State officials will only say a study is underway “to determine what is both feasible and best for the protection and preservation of the vessel.” As an alternative, the state and its hired archaeologists have repeatedly suggested erecting a Pearl Harbor style memorial at the wreck site, miles upriver in a remote and forbidding section of swampland, rich in alligators and accessible only by boat. But the Alabama Historical Commission has yet to promise to the Clotilda descendants that the ship will be dug up. The ship is the key to that history, for all Americans. The record of their experience illuminates and informs the lost histories of millions of African-American families who know only that their forebears were stolen and shipped across the ocean. We know the murderous horrors of an African slaving raid from their descriptions, and we know how desperately they longed for home and the loved ones they knew had either been killed or captured and enslaved. We know exactly what part of Africa they came from, who captured and sold them, who bought them, exactly when they arrived in America, and what happened to them once they were here. We know more about the people who arrived in the Clotilda’s hold than is known about any of the millions of people who were enslaved in the Americas. Because they were young, most 20 or under, when they were captured in 1860, many of them lived into the 20th century and were interviewed dozens of times by journalists and historians. One of the most unique things about the story of the Clotilda and its passengers is how well documented everything is, from the captain’s journal chronicling the voyage and purchase of the captives, to interviews the freed captives gave later in life. More than just a slave ship, it is the last slave ship.
Imagine the story that can be told surrounding the wreck of the Clotilda.
So few of the ships have been found that the brick-sized piece of a slave ship on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture comes from a South African slave ship that sank in port in Brazil.
It is the only ship ever found that was involved in the American slave trade, and one of only 13 slave ships ever located worldwide, though more than 20,000 ships participated in the global slave trade. The wreck is clearly of international historical significance.
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