Journey

Stephen C. Lubkemann

Jaco Jacqes Boshoff

Discovery 2004

We launched the Slave Wrecks Project with a search for four shipwrecks, all hailing from the high mark of the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century: Le Jardinière, La Cybele, the Meemin, and the São José. The captain of Le Jardinière was a cause célèbre in his own day – ensuring his vessel’s maritime misfortune has been publicised and his work as an explorer and a botanist well remembered, even if his more ignominious activity as a slaver had been relegated to history’s footnotes. We knew even more about the Meermin – South Africa’s own Amistad – from the extensive paper trail left in the wake of the trial of the survivors of the shipboard rebellion whose suppression ultimately led to that vessel’s demise. La Cybele had wrecked in Table Bay in South Africa’s Cape Town within sight of Table Mountain, and the rescue of the crew and the enslaved – all of whom survived – left an archival footprint. Even so, none of the accounts of these three events provided the “X-marks-the-spot” details that would readily lead us to the actual wreck sites.

Finding a specific shipwreck is never easy, but not always for the reasons one may think. Sometimes the questions not “Where do we look for the shipwreck?”, but more a matter of “How do we sort out which of the shipwrecks we’ve located is the one we think it is?” Coastlines such as those where these three well-documented disasters occurred are often referred to in the lingo of archaeologists as “shiptraps”: points where shifting winds whip up without warning, or a single inopportune reef is easily missed by an inattentive sailor or a captain navigating in unfamiliar waters. Claiming victim after victim over the centuries, these hazards often conspire to litter a few miles of shoreline with the remains of literally dozens of ill-fated vessels. In spite of our best efforts (still ongoing) to locate the Meermin, Le Jardinière, and La Cybele, to this very day they remain hidden in the archaeological record – despite their visibility in the historical one.

In stark contrast to all it had to say about those three ships, history provided but a glancing mention of the São José and its fate. At the outset, all we knew about the ship was gleaned from a reference another researcher made when, decades ago, he recorded a footnote that caught his eye as he combed through the dusty daily journals of the Dutch East India Company. A brief entry in the journal for December 1794 summarised the terrible story of the São José in a terse note that recorded “a Portuguese ship ran aground in a place called Camps Bay (approximately 6 kilometres from Cape Town) and 200 of the 500 slaves on board perished.” Nowadays Camps Bay refers to an upscale community arrayed beneath the majestic peaks of the Twelve Apostles and spanning a mile-long stretch of beach, located no more than four miles from the heart of Cape Town. But in December 1794, it would have been a very different place.

Those few sobering lines indicated that the loss of liberty experienced on every slaving vessel had been compounded in this instance by a tragic loss of many lives. Most immediately for purposes of a search, it not only seemed to provide a very good idea about where the ship and those on board had met their fate, but it was also pointing to an area in which only one other shipwreck had ever been recorded – a relieving contrast to the locations in which we have searched for the more heavily documented slaver wrecks. Following in the track of the historians who had picked up on the original reference to the wrecking location and requoted it enough times to enshrine it as “undisputed fact” we therefore turned our attention to focus squarely on Camps Bay. As we would soon learn, facts of this “well known” sort may at times be misleading – perhaps all the more so. By virtue of the veneer of authenticity afforded to them by scholarly repetition.

We also immediately recognised the potential importance of the information that this footnote provided about the São José’s destination in the Americas, and its origins in Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa. By 1794, many millions of enslaved people had already sailed from West Africa across the Atlantic on many thousands of voyages and vessels. The slave trade from East Africa, however, was in its infancy. Just over a year before the São José weighed anchor, the Portuguese crown had revoked a longstanding prohibition against bringing enslaved people from its colony of Mozambique to Brazil. This reversal of policy was both a response to the rising demand for them in Brazil and a calculated effort by the monarchy to retain as much profit as possible by limiting this taxable trade to an exchange between its colonies on the two sides of the Atlantic. The very first vessel to successfully complete this route is documented to have arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1795. We now knew, however, it was not the first to make the attempt, since the São José had endeavoured to sail the same route a year earlier. We realised that the shipwreck we were now intent on finding represented one of the very first efforts – and maybe even the pioneering one – to bring enslaved East Africans across the Atlantic.

