Found: The Wreck of the Last Ship to Bring Slaves to the United States from Africa

The wreck of the schooner Clotilda, the last ship to bring slaves to the United States from Africa is discovered in Alabama’s Mobile River after 160 years

Annie Palmer, Daily Mail and Associated Press, May 22, 2019

Researchers working in the murky waters of the northern Gulf Coast have located the wreck of the last ship known to bring enslaved people from Africa to the United States, historical officials said Wednesday.

A statement by the Alabama Historical Commission said remains of the Gulf schooner Clotilda had been identified and verified near Mobile after months of assessment.

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In 1860, the wooden ship illegally transported 110 people from what is now the west African nation of Benin to Mobile, Alabama.

The Clotilda was then taken into delta waters north of the port and burned to avoid detection.

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The captives brought over on the schooner were later freed and settled a community that’s still called Africatown USA, but no one knew the location of the Clotilda.

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‘We are cautious about placing names on shipwrecks that no longer bear a name or something like a bell with the ship’s name on it,’ maritime archaeologist James Delgado said in a statement.

‘But the physical and forensic evidence powerfully suggests that this is Clotilda.’

The United States banned the importation of slaves in 1808, but smugglers kept traveling the Atlantic with wooden ships full of people in chains. Southern plantation owners needed workers for their cotton fields.

With Southern resentment of federal control at a fever pitch, Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could bring a shipload of Africans across the ocean, historian Natalie S. Robertson has said.

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