Yes, The Slave Trade Also Enslaved East Africans

220 Years Later, A Slave Shipwreck Off Capetown, South Africa Uncovers the Death of 212 Enslaved Africans
 
The Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) is a long-term collaboration between six core partners, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The project is designed to combine research, training and education to build new scholarship and knowledge about the study of the global slave trade, particularly through the lens of slave shipwrecks. Core partners for SWP include the George Washington University, Iziko Museums of South Africa, the South African Heritage Resource Agency, the U.S. National Park Service, Diving With a Purpose and the African Center for Heritage Activities.
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Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa

By HELENE COOPER 

MAY 31, 2015- nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women.

Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.

In the end, their journey lasted only 24 days. Buffeted by strong winds, the ship, the São José Paquete Africa, rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and came apart violently on two reefs not far from Cape Town and only 100 yards from shore, but in deep, turbulent water. The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the slaves survived. An estimated 212 slaves did not, and perished in the sea.

On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain. It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.

The story of the São José, like the slave trade itself, spanned continents and oceans, from fishing villages in Africa to sheikhdoms where powerful chiefs plotted with European traders to traffic in human beings to work on plantations in the New World. Fittingly, the discovery of the São José also encompassed continents and oceans. Divers from the United States joined divers in South Africa, while museum curators in Africa, Europe and the Americas pored through old ship manifests looking for clues.

In the end, the breakthrough that the shipwreck was of a vessel that had been carrying slaves came from something unexpected, the iron blocks of ballasts that were used to offset the weight of slaves in the hold.

ROBBEN I.Camps BaySite of shipwreck

Cape Town

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“The more cargo that you have that is living, the more ballast you need because live cargo moves and is not as heavy as, say, tubs of molasses,” said Paul Gardullo, historian and curator at the Smithsonian African-American museum. “Ballast becomes a signature for slaving, and a direct corollary to human beings.”

For the museum — set to open on the National Mall in Washington next year — the find represents the culmination of more than a decade of work searching for the remains of a slave ship, any slave ship, that could help tell the story of the 12 million people who were sold into bondage and forcibly moved, over some 60,000 voyages, from Africa to North America, the West Indies, South America and Europe.

Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, had been looking for such a wreck when he took the job in 2005. “I really wanted something from a slave ship,” he said in an interview. “How hard could that be?”

Exceptionally hard, it turned out, because the museum wanted something original to showcase, and ideally a slave shipwreck that was connected to the United States. Visits to maritime museums in Liverpool and Lisbon for leads on slave ships yielded little. Mr. Bunch heard of a ship that had left Bristol, R.I., in the late 1790s, sailed to Ghana to pick up 144 Africans, then sailed across the Atlantic and sank off the coast of Cuba. But trying to find and excavate that ship proved “too complicated,” he said. Mr. Gardullo, the museum curator, was also chasing leads that went nowhere.

But around 2010, Mr. Gardullo met Stephen C. Lubkemann, a George Washington University anthropologist and maritime archaeologist, who had heard from Jaco Boshoff, a maritime archaeologist with the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, that a shipwreck off the coast thought to be a Dutch merchant ship might be something else. Treasure hunters diving near Camps Bay had identified the ship as the Schuylenburg, which had sunk in 1756.

Mr. Boshoff was coming to another conclusion after multiple dives he and his colleagues had begun in 2010 into waters surging so furiously that they likened them to swimming in a washing machine. Pieces emerged pointing to a different ship altogether.

There in the wreck they found copper fastenings and copper sheathing, which had not come into common use on ships until later in the 18th century. Intrigued, Mr. Boshoff began to dig into archival records, particularly those relating to the Dutch East India Company from 1652 to 1795.

In 2011, as he was poring through the Western Cape Archives Repository that is part of the South African National Archives network, Mr. Boshoff found a critical document: a record from the inquest of the captain of the São José, describing what happened on Dec. 27, 1794, when the ship went down.

The document, which is in Portuguese and paraphrases the inquest testimony of Capt. Manuel João, is chilling. The ship had hugged the shoreline to protect itself from strong winds, but was so close to land that it crashed into rocks and became stuck on two reefs in turbulent surf. It began to come apart right where the treasure hunters had found what they believed to be the Schuylenburg.

A building on Mozambique Island, just off Mozambique in East Africa, where slaves were housed. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times

Because the slaves aboard were valuable cargo, the crew and captain tried to save them. Some were sent to shore in a barge, according to the testimony, but the strong surf prevented the barge from returning to the ship to pick up more slaves. Hours passed.

Those aboard “made ropes and baskets,” the testimony said, according to an English translation, “and continuing like this were able to save some men and slaves until 5 in the evening, when the ship broke to pieces.” But by then, only half of the slaves on board, along with all of the crew, had been rescued. Some 212 slaves died. The document refers to the crew members as “men,” but not the slaves.

“The slave owners had a vested interest in people surviving,” Mr. Lubkemann said — people who were considered cargo, in much the manner today that sellers would consider livestock being transported as cargo. “It’s like you have a barrel of apples, and you don’t want them to spoil,” he said. “It’s a horrible analogy but that’s how the owners viewed them.”

The captain’s testimony led researchers in Mr. Lubkemann’s Slave Wrecks Project to comb Portugal’s national shipping archives for more information about the São José. By 2012, they had found the ship’s manifest, which detailed the São José’s departure from Lisbon in April 1794, bound for Mozambique Island, just off Mozambique in East Africa, where the slave trade had expanded from the more heavily trafficked coast of West Africa.

Included in the manifest was what turned out to be the most important clue in the search: The São José had left Lisbon with 1,500 iron blocks of ballasts.

