Possible Slave Ship Found in Alabama

MOBILE, ALABAMA—According to an Associated Press report, a wooden shipwreck exposed by particularly low tides in a river delta in southwestern Alabama may be the Clotilda, said to be the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States in 1860. The importation of slaves was outlawed in the United States in 1807, but a plantation owner who had made a bet that he could sneak African slaves into the country, past the federal troops guarding Mobile Bay, in the days leading up to the start of the Civil War, employed an Alabama steamboat captain to do so. The Clotilda’s captain, William Foster, wrote that he burned the ship after it delivered its cargo of 110 captives. “[T]he location is right, the construction seems to be right, [it's] from the proper time period, it appears to be burnt,” said archaeologist Greg Cook of the University of West Florida, who examined the wreckage. Cook and his colleagues will attempt to further verify the ship’s identity. To read in-depth about a group of enslaved people who were marooned on an Indian Ocean island, go to “Castaways.”