Burned Wreckage in Alabama May Be Lost Slave Ship

MOBILE, ALABAMA—USA Today reports that a search of the Mobile River has yielded burned wreckage of a ship that researchers say matches the characteristics of Clotilda, the last known vessel to bring enslaved people from Africa to America. “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,” says maritime archaeologist James Delgado, who led the assessment of the evidence, “but the physical and forensic evidence powerfully suggests that this is Clotilda.” The ship is known to have sailed its final voyage in 1860, a half century after the importation of enslaved people to the United States had been outlawed, and to have been burned after its illegal cargo was delivered. The more than 100 enslaved people on board Clotilda remained enslaved until they were freed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. Some of the survivors and their descendants then founded a new community in Mobile that is known today as Africatown. To read about a group of illegally enslaved people who were marooned on an island in the Indian Ocean, go to “Castaways.”