KEY LARGO, Florida (29 August 2004) -- It was a passage like thousands of others made in the shadow of an untamed island chain off Cuba -- 561 Africans shackled below, the Spanish ship that claimed them gliding under cover of darkness toward a colony still fueled by the slave trade. On the night of Dec. 19, 1827, however, an otherwise routine haul of human cargo on the Spanish-flagged Guerrero turned into a shipwreck that archaeologists and others are literally trying to piece together nearly 200 years later. Using iron-sensing magnetometers and old records as their guide, a team of researchers is trying to locate what salt and storm have not claimed of the slave ship Guerrero, which crashed into coral while being pursued by a British-flagged vessel -- the HMS Nimble -- patrolling off the Bahamas. In the end, the Guerrero sank as part of a tragedy whose history, like that of other slave ships, has yet to be fully written. ''We don't have a lot of those [ships] that have survived, and those that have are on the bottom of the ocean as shipwrecks,'' said Corey Malcom, director of archaeology for the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West and the project's lead researcher. The Cuba-bound Guerrero slammed against a coral reef at full sail a few miles off North Key Largo under fire from the British vessel. Accounts from the time report the Guerrero's masts broke off and fell forward, while a hold crammed with Africans filled with saltwater. More than 41 people -- all of them African -- perished. But the drama was not over: Shortly after, the Nimble also hit the reef. But that collision wasn't as hard. At dawn, enterprising salvagers were on the scene, tossing overboard ballast and cannon balls to lighten the Nimble's load, and placing the Guerrero's rudder on the Nimble so the British ship could continue to Key West. The Guerrero was unrecoverable, though much of its cargo wasn't. But Spanish crew members loaded onto the wrecking vessels soon took matters into their own hands: They hijacked their rescuers and forced at least 400 Africans to auction in Cuba in the wreckers' boats. Aground on the reef, and partially submerged, the Guerrero was abandoned and eventually broke up. At least 100 Africans avoided recapture and were taken to Key West. There, slavery was legal, but the importation of slaves was not. Soon, a U.S. marshal based in St. Augustine took custody of the Africans and placed them on North Florida plantations for a year until their transport to Liberia. The trajectories of the Guerrero and the Nimble have been deduced from captain's logs, newspaper clippings and other records, but scholars believe that what's left of the Guerrero -- and it may be mostly iron -- will crack open another portal. ''Now we are starting to move into the archaeology of it,'' Malcom said. ``This is a trade that changed from country to country and period to period and each one is going to have its own story to tell.'' There are two other known slave ship wrecks off the Keys: one near Marathon that was found by hobbyists a half century ago but has never been formally studied; and that of the Henrietta Marie, an English slave ship found some 35 miles off Key West by Mel Fisher 32 years ago. A traveling exhibit of that ship's artifacts is making its way across the United States. MANY SHIPS Scholars believe there are many more such ships off the Keys, resting places for Africans who were not among the 12 million who survived the Atlantic crossing to be sold into bondage. | | SMALL PIECES: Diver Bernd Altmeier measures a piece of wood at a site being explored in the search for a shipwrecked slave ship. BRENDA ALTMEIER/FLORIDA KEYS NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY The Keys' shallow coral reefs, the nuances of the Gulfstream and the area's vulnerability to hurricanes conspired to make salvaging wrecked boats profitable. Each vanquished vessel had a tale. ''There are so many stories, and ships from the earliest days of Spanish exploration to Civil War blockade runners. It's really an astounding physical maritime history,'' Malcom said. Because recovery is expensive and time-consuming, modern-day salvagers -- like the legendary Fisher, who discovered the Spanish galleon Atocha -- have tended to follow the gold. Slave ships, by contrast, may hold little financial incentive, but offer untapped historical and educational promise. ''The complexity of the story about this particular ship, I think, is one that is useful in terms of the public because the public's understanding of slavery and the slave trade -- besides being something you don't talk about much -- is very rudimentary,'' said Pier M. Larson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Among those working with Malcom are experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Key West-based RPM Nautical Foundation, as well as Denis Trelewicz, an amateur Upper Keys historian whose obsession with the Guerrero spurred much of the recent activity. NOAA has provided a $15,000 grant to assist the painstaking effort to literally sweep for metal ship debris using a magnetometer, or magnetic sensor, that's elevated over divided sections of a four-square-mile area off Key Largo. 40 LOCATIONS In recent weeks, Malcom has found about 40 locations where he believes anchors, nails, cannonballs, or metal rigging from both vessels may lie. Next, he plans to craft a map of dive sights from data culled from the magnetometer. If closer inspections yield items, researchers will have to seek permission from NOAA and the state to raise them and take a closer look. The attempt to piece together the Guerrero's demise, he said, is at its very beginning. ''It is a graveyard, as a lot of shipwrecks are,'' said Malcom. ``I think this one is especially poignant because you have at least 41 people who died under conditions of duress, and their remains may still well be there.'' |