East Africa’s role in the Atlantic slave trade is largely forgotten by the public. This is not entirely surprising, since the handful of dramatic accounts that have familiarised the public with the slave trade (such as the Hollywood blockbuster Amistad or the famous television series “Roots”) all start the story in West Africa. Most South Africans are thus quite surprised to hear that slavers bound for the Americas once plied their coasts, while Americans have sometimes set out to correct us when we begin to discuss the archaeological evidence of the trade from East Africa (“don’t you mean West Africa?”). This orientation is mirrored by historical scholarship, which – as a whole – treats the East African trade as a sort of addendum to the main event.

In part, this is because the slave trade from East Africa for centuries sent the enslaved primarily in the opposite direction, to destinations around the rim of the Indian Ocean, and was drawn in earnest into the transatlantic orbit only during the last few decades of the trade to the Americas. When this happened, however, it did so with vengeance, so that in the relatively short period between 1780 and 1870, nearly half a million East Africans joined the roughly ten to eleven million West Africans brought in chains across the Atlantic. What began as barely a trickle at the end of the eighteenth century would thus eventually surge into a torrent of enslaved humanity, feeding the increasingly voracious appetite of the plantation economies of Brazil as well as Cuba at the height of their growth throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, while fewer than a dozen slave ships arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Mozambique before 1811, more than eighty-five ships made the same voyage between 1825 and 1829, bearing a total of more than forty-eight thousand enslaved East Africans in their holds. The historian Herbert Klein informs us that by 1830, just under eleven thousand enslaved Africans were being sent across the Atlantic from that continent’s east coast each year.

Surging demand for the enslaved was not the only factor that sent slavers scrambling for new sources on the other side of the African continent. Ironically, the growing success of those campaigning against the slave trade played a role in this shift as well. In 1807 abolitionists convinced the British government to pass the first laws against slave trading in its own colonies. Over the three decades that followed, this former slaving power cajoled other major nations implicated in the trade to pass a series of treaties that, by 1836, finally rendered it illegal everywhere to trade in human captives. East Africa initially grew into an important source of enslaved people as the earliest of these treaties rendered more established sources in West Africa illegal. Once the trade became illegal everywhere, slavers found they could continue to perpetrate the trade with greater impunity along the remote Indian Ocean coast of the continent, where the British anti-slavery squadrons were deployed in far fewer numbers than found along the more accessible West African coast.

The profits from these new East African sources were reaped at a horrific price – one that exacted an even greater toll in human suffering than was already characteristic of this inhumane enterprise. If the horrors of the Middle Passage typically culled the lives of so many in a voyage that on average took just over a month from West Africa across the Atlantic, they often demanded a much higher toll from the ghastly holds of those slave ships compelled to stay far longer – sixty days on average at sea, because they were coming from the other coast of the continent.

By the time East Africa had become a significant source for the transatlantic trade, the United States Congress had, in 1808, banned slave trading to U.S. ports and prohibited U.S. citizens from participating in slave trading. Nevertheless, American citizens, industries, and indeed the very American flag itself all became centrally important in the perpetration of the transatlantic slave trade for many decades after these laws had been passed. In the process of researching the story of the São José, many indications of this American involvement have come to light in the archives – sometimes pointing in new and startling directions that deserve additional future research in their own right.

Thus, we have learned that American captains and slave ships were familiar with these shores well before the trade was banned in the United States. Their names (Benjamin Moore, Thomas Beller, James Williams) appear in the logs of the harbour masters of Mozambique’s slaving ports from Inhambane in the far south to Mozambique Island in the north. Just a few months before the São José weighed anchor under the command of the Portuguese captain Manuel João, two American vessels – one from Boston and the other from Rhode Island – arrived in Mozambique seeking slaves. Over the next few years other vessels from U.S. ports would follow, arriving from New York, Newport, Charleston, and Boston. It is more than likely that Beller and Moore – along with several other American captains who registered departures with cargoes of captives from Mozambique Island – would have crossed paths with the owner of the São José (who would remain active as a slaver until 1828) at the seat of the local municipal government on Mozambique Island, a building that stands to this day, and whose cornerstone inscription tells us had been erected merely a decade before the São José was lost.

