the form of democracy
in which Africans would play a part.
I heard there were records showing pirate ships
whose crews were made up of as much as 30% escaped Africans.
Yes.
The plantations were complaining that they had
2,500 enslaved Africans
that ran away to join the pirates.
When you're on board these vessels,
every man was equal.
It was not question of the color of your skin,
but it was the skills you have.
Pirates actually gave opportunities?
Yes.
Because on board, it was one man, one vote.
It is remarkable that at a time when Africans
had been classified as subhuman,
here was a world where they had an equal vote,
and an equal say alongside their white counterparts.
So here is the remains of Port Royal
that is now completely submerged.
- Submerged underwater. - Underwater.
I'm not a diver, but I can snorkel.
So I joined the pros to see what remains
of this underwater city.
Woo!
You can still see the foundations of buildings
and sometimes 17th century artifacts
like this onion bottle.
For about 20 years, this submerged city
was a place where Black pirates
got to vote at sea and on land,
helping to plant democratic ideas
in the new world.
After talking with the locals,
we learned that there are a few more locations further out
that could have what we're looking for:
Evidence of Danish slave ships.
In addition to those yellow bricks,
we're also looking for bigger things like cannons,
cannon balls, gold, and even ivory:
things which would have been on the slave ships from Africa.
Since we're headed further out and going into deeper water,
snorkeling won't cut it.
We're going to dive.
So we need to talk dive plan and a bit more about safety.
Salvador is going to be the lead youth diver
in terms of safety.
I know it's not very deep, we've had instructors
drown in 10 feet of water.
So be aware of how much air you got
remaining in your tank.
Don't take no dive for granted, okay?
Your life depends on your skills,
your equipment and your attitude.
Everybody comprende? - I do.
Si.
All right, let's do it. Pool's open, let's go.
Very soon, we start to come across shards of pottery
and a broken bottle,
little clues that we hope will lead us
to something much bigger.
Amazingly, Anderson swims right into a cluster of cannons.
It's exactly the kind of evidence
we've been searching for.
The more I saw, the more there were.
So that was amazing.
They're beside each other, they're across each other.
There are some cannons that just looked like coral.
They were so heavily encrusted, the ocean's taking it back.
But we know distinctively that they're cannons.
You can see the bore on some of them.
Some of the bores are covered up.
Cannons can give us a lot of information.
We saw about eight, 10, maybe 12.
But if there's more, it could tell us
the size of the vessel.
We know the size of "The Fredericus"
and "The Christianus"
so, that would be very insightful.
The cannons were amazing,
but there were still more surprises to come.
Even with 300 years of coral growth,
there was no mistaking the shape of our next discovery:
A fully intact anchor.
The shape of the anchor, it's about three, four meters.
Come from a very large ship
just based on the size of that anchor.
Two floats are there.
Each one is about a foot wide
and maybe another foot and a half long.
So in beautiful shape.
There's some incredible stuff.
Some more evidence that we can put in the mix
and try to figure out what's going on at the site.
The first time I saw the anchor,
for me is amazing.
I asked my grandfather and my grandmother
and they both say yes, I had an African ancestors,
and they both had like connecting histories
with slaves.
To know that makes me feel that
I'm more connected to my history.
It's not in the history books.
It's not in the documents.
And if they find it themselves,
they begin asking the right questions.
And the right question is, where do I come from?
What has that meant in the life of me and my community?
Clearly the pieces of the puzzle
are falling into place.
But going off of what Andreas has said,
we're continuing to follow the yellow brick road.
Jekyll Island, Georgia, like Africatown,
is where one of the very last slave ships arrived,
bringing 409 people here
just seven years before the end of the Civil War.
Matthew Raiford studied at some of the finest
international schools of cuisine,
but he's returned here to honor the cuisine and culture
that was created by his ancestors.
Going to school, I would say things like,
"Well, there's another way to do that right there."
And folks would look at me like,
"what do you mean it's another way?"
" We're learning French cuisine."
And I was like,
"Well, my grandmother would do it like this."
Grandma's food tasted better.
And my grandma food tasted better, right?
Raiford's come back to his family farm
as an activist, farmer and chef,
celebrating African American culture through food.
We live on our own family farm.
We've had that land since 1874 and we've always farmed it.
We're still farming it now.
And we're still using a lot of the old ways to farm.
So I'm doing a little quick little cooking demo
off of things that we grow on the farm,
and then things that comes from the Gullah Geechee culture.
Gullah Geechee culture is an African culture
that took root on the sea islands,
along the Atlantic coast of Georgia,
Florida, North and South Carolina.
See, during the Civil War, the white plantation owners
fled in fear of former slaves seeking revenge.
I mean, the African population left on its own.
It had to hone its survival skills.
How do you make a living when A,
you don't have an education,
you're stuck on a barrier Island?
A lot of them mined what they learned
and what they saw here
and figured out a way to make it work.
- Did they? - They did.
I'm living proof that they did,
and they did a good job of it too.
So when they were crossing the Atlantic,
when they were shipping their cargo,
people, human beings,
those human beings came with their culture?
Absolutely. We brought our ways with us.
We brought our foods with us.
We bought our use of spices, of salts, of cookery.
