It takes a rare combination of skill and ambition to find and excavate the wrecks of sunken slave ships. Not only do you need archeological expertise and professional diving abilities, you need to have scholarly interest in the history of the slave trade. Unlike the archeological expeditions of ships like the Titanic or famous warships or countless treasure-bearing wrecks, there has been little interest in uncovering the sites of the estimated one thousand slave ships that went down during the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Among the terrible experiences of the Middle Passage, that of drowning while shackled or trapped in a slave hold has been underrepresented as there is little archeological material to document this particular horror. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of African people encountered this fate.
One archeologist is finally breaking ground in the little-studied field. Ibrahim Thiaw decided to become an archaeologist after visiting Gorée Island, the port site where Africans were imprisoned, shackled, put onto ships, and sent to the New World. While hearing the stories of this trade in human bodies, Dr. Thiaw broke down. Despite the confusion of his friends and family, Thiaw became determined to study archeology, specifically to uncover buried stories of silenced people. Any piece of evidence is valuable, he believes, no matter how small. The bones, the shackles, anything that one of these people may have carved into the ship’s wall. Thiaw went on to earn his PhD from Rice University and returned to Senegal.
In 2013, he learned to dive, intending to seek out the many ships known to have sunk right off the coast of Senegal. His timing was good. The following year the Smithsonian launched its Slave Wrecks Project and they were looking for a committed archeologist capable of working underwater. That year, Thiaw and a team of his graduate students began the painstaking and costly project of seeking out specific wrecks on a sea floor littered in shipping debris. Thus far their project is still in the works and funding is limited. On top of this, there is little support from the Senegalese government that has declared it time to let go of that ugly period of its history, to keep the past in the past, to keep it buried. From elsewhere in the world, there is little interest in slave wrecks. Between the Black Swan project, where $500 million worth of gold bullion was recently uncovered, and the “Billion Dollar Wreck” of the RMS Republic, the interest in shipwreck history seems to be the old interest in finding where the money is.