The American Flag became a particularly important tool in the perpetration and perpetuation of the slave trade as it slid treaty by treaty into illegality. Whereas the British eventually compelled nation after nation to sign treaties that allowed the British to board and search ships suspected of slaving, the American flag remained exempt. This was thanks to a key provision that had ended the war of 1812 by addressing a longstanding American grievance against British interference with its ships on the high seas. It demonstrated how increasingly adept slavers had become at manipulating the fine points of international law in order to dodge legal restrictions. They often carried crews and captains of multiple nationalities and parallel sets of official papers, which would allow them to shift the flags under which they sailed as dictated by convenience or necessity. Thus, the American flag was often hoisted on both coasts of Africa and both sides of the Atlantic, as a shield that safeguarded slavers and their trade.

Though the slave trade’s final decades present a challenge because of the sparseness with which illegal activities are always documented, slaving voyages from Africa to the United States are well known to have happened as late as 1859. The very last documented slaving voyages across the Atlantic (to Cuba) occurred in 1867. If the slave trade often seems a distant and unfamiliar past, we are reminded of how recent it really was if we consider that, by the time of that final voyage, steamships were already crossing the Atlantic (and a handful were, in fact, slavers), while the two Wright brothers, future inventors of the airplane – a mode of transportation in whose holds we traverse the Atlantic in hours rather than months – had both already been born.

As we searched for the São José, we knew we were looking for perhaps, the very first measure that had breathed additional decades of life into the slave trade, bringing it to the very threshold of our modern world, and adding hundreds of thousands of souls to the roster of those carried across the Atlantic into bondage.

For over two years, from 2011 to 2013, we searched Camps Bay for the submerged site of the São José in vain. In work season after season, Jaco, frequently assisted by Jonathan Sharfman and Tara Van Niekerk from SAHRA (the South African Heritages Resource Agency), led several Slave Wrecks Project teams in magnetometer searches of Camps Bay. (A magnetometer is a geophysical instrument that measures the earth’s magnetic field and that will identify ferrous objects – including those characteristic of shipwrecks such as ships’ fittings, iron guns, anchors, and nails – as an anomaly or variance in the normal magnetic field). At different times Steve and students from The George Washington University joined in, as well as National Park Service colleagues volunteering their expertise during personal leave – all to no avail. Although in the course of these surveys we identified several magnetic anomalies, further inspection dives proved them to be bits of an old pipeline, a relatively modern anchor, and assorted types of discarded modern metallic refuse. Frustrated and confounded, we returned to the archives again – Jaco to the records of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town, Steve to the Mozambican holdings in the Archives of Overseas History in Lisbon.

Jaco made the most important breakthrough first. After many hours of rifling through stuffy tomes of the Dutch East India Company, he happened across a deposition a Portuguese captain gave to a local Dutch lawyer about the shipwrecking of his vessel. It was none other than the São José! Or, as we now learned its full name, the São José Paquete d’Africa. In his deposition, the captain testified that the ship had left Lisbon on 27 April 1794, destined for Mozambique, to take on board a cargo of enslaved Africans with the order to sail to Maranhão in Brazil. On her way from Mozambique with her cargo of captives, she was sailing toward Cape Town hoping to re-supply, but on the night of 27 December 1794, a strong south easterly wind prevented the crew from entering safe anchorage at Table Bay. They decided, therefore, to hug the coast and hope that better conditions would allow them to enter Table Bay the following day – a decision that turned out to be tragically fateful one. According to the deposition: “…at two o’clock in the morning, as they sought to resecure anchors belatedly noticed as having been dragging throughout the night, the ship struck a rock and started taking water while, according to the captain, under a well-known landmark: the Lion’s Head.”

The deposition continues in a lawyerly, efficient, almost bulletin-like bureaucratic prose that seems intent on conveying just the bare facts about the dramatic events that transpired throughout the remainder of the night and into the early dawn:

…the captain ordered the crew to cast out an anchor, but the cable snapped. They dropped a second anchor and then realised that the stern of the vessel was stuck on rock. The strong wind and surge broke this anchor as well and the ship now became wedged between two reefs. The crew then tried to use the ship’s windlass and a third anchor to get the ship off the rocks, but this rope broke as well. The captain and crew now realised that they were close to the shore and sent a boat with a line ashore. In the rough seas this small boat was broken up in the process of coming ashore. Next, a raft with sailors and slaves aboard was sent ashore, along with another small boat. In the meantime, a Dutch East India Company official from Cape Town arrived and rigged a basket on a rope which they were able to attach to the ship and begin to bring the people and some of the slaves to safety.