So when I think about American food,
I think about the African influences
on what comes to our plate, but also in what we grow.
So a lot of what I thought is Southern cooking
is really Gullah cooking:
A cuisine made up of many ingredients
that Africans brought here,
including rice,
sweet peas and okra.
I just threw in a little bit of red pepper in,
I want that red pepper to still have
a little bit of bite to it.
So that's why I put it in a little bit later.
You've been cooking longer than that.
Well, I'm 76 years old.
I've been cooking since I was eight.
- So. - My mother and father,
they taught us how to cook everything.
Is that where Matthew gets it?
Well, let me tell you that boy right there,
he's a good cook.
I got to give him credit. He is better than me.
I hate to say it.
Do you remember a favorite dish from your mom?
You know, you ever eat fried chicken gizzards?
Not fried chicken gizzards, no.
Yeah, people used to throw them away years ago.
My mother used to go to slaughterhouse,
they'd give them to her.
She bring them home, clean them up.
- Was it good? - Oh, yeah.
Put a little pepper and salt in there.
I do it today.
So this is our vegetarian paella right here.
Have a little bit of sweet potato leaves,
some of the Cherokee purple tomatoes,
some sea island red peas.
Then, for those that aren't completely vegetarian,
we have Sapelo clams.
Charlie Phillips actually harvests
these clams right here.
He's an amazing fisherman.
You can actually name the fisherman who got the clams.
Yes, I can name the fisherman.
I actually can name the fisherman.
Those traditions came with us to bring a piece of home.
We were known to sew, literally braid,
and bring seeds in our hair.
It looked like an ornament. It won't look like a seed.
So when I bring it over, I got seed,
I got something from home.
When I get to my new destination,
I plant in my new home to bring a piece of home with me.
Every time I eat it, I still remember home.
I still remember when my mama used to make it for me
and my mama's mama made it for her.
When I think of your ancestor-- - Mm-hmm.
that was kidnapped, trafficked from Africa,
the odds that his great-great- great-great-great-grandchild--
- Mm-hmm - would be here
celebrating the culture that came on that ship.
It's a miracle.
It is a miracle.
It's impacted on the world around you.
Definitely.
There's not a city in the United States
that is not trying to have
the best Southern restaurant ever.
And what are they serving?
Rice and peas, you know.
They're making biscuits, cornbread,
they're frying gizzards, right?
So it was like, think about all of those that things
have been considered for so many years
to be poor people or slave food,
right now, everyone wants to celebrate it.
I've come to Kingston, Jamaica's capital city
to explore the connection
between this island's history of enslavement
and one of its greatest exports, reggae.
I was born here in Jamaica.
Right. I have history, ancestry
of a slaved trip, right?
And the ones who survived, came here on this rock
and I am a product of their survival.
There is something that's innate in our people.
When we come together we can defeat any oppression.
It's what left of the culture or the practice,
the traditions that they are coming across.
We as a people, we just have to pass it on to our arts.
Reggae has gone to all parts of the world
inspiring people,
because of the very soul of the music,
and that soul has to do with an entire history of hardship,
of oppression, of rebellion, of enslavement.
Life on the plantation was about this oppression
of Black life.
The culture around the plantation life
gets translated into what became
Jamaica's indigenous musical genres.
By the time we get to the 1930s,
people began listening to Marcus Garvey's philosophy.
Marcus Garvey with his ideas
about returning masses of people to Africa:
That of course gets crystallized
in the Rastafari movement.
And they're the ones that develop reggae?
That's right.
Many of the lyrics in reggae songs still talk about
the history of slavery, about returning to Africa,
about undoing the chains of mental slavery.
Do you think that this is a music form
that's keeping that history alive
in the minds of Jamaicans and the world?
The Rastafari people
are the memory of the Jamaican people.
They have been the ones to consistently
dip into that history to show us who we are,
show us where we're coming from
and also showing us where we're going.
The cannons and the anchor are important clues.
But to identify those Danish ships once and for all,
we need to find yellow bricks,
a lot of them.
So we're heading back out to search again.
We have the opportunity to be with these kids
and to help them find their roots.
And that is absolutely incredible.
It's a huge search area,
but the location of the cannons and the anchor
gives us hope that we're on the right track.
Those bricks have got to be hidden out here somewhere.
Through the sea grass and shifting sands,
Kevin felt sure he spotted something.
At first glance, it was hard to notice
if there was anything different about the spot at all.
But when we looked closer, there was a strange pattern.
In that moment, you realize that this cold case
that has been lying on the bottom of the ocean
for hundreds of years is now right in front
of you about to be solved and you're there.
To see that, to be in that moment,
that's a historical moment.
This huge hill of seabed
is actually a huge pile of bricks.
According to the ship's manifest,
there should be 40,000 of them down here.
Andreas has been able to get permission
to bring up one of the bricks for testing.
I have it. Got it here.
Whoo.
- Oh, my God. - Whoo.
So now they have an opportunity
to rediscover their ties to their past
and rediscover their contact
or the connection to the enslaved Africans
who were here.
This is about Cahuita.
This is about the people of Cahuita.
This is about the bravery.
This is about the people who are here
to find out the truth about exactly who they are as a people
and where they came from
and how Africans were very much a part
of creating this community.