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Journalism of Courage
Researchers were due to begin on Monday a 10-day evaluation of the submerged wreck of the Clotilda, believed to be the most complete remains of a slave ship ever discovered. The Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States from Africa, was scuttled in the Gulf of Mexico close to the mouth of the Mobile river in Alabama after it had offloaded its cargo of 110 captive men, women, and children in July 1860, 53 years after Congress had outlawed international slave trade.
The Alabama Historical Commission confirmed the identity of the wreck in May 2019, and in 2021, researchers announced that two-thirds of the original ship remained intact, including the under-deck hold where the slaves were kept during the six-week journey to America from Benin in West Africa.
The slave trade
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, as many as 10-12 million Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Hundreds of slaves were packed like animals into the hulls of the ships for brutal journeys that could last from weeks to even months.
Usually, pairs of slaves were chained together at the ankle and placed in columns with ropes around their necks. Unhygienic conditions often led to the outbreak of diseases. Historians suggest that 10-15 per cent of slaves died during the journey.
The Clotilda
The slave ship was bankrolled by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy businessman and landowner from Mobile, Alabama, and captained by one William Foster. In early March 1860, Foster sailed for Whydah, a port in the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin). After purchasing his cargo of slaves, Foster embarked on the return journey to the US in May.
The scuttling
Upon reaching the coast of Alabama, the crew and slaves were illegally removed, the ship was set on fire, and deliberately sunk. This was done because a federal law of 1807, backed by President Thomas Jefferson, had prohibited the import of new slaves into the US. This law, however, did not seek to curtail the country’s internal trade in slaves.
An AP report quoted historian Natalie S Robertson as saying Meaher commissioned the Clotilda’s journey so he could win a 1,000-dollar wager that he could continue importing slaves despite the 1807 law.
The slaves
Since they had been brought illegally, the Clotilda’s cargo could not be classified as slaves. But they continued to be enslaved, and were distributed amongst the financial backers of the voyage. Meaher kept 32 of the slaves on his estate near Mobile; the others were sold to various slave owners across Alabama.
In the decades before the American Civil War of 1861-65, the country had witnessed a cotton boom. The cultivation of cotton relied heavily on slave labour, and the demand for slaves continued to grow. With imports banned, prices of domestic slaves skyrocketed, and plantation owners demanded the resumption of the global slave trade, and provided incentive for men like Meaher.
Africatown
In January 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was President, Congress passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
The former West African slaves purchased some land from Meaher, on which they established Africatown outside Mobile. They were joined by other emancipated slaves from nearby areas, and together they established an autonomous community where they retained many of their indigenous customs and spoke in their own language.
“It’s, of course, a story of resistance,” The New York Times quoted Sylviane A Diouf, author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, as saying. “They, from Day 1, acted as a community and as a family and they continued to be very active after they became free.”