“Unfortunately,” the captain concludes matter-of-factly, “the sea became so rough that the ship broke up and became a total wreck with two hundred and twelve slaves perishing in the violent waves.”

The reference to the shipwreck occurring “under a well-known landmark” immediately refocused our sights with respect to the physical search for the shipwreck site. Rather than Camps Bay, the description in the wrecking account seemed to point instead toward Clifton, a smaller cove just to the north, its landscape clearly dominated by this looming and iconic promontory still known today as the Lion’s Head.

In fact, Jaco already knew of a shipwreck there, long referred to by the local dive community as the “Schuylenburg site”. Supposedly this was the final resting place of a Dutch East India Company supply vessel that had disappeared without trace during a journey between Cape Town and nearby Simon’s Town in 1756. Further investigation revealed that the amateur treasure hunter who had first discovered the wreck site in the 1980s had been seeking a name that would allow him to meet permitting requirements, which required that a site be given the designation of a known maritime loss. He selected “Schuylenburg” primarily because it fit the bill – being both a wreck that had never been found elsewhere, and that had disappeared while undertaking a voyage that would have brought it past Clifton. Despite being a product of administrative convenience rather than of any substantive investigation of the site itself, the name had stuck. Over time it had gained the status of “fact” – one that had not caught our interest until the captain’s deposition forced us to scrutinise it in a whole new way.

If we did not yet know that the wreck was that of São José, it became apparent almost as soon as we had started diving that it could not be the Schuylenburg. The first hints that the site had been misidentified came in the form of the copper sheathing, nails, and spikes we found. We knew that shipbuilders had started to use copper fastenings and sheathing to protect the bottoms of wooden ships playing tropical waters from shipworms only later in the eighteenth century – well after the Schuylenburg had disappeared. The four canons on the site also seemed to rule out the only other possible candidate in the historical record – the Hopefield Packet, a small, thirty-one-ton coastal schooner that ran aground in Camps Bay in 1869, after the crew and captain got drunk while sailing her to Dyer Island with general stores. Not only would a coastal schooner have been unlikely to carry any guns, but further review of the archival account shows that following the grounding, the hull had been sold for £75, suggesting it had likely been re-floated. Moreover, the cargo had been sold for a mere £125.

Over the next two years, as we struggled through unseasonable storms that severely reduced what were already the slimmest of work windows the weather would permit, evidence began to mount that this might well be the site of the São José. According to the captain’s deposition, the ship had become “wedged between two rocks” and at a distance that was close enough to the shore to allow a rescue line to be rigged that was capable of carrying survivors in a basket from the distressed vessel to the beach. The signs of wreckage and the artifacts we were finding were located between and upon two reefs, and within the limited distance from shore that would allow such a line to be tied. Even the captain’s accounts of the depth at which the ship ran aground proved to be consistent with what we were finding.

Meanwhile, a review of the treasure hunter’s report on the limited work he had done on site before he had lost interest was also suggestive. It included ceramics identifications that, ironically, ruled out his own designation of the site as that of the Schuylenburg. They were, however, consistent with thealternative possibility of the São José. More speculatively, he also mentioned a large number of “horseshoe”- shaped objects cemented to portions of the reef (but which had since deteriorated and were no longer visible on site). Knowing that shackles often were U-shaped like horseshoes, we wondered…

Our suspicion that this was the wreck of the São José gained even more validation as new archaeological findings on the site in South Africa and new documentary evidence brought to light in Portugal pointed directly at each other. Working with his team in the field, Jaco had uncovered another important artifact on the site: solid iron blocks, each about two feet in length, which were easily recognisable as a kind of iron ballast that had been used to stabilise sailing ships.

Starting in the late eighteenth century, iron ballast is known to have been used by slave ship captains who were concerned that human bodies did not weigh enough, nor were they packed as compactly as other types of cargo (despite being shackled back-to-back and crammed in rows on decks so low it was not possible to stand) to ensure a centre of gravity low enough to safeguard their vessel’s stability. Iron ballast could compensate for human bodies in other, more literal ways as well, at times serving as a good traded for enslaved people – one commodity traded for another.

