Slavers Burned the Last US Slave Ship to Hide Their Crimes. Now It's Been Found.

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | May 23, 2019 11:41am ET

After nearly 150 years, the last known ship used to bring kidnapped people to the United States to sell into slavery seems to have turned up off the coast of Mobile, Alabama.

Slavers used the Clotilda, as it was known, to bring 110 people snatched from present-day Benin to Mobile in 1860, according to a statement. That voyage took place 52 years after an 1808 law banning slavers from bringing more people to the United States to sell into slavery, and the year before the start of the U.S. Civil War. After the 110 kidnapped people were offloaded, according to the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC), the ship was burned and scuttled to hide evidence of the slavers' crime.

Now the AHC says a burnt wreck found off the Gulf Coast is likely the Clotilda. It doesn't have a name visible, but it matches known characteristics of the ship. [6 Civil War Myths, Busted]

"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," said James Delgado, one of the archaeologists who led the verification project, in a statement from the commission. "But the physical and forensic evidence powerfully suggests that this is Clotilda."

More:
https://www.livescience.com/65547-last-slave-ship-found.html?utm_source=notification

[Kind of Blue]

1. The article mentions the Clotilda as the ship

that brought the last known survivor of enslavement Cudjo Lewis, real name Oluale Kossola, to the U.S. Early last month, survivor Sally Redoshi Smith who lived longer than Cudjo was discovered. Both Redoshi and Cudjo recalled the nightmare of that journey to author/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.