Researchers Discover Lost Slave Ship

A marine archaeologist compares the hull remains of known shipwrecks off East Caicos.

REUTERS/NOAA

For the first time, remains of a wrecked slave ship have been uncovered. Marine archaeologists located the ship off the Turks and Caicos Islands, where it sank in 1841. This accident set free the ancestors of many current residents of those islands, as 192 Africans survived the sinking of the Spanish ship Trouvadore.

Over the years the ship had been forgotten, said researcher Don Keith, so when the discovery connected the ship to current residents the first response "was a kind of shock, a lack of comprehension," he explained in a briefing organized by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But after word got out "people really got on board with it," he said, and the local museum has assisted the researchers. He said this is the only known wreck of a ship engaged in the illegal slave trade.

When the Trouvadore sank, the importation of slaves had been internationally banned but still flourished via pirate ships and illegal slavers that eluded British and U.S. naval forces in the region. The ship's 20 crewmen were arrested and sent in chains to Cuba for trial on what was a hanging offense, though their fate is not known.

About 20 of the African passengers were resettled in Nassau in the Bahamas. The rest were apprenticed to work in the salt ponds in the Turks and Caicos for a year in order to pay for their rescue, and then freed.

The artifact salesman noted in his letter nearly four decades after the shipwreck that "their descendants form ... the pith of our present laboring population."

Have you ever tried tracing your roots? If so, please share your own "discovery" stories with us below.

Geoffrey Gardner

Tags: Trouvadore | illegal slave trade | slave ship | turks caicos

11:40 AM ET | 12- 1-2008 | permalink

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