These Divers Search For Slave Shipwrecks and Discover Their Ancestors | National Geographic

I am a light in the bottom of the ocean. [Music] Buried in the silence of years, I am the lights of the spirits. [Music] I often think of the middle passage as the origin story for Africans in the Americas during that transatlantic slave trade period. We know there were tens of thousands of ships that traverse the Atlantic. We estimate that there are 12.5 million people who were taken from Africa. The intent was to make as much money or profit as possible. Often, as many as 600 people would be chained together and put in the bottom of a cargo holds of a ship. People suffered from starvation and illness. There were sharks that followed the ships because of blood that was in the water from people they threw overboard.

When you're trying to engage in this subject of slavery, there are no easy conversations. The work is in the attempt to tell the truth, to confront, to help people reckon with this history. Africans live in various countries in Africa; don't think of themselves as black. That's an outside observation. Before people boarded those ships, they belonged to this ethnic group or this tribe. That's when this thing called black was born. Where do we put our sorrow? Where do we reconcile our history, and where do we reconnect with our heritage? All of us look for a touchstone generations later. There are people who are descended from the continent, and they can go back and touch these historic sites, even underwater.

I was living in DC when the Museum of African American History and Culture opened, and at the very bottom of it, it has artifacts from a ship. They were part of the larger story that I was getting. Then I made it to the second floor, and there was this picture, and I go to read the plaque about it, and it says it's this group called Diving With A Purpose. This is a part of the Slave Wrecks Project, which is a larger collaboration of partners who are dedicated to finding these slave ships around the world. When I see the name of this guide, I can’t Stewart, so I used to go diving. We would get on the boat, and the folks on the boat wouldn't buddy up with me. My assumption is that it was because I was black. It happened several times, and I didn't know really what to do. Then I found out about Dr. Jones, and the rest is history.

A lot of people consider me to be the Dean of African American Divers, and I learned to dive in the military. My first official dive was in 1951. Dr. Jones is truly one of the greatest black men I have ever met. When I came back from the military, there were people who had heard about diving, whether they didn't know how to do it. One by one, people started contacting me, so I said, well, let's form a club. These people were intent on telling their own story, and I thought the human journey of Africans in the Americas has not been told from this lens anywhere. Now, first, some archaeologists came in to give a talk on the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship. Once we saw the shackles, it really upset the people.

We decided we were going to put a plaque down on the Henrietta Marie. Now, I've made over 6000 dives; that was one of the most memorable dives I had because it was like diving on a grave site. You do feel like you're visiting the souls of your ancestors when you're dead, and it's just difficult to explain the feeling—sorrow, anger, disgust—and you feel a sort of feeling of helplessness. We said you know we need to go out and find the slave ships. [Music] Then we got lucky, and I can Stewart met Brenda Lazar, who was the archaeologist at Key Biscayne State Park. She needed divers; we had divers. She said, I will train you guys to do this work if you will help me map this ship. She says, you know, I'm the lone diver here in the park, and you know as a diver, we can't dive alone.

Earning 10 were these visionaries for this program. After a few years, you know, under her instruction and tutelage, she said, okay now it's your turn; I'm gonna sit back a little bit. She said that we're not to keep this program to ourselves; you have to train other people. There's a rise in the interest and study of the African Diaspora of our past, but there's not real space made for people who actually look like us. This lens of people who are descendants from Africa is crucially important because these are stories that have not been told.

When presented with this opportunity to expand my impact and create pathways for students, it seems like a no-brainer. It's like, okay, so how are we gonna get these kids in the water? [Music] Make sure that you close to them with your buddy. We have an hour trip to the dive site. You will be getting a briefing, and before you get into the water, I'll be recording your time in. So what we're doing out here on this very beautiful day, we have four underwater archaeology advocates. What we teach here is the basic principles of how to document a shipwreck, how to do measurements underwater, and basic mapping techniques. We are training them to be able to go into a wrecked shipwreck landscape and begin the initial process of gathering data.

