Researchers have returned to the Alabama coast near Mobile to assess the sunken remains of the last slave ship to bring captive Africans to the United States more than 160 years ago.
The Alabama Historical Commission said the team will begin a 10-day evaluation of the Clotilda remains beginning Monday. Experts have said that it is the most complete slave ship ever discovered.
The agency has hired Resolve Marine, a salvage services company, to work on the Clotilda. The boat sank on the muddy Mobile River after illegally dumping 110 West Africans off the Alabama coast in 1869, decades after Congress banned the international slave trade.
The company plans to anchor a 100-foot (30.5-meter) barge at the site with equipment to support divers and store artifacts pulled from the water for analysis and documentation.
“It is a great duty to ensure that the Clotilda is evaluated and conserved,” Aaron Jozsef, project manager for Resolve Marine, said in a statement.
Some have spoken in favor of pulling the remains out of the water and displaying them in a proposed museum, and officials have said the work to be done will help determine whether such a project is viable.
Clotilda’s voyage was financed by a wealthy Alabama businessman, Timothy Meaher, whose descendants still own large tracts of land near Mobile. Enslaved upon arrival in Alabama, after the Civil War some of the Africans created a community called Africatown USA, a short distance north of Mobile, and many of their descendants still live there.
In 2019 it was determined that the shipwreck in the river was that of the Clotilda, and since then the authorities have been evaluating the place to decide what to do with the remains. Although small pieces of the two-masted schooner have been brought to the surface, researchers have found that most of the vessel — including the brig in which the slaves were transferred — is still intact.
In collaboration with the state and SEARCH Inc., Resolve Marine said it will carry out work that includes evaluating Clotilda’s hull and limited excavation for artifacts. He also develops a plan to conserve the wreck where it currently stands in the river, a few miles north of Mobile.
The $1 million state-funded project “will contribute to the collective understanding of the ship and the site’s potential to provide significant archaeological information about the ship and its last voyage,” Jozsef said.