The ballast that we found became more than a suggestion that this might be the site of a slave ship, and the particular one we were looking for, when Steve and long-time archival research collaborator Yolanda Teixeira Duarte excitedly pored over the most recent find. Clearly noted in the very first line of the ledger of the São José’s cargo manifest when it had left Lisbon at the outset of its voyage was this entry: “1130 iron bars.”

How is it, then, that shipwreck sites come to be identified? Archaeologists rarely find a ship’s bell with the name of the ship engraved, nor do most vessels exhibit unique or iconic features such as those that make most famous ships such as the Titanic or the Monitor so readily recognisable. In fact, most shipwrecks don’t look much like anything more than a pile of stones, or a strangely straight edge embedded in a reef, something the untrained eye can easily miss when swimming over it. Once they are found many are at best remnants of vessels that, after being catastrophically dismembered in the first place, may well have suffered the additional ravages of repeated storms or salvage. They will have disappeared and reappeared over time, covered and re-covered in the sand brought by currents or storms, or submerged under the gradual growth of reefs. Archaeology on such sites is like trying to piece together a puzzle in which half the pieces have gone missing, while some of those that remain have been thrown into a blender.

More often than not, the case for identifying a ship will necessarily have to be circumstantial – yet in order to do so, the case must always be substantial. Confidence rises as independent lines of evidence emerge, each failing to contradict the hypothesis and instead continuing – time after time – to corroborate each other. This has proved to be the case of the shipwreck we are now quite certain is the São José – the site described so specifically with reference to landmarks and to a configuration of reefs that trapped and doomed it, doing so a particular depths and at prescribed distances from shore, and in an area well monitored in its day. Even today, the site continues to surrender artifact after artifact that insist on pointing to the same timeframe and telling the same tale that documents in disparate archives tell – from the late eighteenth century pulley block to the concretions whose X-rays reveal the ghostly echo of what once was a shackle.

Several large timbers that Jonathan Sharfman, one of the divers on the research team, found at the end of a working dive have provided the most recent corroborating evidence. Hoping for more information, we took samples and sent them to Dr Marion Bamford, a world-renowned timber specialist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her laboratory analysis identified the timbers at Dalbergia melanoxylon, an extremely rare hardwood still to be found on the mainland about sixty kilometres from the Island of Mozambique where the enslaved people from the São José embarked. Perhaps these timbers were carried as dunnage, on top of the iron ballast. Meanwhile, one of the structural timbers we have located on site has been identified as another type of East African mangrove wood, perhaps part of a repair – a suggestion that has emerged from yet additional archival evidence that ships were frequently repaired on the island, a fact long forgotten by official histories. Further analysis will tell us more, as will the excavation work that proceeds on the site. As we continue to unravel the mysteries on this archaeological site, the cumulative convergence of so many independent lines of corroborating evidence establish beyond any reasonable doubt that we are working on the remains of the Slaver, São José Paquete d’Africa

Only part of what we know about this voyage and the final moments of those on board has been gleaned from the archives and artifacts. It is the site itself that has often insisted on inscribing its most visceral insights through the rigors and risks it imposes on each of us in the research team, as we attempt to work on it under water. It is a site that is almost always difficult – and more often than not, simply too dangerous – to dive. Exposed to the prevailing southeasterly winds, a back reef creates a swell break whose surge is amplified by the site’s relative shallowness and proximity to the beach. Even in moderate weather, skilled divers find themselves swinging back and forth in a sweeping and erratic pendulum motion. The effort and focus required to combat the surge in order to excavate or document can easily distract even the most experienced diver…just long enough for the drift to allow the next surge to dash him or her against the reef. We have all bled on this site.

The constant swirl of sand reduces visibility and has at one time or another disoriented every single diver who has worked with us, forcing each one to the surface in an effort to find lost bearings. Archaeological documentation is made all the more challenging when an area uncovered on a first laborious dive is found upon return, a mere hour or two later, to have already been recovered by a foot or more of sand. Years of contending with these challenges have impressed upon us that our dive tanks and computers, our fins and our masks, render us at best only marginally less helpless than those who found themselves on the distressed and disintegrating São José on that December even so long ago.

