MOBILE, Alabama — The last known American slave ship is too “broken” and decayed to be pulled from the murky waters of Alabama’s Gulf Coast without being cut to pieces, a task force of archaeologists, engineers and historians has announced after years of research.
The task force led by the Alabama Historical Commission said Thursday that the Clotilda, the last ship known to have carried enslaved Africans to the United States, had been broken in half by a large ship and badly eroded by bacteria. The 500-page report says the “responsible” way to remember the ship is to protect it underwater where it was discovered six years ago.
“There is no other site in the world that provides physical evidence like the Clotilda,” said James Delgado, a lead marine archaeologist on the study who said the priority was to preserve that physical evidence. “The Clotilda is the scene of the crime, so everything we did was in that sense of a crime scene investigation.”
The wooden schooner at the center of the investigation was built in 1860 by Timothy Meaher, a year before the Confederacy was founded and decades after the importation of slaves became punishable by death in 1808. Captained by William Foster, the ship sailed to West Africa and illegally smuggled 110 Africans back to Alabama. Foster then attempted to set fire to and sink the ship to cover up the crime.
After the Civil War freed the Clotilda survivors, 32 of them, according to historical records, purchased land from Meaher and founded what is now Africatown, formally known as Plateau, about 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) north of Mobile.
The remains of the ship lay unidentified in the brackish Mobile River until 2019. On Thursday, the task force released photographs of some of the charred hull remains unearthed during the investigation — evidence that bolstered the story chronicled by historians and community members for decades.
Before the $1 million government-funded study, it was unclear how well the ship had survived its more than 160 years underwater. Some had hoped it was intact enough to be fully excavated and turned into a land-based museum.
“Museums have power, and that ship loses power when it’s in the water,” said Ben Raines, a local reporter and historian who wrote a book about the Clotilda.
Raines said he remains optimistic that the ship can be excavated and turned into a museum, as the task force said that option is still scientifically and technically feasible. Raines said a museum would be an important resource for all descendants of the enslaved in the U.S. and could bring much-needed revenue to the Africatown community. Many residents present at Thursday’s meeting expressed a similar sentiment.
Delgado did not rule out that option, but said that process would require taking the ship apart “piece by piece, nail by nail,” and could jeopardize some of the remaining physical evidence about the experiences of the enslaved people on board.
That important historical evidence includes the lower hull where the enslaved Africans were held captive. Deep-sea dives revealed that the sealed chambers where 110 people were held remain largely intact.
Clotilda Descendants Association President Jeremy Ellis became visibly emotional as Delgado shared details about the compartment where his ancestors were being held.
“Now that we’ve learned more about what they really went through and how small that cargo hold was and how close they were to each other, it’s really chilling,” said Ellis, who is in his early 40s and a sixth-generation descendant of Clotilda survivors Pollee and Rose Allen. “And it makes me want to continue the efforts for reconciliation and healing for the descendants.”
Instead of an excavation, the report recommended a plan to preserve the underwater structure by installing large pillars around the ship to protect it from other ships and vessels. The ship is located underwater in a designated Wildlife Management Area, and the city is on the National Register of Historic Places, meaning the process would require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to obtain federal permits to install the protection. Representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers who have been integral to the investigation said the process could be resolved within months as long as there are no serious conflicts between environmental protection and the needs of the ship.
The discovery of the ship in 2019 brought new life to a long-standing debate about how to deal with the harrowing legacy of the Clotilda, especially for the direct descendants of the survivors. The Meaher family still has millions of dollarsin real estate ownership in the area, as well as parks and roads that bear the family name.
Zora Neale Hurston’s bestselling book Barracoon documents the life of Cudjo Lewis, the Clotilda’s last surviving African slave. Released in 2018, Barracoon includes stories of Lewis’s upbringing in Africa, his experiences aboard the slave ship and during slavery, and his role in founding Africatown. Lewis died in 1935 at the age of 94.
As a result, Africatown and the Clotilda often quoted in the national conversation about reparations.
Ultimately, the task force said the underwater preservation plan would only protect the structure for an estimated 100 years before it would completely succumb to erosion. They added that the timeline could be shortened by climate change, which is likely to affect the levels, temperatures and salinity of the water around the ship.
But many descendants indicated that they are happy for the ship to remain underwater.
Veda Robbins, 55, is also a sixth-generation descendant of Pollee and Rose Allen. Robbins grew up in nearby Mobile, but clearly remembers going to her great-uncle’s house in Africatown as a child. Robbins was married at the local church in Africatown and later baptized her children there.
Robbins said the ship isn’t so much a concern as the need to revitalize the Africatown community, which plagued by environmental pollution and divestment since inception.
“I don’t want a ship taking up space in the community that could be used for housing and things for the community itself,” Robbins said. The unincorporated town’s population has shrunk significantly to just under 2,000 people.
Robbins echoed the official position of the Clotilda Descendants Association: Ultimately, the ship is less important than the stories of the people who survived, and of the descendants who are already struggling to keep the community of Africatown intact.
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Safiyah Riddle is a staff member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-reported issues.