So we do maritime archaeology, which enabled us to uncover the São José. The São José is a slave ship that starts in Lisbon, travels to Mozambique, picks up captive Africans to sell them into enslavement in Brazil. The ship goes down just off the coast of South Africa. What we're doing here is helping to tell a story on a human scale, a story about a ship and the five hundred and twelve people who were enslaved aboard that ship. The search, in all its levels for and around the ship, creates deep connections. I do recall very distinctly when I first encountered the wreckage of the South Susanna. Being in the water for me can become very, very meditative and quiet and beautiful, but when that beauty sort of encapsulated a slave shipwreck, you know there's another sort of feeling you get.

I just remember seeing that wretched stand, and so I approached the wood, and I resonated and grabbed and tested, and whatever you want to call it, I could feel the vibration, the energy, and the pain and the suffering and the horror. It's like I kind of closed my eyes, and I could audibly hear the agony and the screams. If I close my eyes, all I could think was to say inside my head, we never forgot about you; we came looking for you, and we found you. When we encounter these labor sites, we like to go back to those people, that particular ethnic group, and tell them that we found their ancestors.

In Mozambique Island, we met a gentleman who is a member of the Makua tribe, and he gave to us a cowrie shell in a case basket. Inside that basket, he had put soil, and that soil came from the site that was the last footfall of people on the African continent before being ordered to ships. He asked us to take the soil and to bring it as close as possible to the wreck. That was an opportunity for healing; that was an opportunity that was symbolic because it connects the Americas. It connects South Africa, it connects Mozambique, and it connects it to the now and to the past. [Music]

Now what happens when you take that sense of adventure and you pair it with social responsibility? That's when sparks fly. We're training young people in diving; they're becoming certified divers, and at the heart of that is heritage stewardship. I love this idea of young black minds stepping into the sea and claiming it. This has been a very successful field school, so we thank you very much for all that you will continue to do as advocates of the ocean and cultural heritage management. I think it was a great year; we did some outstanding work.

With that said, we're gonna recognize our new advocates. What we can do is gather knowledge and pass it on so it doesn't stop at one generation to people, but it keeps on going. What would it mean to tell those stories that we don't get in our history books? I think us asking questions of this history in the ways that we do, bringing these stories to life, makes them real. These are the kind of stories that we can't let die—the story of resilience, of holding on to humanity, that story of refusing to be dehumanized is such an important story for this world today.

I think the healing part of this work is the community that comes out of humanizing these experiences. I didn't expect it to feel this way; it feels [Music]. We know that we're speaking for millions of people who are here. We can't see them all, but we know that all of us, every ancestor we've ever had, is alive and present within us today. We are their blood, their flesh, their bone, and every generation yet to come is alive and present in us today. The Atlantic is one of the most turbulent of all the oceans. [Music]

I have been thinking about the people who've never been honored. They've never even been acknowledged; their stories are just lost. [Music] Perhaps there's something spiritual that's happening in these oceans. There's a need to lay the ancestors to rest. [Music] And the search, in fact, never has. [Music] The search for ourselves never ends, so this whole question of identity and culture, particularly for people of African American descent, is a huge struggle. Who do we call ourselves? Are we Negro? Are we black or African American? Who are we?

I am a black girl from Atlanta, but I'm also a nerd, really into sci-fi, and a yoga enthusiast. Like, there are all these parts of me that make up who I am, but that don't get seen because people just see the blackness, and that's how I get to find my wish. My dream for other black folks around the world is to be able to exist inside of their wholeness and to have people see that and recognize that. That's the work that is happening here. I am the sea light. [Music] I have walked the waters [Music] and I have been in the memories lost, only with the spark of the hope that someday some diver would look at the artifacts that are the traces left of the people and ask the questions that have not been asked. What people must have come in those ships? [Music] [Music]