The suffering of those on board the São José had begun even before they reached Mozambique Island to embark on its fatal voyage. Then – as is also the case today – one could arrive at this slaving outpost by land or by sea. Some of the enslaved would have endured the long trek by foot, taking weeks to traverse the distances between Nampula in the interior and Mozambique Island that our Jeeps now cover in mere hours. They would have taken their final steps on African soil staggering along the same paths still used today across the marsh flats of Mossuril or of Quintagona. The vista of the bay surrounding Mozambique Island would have filled most – who had never seen the sea – with both amazement and fear. Likely kept first for days or even weeks in the slave pens of the slave traders’ compounds, whose ruins are still evident across this landscape, they would have eventually been herded into small dhows and shuttled under careful guard to the slave ships awaiting in the anchorage on the north side of the island. To those seeing them for the first time and bound for their holds, these ships would have loomed as giant and terrible apparitions holding the promise of unknown horrors.

Others, arriving by a different route from the sea, would have already experienced those horrors, having been brought down the Zambezi River and then north along the coast from Quelimane by boat, before disembarked and hurried into the temporary holding pens of one of the many slave traders found on the island itself. In both cases – and as had already happened several times along their route, when the enslaved were first purchased far inland, and again when passing through the lands of the surrounding sheikhs – the traders on the mainland or the island would have exacted their pound of flesh from the captain of the São José in exchange for the exhausted and shrinking human frames. At least one document tells us in detail of the wranglings involved in the sale of an enslaved African to the captain of the São José just days before that vessel’s departure.

Those on board the São José had already been at sea for three weeks on the night they heard the sound of splintering timbers and felt the icy grip of water pouring in as the reefs of Clifton set out to dismember their floating prison. Packed together in the ship’s hold, these five hundred bodies would already have endured weeks of the sweltering heat at the very height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It was a voyage timed to beat the Indian Ocean monsoons and catch the tail end of the Atlantic’s favourable trade winds, but utterly indifferent to human suffering. Spent by this ordeal, it is more than likely some were sick and dying, many were seasick and dehydrated, and all were weak and worn. Every captive on board was in some stage of physical distress long before the ship ever was.

What the captain’s curt account fails to reveal about the drama that unfolded throughout the final hours of the São José we can still imagine with some certainty. Struggling to breathe in the heart of the hold, swamped with the stifling stench of sweat and urine, the enslaved would have found themselves awash in their own vomit, or that of the other enslaved succumbing in droves to the nauseating unrest of the violent sea. Entombed in the lightless hold of a ship shrouded by the pitch black of a storm-tossed night, surely the next of the human senses to be overwhelmed would have been that of sound. As awareness of the ship’s plight took hold amongst the crew – and as sheer panic set in after it struck the reef – the enslaved would have heard desperately shouted orders, punctuated by sailors swearing in one breath. Before perhaps invoking their patron saint in the very next. Hurled in Portuguese over groaning timbers and the cracking whip of sails, these invocations would have mingled with prayers to Allah or pleas for protection to the ancestors uttered in a variety of tongues – Macua, Sena, Yao, Makonde.

As the ultimate fate of the vessel became clear, the captain and other officers with a financial interest in the venture would have ordered the crew to bring the weakened and terrified captives on deck – perhaps in small groups, to better control them. The officers would have done so in order to salvage as much of their investment as possible. As the night progressed, only a rump crew would have been left behind to ferry the enslaved across on the lifeline and basket that had eventually been rigged to the disintegrating ship, and through which most of the crew had already reached safety. At some point, however, those of the crew left behind must have read some sign of the vessel’s imminent demise – perhaps an ominous shuddering of the deck or structural timbers finally shattering under the weight of the hammering waves. Whatever it was, at some point all the crew abandoned the ship together, leaving perhaps as many as half of the enslaved still on board – something we know because the record tells us all the crew survived, whereas more than two hundred of the enslaved did not.

