[Curiosities] A shipwreck hidden off an iconic Cape Town beach reveals the horrors of the slave trade

[-Sn!PeR-]

 

For three weeks, since the Portuguese São José Paquete d’Africa lifted anchor in Mozambique, the 512 enslaved Mozambicans crammed into its hold had been living a nightmare of seasickness, dehydration, disease, and degradation. Ahead lay a harrowing four-month crossing to Maranhão, Brazil, followed by a lifetime of forced labor in the cane fields.

On the voyage perhaps 20 percent would die, the average mortality rate on a slave ship, where African people were shackled, packed in like cargo, and made to endure horrendous conditions. As many as two million souls perished on tens of thousands of ships that sailed the notorious Middle Passage, as the journey across the Atlantic is now known. Their bodies would be tossed overboard and consumed by sharks that trailed behind, so many that scientists believe sharks altered their migratory patterns to follow the slave ships. But on December 27, 1794, 24 days into its voyage to Brazil, the São José was caught up in a wild storm near Cape Town, South Africa.

The captain sought shelter in Camps Bay, but the São José crashed against submerged rocks and began to break up. One can only imagine the terror belowdecks when the water began pouring in. Up top, captain and crew managed to see themselves safely ashore. Since the stricken ship was only a hundred yards off the beach, the men were able to set up a rescue line and bring about half their captives ashore before the São José finally sank.

 

 

The crew members were not being heroic. Saving the lives of the Mozambican people was an act of salvage rather than one of mercy. The survivors were promptly sold into enslavement in South Africa as a means of recouping some of the losses on the voyage. Those who were not rescued in time—212 souls in all—drowned. The loss of their lives was recorded as the loss of so much cargo in the report the captain submitted to the Dutch colonial authorities in what is now Cape Town on December 29, 1794. It was duly filed and over time the incident was largely forgotten—until 2011, when underwater archaeologist Jaco Boshoff, a coprincipal investigator with the Slave Wrecks Project, found the document while looking for clues about the ship in the Western Cape archives.

Launched in 2008 with a mission to search for slave shipwrecks and research the global history and legacies of enslavement across the African diaspora, the Slave Wrecks Project is coordinated by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and The George Washington University. Its leadership team of international partners includes AfrOrigens in Brazil; the U.S. National Park Service; the Iziko Museums of South Africa; Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal; and Diving With a Purpose, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training people in underwater archaeology and documenting African slave trade shipwrecks and the maritime history of African Americans.

 

Treasure hunters had discovered the wreck in the 1980s and identified it as an earlier Dutch ship, but copper fastenings and sheathing found at the site suggested a later period. The intriguing captain’s report of an 18th-century Portuguese slave ship foundering within sight of Cape Town helped Boshoff and his colleagues narrow the search effort—in collaboration with archivists, historians, and archaeologists from Mozambique, Brazil, South Africa, Europe, and the United States—to locate the São José and tell its story.

When the ship’s remains were eventually identified in 2014, the São José became the first shipwreck known to have been carrying enslaved people at the time of its sinking. Its ballast of iron bars, used to offset the weight of the ship’s human cargo, as well as the remnants of shackles found in the debris put its identity beyond doubt.

 

 

Searching for sunken slave ships

 

An estimated 36,000 slaving voyages are believed to have been made during the nearly four centuries the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in operation. These voyages remain the largest forced migration in human history.

More than 12 million Africans were kidnapped and trafficked thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean into chattel slavery, forever uprooted from their homes, families, and cultures—a massive trade in human beings, which lasted from the 1400s well into the 1800s. Some estimates run as high as 20 million. Many captives would rebel and resist. Many would perish en route. Yet of the estimated 1,000 slave ships believed to have wrecked on these journeys, only a dozen or so have since been found—and even fewer have been archaeologically excavated, recorded, and conserved.

“Maritime archaeology has traditionally been focused on sunken treasure or locating famous warships, great liners, or the lost ships of explorers,” says Dave Conlin, an underwater archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service whose brief is to find and preserve sites of national significance anywhere in the world. “Slave ships aren’t famous, and they seldom have any treasure associated with them, and so they’ve been overlooked.”

 

Trade in Mozambique

 

“The São José represents one of the first attempts to bring East Africa into the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” says Conlin. Until then, European slave traders had focused on Africa’s west coast, a source of slaves since the 15th century, when the Portuguese began making their first voyages in search of a sea route to Asia. The slave trade had been prospering along these coasts for centuries, with local rulers selling prisoners they’d taken in raiding parties in the interior. European traders brought unprecedented demand, as well as guns to intensify conflicts and arm middlemen raiders, to acquire cheap human labor for plantations and colonies in the New World. As this commerce continued into the 18th century, the appetite for goods grown in the Americas skyrocketed. The cultivation of sugar for European consumption became a driving force in the growing trafficking of human beings between Africa and the Americas. By the 1790s high demand for slave labor from sugar planters in Brazil, rising competition, and scarcity of supply pushed Portuguese slave traders to look farther afield. The slave trade in East Africa and especially their colony, Mozambique, offered a solution.

 

One of the first to test this new market was the wealthy Pereira family, owners of the São José. The ship set sail from Lisbon on April 27, 1794. After an uneventful passage it arrived in Mozambique, where kidnapped Mozambicans were marched aboard and packed together in cramped, unsanitary confines belowdecks.

Few firsthand accounts exist of what it was like to be transported on a slave ship. One is an autobiography written in 1789 by author and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who was abducted from the Ibo region of the Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria and trafficked from West Africa to Barbados. “The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there . . . but now that the whole ship’s cargo had been confined together it became absolutely pestilential,” he wrote. “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.”

 

Those forced aboard the São José faced a journey more than double the length of those shipped from the slave ports in West Africa. It was a voyage some 400,000 East Africans would make over the following decades, but not the 512 people aboard the São José. Their journey ended in Cape Town, either as survivors sold into enslavement or beneath the pounding waves of Camps Bay.

(Where were enslaved Africans taken from? The answer could be hidden in their bones.)

“Diving on the wreck is extremely challenging,” says Kamau Sadiki, board member and lead instructor at Diving With a Purpose. “The water is bitterly cold; there is a lot of kelp and powerful swells. For me, though, the most challenging moment was my first glimpse of it, seeing the reality of these huge ship’s beams jammed in the rocks, knowing what happened here and sensing the terror those people must have felt. I had to stop and gather myself before I could go on.”

 

None of the kidnapped people from Mozambique would see their homeland again, but more than 200 years later those who died aboard the ship would have their homeland come to them. Informed of the ship’s discovery, the Makua people of Mozambique, whose ancestors had likely been aboard, sent a cowrie-shell basket of earth to be sprinkled over the wreck to honor the dead and return their story to public memory.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/slave-ship-shipwreck-transatlantic-slave-trade