As the ship finally broke apart, the early morning air would have resounded with the shrieks of those injured or drowning – played out against deafening drumbeat of the relentlessly crashing waves and the concluding, calamitous crescendo of the ship breaking apart. The final clamours of the doomed may well have been brief, as the angry sea would have claimed its victims quickly. Any still in the hold would have been instantly entombed. Others weighted by the shackles or chained to each other would have been dragged beneath the surface in mere moments. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that many of those still on board ever made it to shore once the ship finally broke apart – even though it was a mere few hundred feet away. Most of the enslaved would have been weakened, and few, if any, would have known how to swim. Most of those not overcome by the towering waves, or battered by the swirl of jagged debris, would have quickly succumbed to the frigid waters that are ushered into this cove by Antarctic currents (a shock to many of the divers working with us on the site who had presumed the water must be warm because this was Africa). A few may have struggled in vain to break free of the entangled netting in which slave ships could sometimes be found ensconced – drawn down by the very web that the crew spun in their effort to protect their profits by thwarting suicide attempts, a final act of despair that became all too common during the course of the crossing.

Within just a few hours, the dozens of broken bodies carried to the beach by the churning surf would have coalesced into a ragged line stretched along the cove. At first toyed with by the surf, they would have grown increasingly motionless as the water released them from its grip and left them behind at the high tide mark, entangled in the jumbled debris of the broken ship. The site of crew and locals disentangling those bodies from other cargo, only to cast them aside as refuse in order to salvage what was still of any value, is quite likely one of the last images seared into the memory of the survivors as they were herded away by other crew members and the Dutch officials who had come to the crew’s aid.

The archival record tells us that all these traumatised survivors were auctioned off to local owners in the Cape – save eleven, we are told, who perished in the days following the wrecks, perhaps too spent or injured by that ordeal to survive any other.

It has sometimes been said that the past is a different country – and as researchers, we seek out all the evidence we can find to get there. In part, what we strive to do is to translate the behaviours and mind-sets that we find there and that seem so different – even alien – into terms that are in some sense comprehensible here in the present. That proves easier to do when we encounter at least something in the mix of the behaviours described in the document or suggested by the artifact that we can, at least in some way relate to ourselves.

As archaeologists who work on and under the water, there are thus at least some aspects of the thinking on that vessel that we can readily grasp, even if more than two centuries separate us. The sea still demands that we account for the weight of our own bodies when we calculate boat carrying capacity, imposing a metric that is indifferent to whether this weight is attributed to human or other forms of cargo – equipment, fuel – that we carry on board. In this sense, there is something in the captain’s calculation of both iron bars and bodies as ballast that we can readily grasp.

But our efforts at translation are partial at best, since we inevitably encounter chasms that can prove much harder to span. It thus requires a far greater effort to grasp the column in that captain’s ledger in which those iron bars and human beings were converted into the forms of shared monetary value that allowed them to be exchanged for each other in the marketplace.

The outward silence and stillness of the archives can be deceptive since the voices of the past arrested herein can still pack a blindsiding punch. The sheer matter-of-factness with which a slaver captain’s account distinguishes “the people” from “the slaves” can subject you to a form of cognitive whiplash, as the oddity of this phrasing first forces a double-take, and then a dawning realisation of its mundane presumption of difference in the very humanity of the enslaved and the crew. No less shocking – and revealing – are the precisely hand drawn graphs by petty government officials of the day. Intent on conveying different measures of trade and commerce relevant to their administrative tasks and duties, they carefully tallied the enslaved with other commodities and trade goods, neatly listing them in tidy columns alongside goats, barrels of pitch, dry fish, bolts of cloth – the crass calculus through which Africans were shorn of their humanity and reduced to monetary value.

The handcrafted Excel spreadsheets of their day, these precisely rendered pie charts and ingeniously designed graphs force us to contemplate a past that is not only a different country, but a far more distant one. Perhaps it is for the very reason that they seem so alien, and because they are so profoundly unsettling, that these seemingly more distant pasts can more easily be – and often are – forgotten. We would contend that the responsibility of research in such instances is redoubled – to not merely translate, but to seek out and recover the inconvenient truths of the past that have been sanitised from history and bleached into invisibility.

It is through this task of recovery that research comes to disturb – and so, ultimately, serve – the present. Certainly, such acts of recovery disturb the settled, accepted, and dominant narratives about the past by bringing to light portions of this history that have been relegated to neglect or selective remembrance, or that have even sometimes been suppressed outright. Research can recast our understanding of what actually happened, reintroducing us to a journey we mistakenly think we know well. Our ongoing work on the São José has been punctuated with many instances of such eye-opening disturbances, that of a gold pendant found within yards of a shackle, underscoring the fact that luxurious privilege and suffering were both evident on these vessels. Or the names of individual enslaved Africans and the record of key life events as marriage and baptism found, against all expectations, in the archival records in Maranhão in Brazil – for more than one hundred Mozambicans who were transported on three other vessels that followed the São José’s very same intended route with less fatally calamitous results.

In combing through archival accounts, we have been struck by how neglected the enslaved’s resistance may be in our understanding of the slave trade, as we find that so many of the shipwrecks that have been added to the list of searches under way in the Slave Wrecks Project actually sank because of rebellions on board. We are continuously shocked by the enormous evidence of the ease with which fervent faith and the cruelty of the trade in flesh could co-habit – inasmuch as many hundreds of slaving vessels are documented as being named after dozens of different Christian saints, with no less than forty-seven of these invoking the same patrol saint as that of the ship that ended so many lives in Clifton: Saint Joseph.

Recovery of such pasts – forgotten in the process of writing history – is part of the answer we give to those questions that are often posed to us: “Why do we do this work? Why seek out the shipwrecks of slavers? Why the Slave Wrecks Project?” Yet this is only part of the answer. If one measure of research is its capacity to disturb history through recover of the past, another is its ability to utilise the capacity to disturb how we think of the future, by highlighting the connections between the conditions of the present and the past from which it springs. And thus, what is disturbing is not only what happened within the waves so long ago, nor even that this has since been forgotten, but rather, how what transpired over two centuries ago in this place is linked to what transpires there today.

The slave trade represented by this wreck is one link in a long chain of past conditions, each of which has meticulously shaped the link that followed, to cumulatively produce our shared present. Nowhere are these more prominently displayed than in the stark contrasts between the wealthy enclave of Clifton and the post-apartheid nation it is part of – a scenario that is played out again and again, in ways different but fundamentally the same, halfway around the world in the Americas.

Though the historical record recounts in some detail the disposition of all that was salvaged from the wreckage of the São José still deemed of any value, it remains markedly silent about where the bodies of the enslaved who died that day were buried. We suspect that the final resting place of those who perished would have been selected for its immediate convenience, and thus that the dead today lie under one or more of the luxury residences that crowd every valuable inch of real estate right up to the beach in this privileged community. What we can say with certainty is that, in being summoned from a forgotten past to represent the slave trade and its long legacy to the world, their final resting place provides a metaphor for illustrating how forgotten pasts undergird the present.

If our research journey started with a search for the site of a shipwreck, it has brought us over time to the realisation that the site of that story is far more extensive than we initially could have ever guessed. The journey of the São José extends in the most immediate sense from the interior of Mozambique, where enslavement first occurred, to a submerged site and the unknown graves somewhere near it, in a small cove in South Africa. It includes the descendants of its sold survivors, some of whom surely walk the streets of Cape Town today. It also encompasses the global enterprise of its owners, who mixed slaving with other businesses in locations as wide-ranging as India, Lisbon, Brazil, São Tomé, and Montevideo – a far-flung incidence of globalisation two centuries before the term ever came into vogue.

It intersects with other stories whose protagonists walked streets – as slave traders or enslaved – in dozens of ports, and on hundreds of plantations scattered across the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately, the story of the São José is entangled with so many similar stories that insist we should strive to not forget about a brutal practice – the slave trade – that in all of its difficult detail laid the very cornerstone of modernity. Time after time as we have dived on the site of the São José, we have been reminded of the larger story that this archaeological remnant of merely one instance of the Middle Passage represents.

Understood in this light, the question of “Why the Slave Wrecks Project?” becomes moot. How can we not search for the evidence of what was so foundational in the formation of our modern world? How is it possible that such meagre attention has been paid to studying and preserving the remnants of such a significant, and central, part of our past? How can we not reach out to recover these lost stories? What do we risk missing, as we build our future, if we not examine its links with these pasts – if we do not fully understand the role of the Middle Passage in bringing us to where we now all are?

As maritime archaeologists, we know well that each time we dive beneath the waves, we hold the distinct privilege and sacred honour of searching for, and touching, what is perhaps the most literal embodiment of the Middle Passage.

And when we do, it always touches us back.