From there the hunt moved to Mozambique, where in 2013 researchers combing through government archives unearthed a document dated Dec. 22, 1794, about 20 days after the ship left Mozambique Island. The document confirmed the sale of a man who was taken from the mainland to Mozambique Island and was aboard the São José.

For the researchers, this was just one man, one slave, out of 400, and he had been given no name in the document save “Black Man.” But it was a record, with a tangible placement of a slave aboard the São José.

By far the biggest piece of the puzzle, and the finding that resonated the most with the researchers, had surfaced, literally, in 2012, when Mr. Boshoff and his colleagues were diving in the waters below Lion’s Head. One afternoon, a diver came to the surface saying that he had seen iron blocks buried in the ocean floor.

Mr. Boshoff suited up and slipped into the water to see for himself. There, resting in the sand, were black iron bars with holes in them.

Iron blocks of ballasts recovered from the wreck of the São José, a Portuguese slave ship, on which they were used to offset the weight of the human cargo. Credit Iziko Museums

He understood instantly what they were. Ballasts. Iron blocks of ballasts.

“I’m a scientist, I’m not one for massive amounts of emotion,” Mr. Boshoff said. But, he added, “I knew immediately.”

Iron ballast bars were part of the currency of the slave trade. Ships undergoing those long ocean voyages needed weight to keep them stable, and human beings in the cargo hold do not weigh enough. Their weights go up and down. Some of them die.

So slavers used iron blocks of ballast to counterbalance the variable weights of their human cargo.

More than anything else that divers had pulled up so far from the São José site, from a pulley block to refined finishing nails to encrusted shackles, the iron ballast bars had meaning for the researchers involved. “That people were calculating the weight of human bodies that way — it’s difficult to imagine,” Mr. Lubkemann said.

So far, no skeletons or even partial remains have been found in the wreck.

On Tuesday, when Mr. Bunch of the Smithsonian’s African-American history museum will join his counterparts in Cape Town to announce the discovery of the São José, there will be a memorial service near the site where the ship went down. Divers will place soil from Mozambique Island on the underwater site to memorialize the graves of the 212 drowned slaves.

The officials will announce that recovered objects from the ship, including iron ballast blocks and encrusted shackles, will go on long-term loan to the African-American museum in Washington, from Iziko Museum, which remains the primary owner of the remnants. Mr. Bunch will talk about his recent visit to Mozambique Island, to a fishing village that once held slave pens.

In the interview, he said he was gratified that he had finally found a slave shipwreck for his museum. “I wanted to find a way for people to remember all those nameless people who died crossing that Middle Passage,” he said, referring to the middle leg of the triangular voyages of European ships that sailed to Africa to collect slaves, transported them to the Americas in exchange for raw materials, and then took the raw materials back to Europe.

The space in the museum for the items pulled from the sea, he said, will include recordings of voices describing the slave trade — “a place,” Mr. Bunch said, “for you to mourn and to remember.”

Part of the remembrances, he hopes, will focus on the slaves of the São José who did not die at sea on Dec. 27, 1794. Those people — more than 200 of them — survived the wreck and made it to shore.

And there, within two days, they were sold again.

Jada F. Smith contributed reporting.

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220-year-old shipwreck gives up its grim secrets about the slave trade

Thomas Luny (1759-1837)
Iziko Social History Collections (Photo by Pam Warne)

source: e-torch.org

Depiction of the port of Cape Town, South Africa where the São José slave ship planned to stop before continuing to Brazil. The ship wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope before arriving in Table Bay.

In 1794, the São José-Paquete de Africa, a Portuguese slave ship, was wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Destined for Brazil, the ship was carrying more than 400 slaves from Mozambique when it struck submerged rocks and began to sink. The crew and more than 200 of those enslaved were able to make it safely to shore, but tragically, more than half of the enslaved people aboard died in the rough waters. Perhaps even more tragically, those who survived were were resold into slavery within days.

The São José left Lisbon April 27, 1794, to purchase slaves in Mozambique, with the intent to continue on to Brazil. The Cape of Good Hope in South Africa had long been supplied with enslaved people from parts of East Africa, but beginning in the 1790s, East Africa also became a significant source of slaves for the Brazilian sugar plantations. The São José was one of the earliest voyages of the slave trade between Mozambique and Brazil, a massive trade in human beings, which continued well into the 19th century. More than 400,000 East Africans are estimated to have made the journey between 1800 and 1865, transported in inhumane conditions in voyages that often took two to three months; many did not survive the trip. For many years Cape Town prospered as a way station for this trade before ships began their long trans-Atlantic journey.

The discovery of the ship marks a milestone in the study of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and showcases the results of the Slave Wrecks Project, a unique global partnership among museums and research institutions, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and six partners in the U.S. and Africa.

Objects from the shipwreck—iron ballast to weigh down the ship and its human cargo and a wooden pulley block—were retrieved this year from the wreck site. A selection of artifacts retrieved from the São José wreck will be loaned by Iziko Museums and the South African government for display in an inaugural exhibition titled “Slavery and Freedom” at NMAAHC, opening fall 2016.

Remnants of the Portuguese for on Mozambique Island. twelve million people were sold into 

bondage and forcibly moved, over some 60,000 voyages, from Africa to North America, the West 

Indies, South America and Europe. (Photo by Joao Silva / The New York Times. 

See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/world/africa/tortuous-history-traced-in-sunken-slave-ship-found-off-south-africa)

São José Wreck

The Slave Wrecks Project, a collaborative effort between NMAAHC, Iziko Museums of South Africa, the South African Heritage Resources Agency, the George Washington University and a core group of international partners, uses slave shipwrecks to investigate the impact of the slave trade on world history. The still-developing story of the São José represents the work of researchers and scholars from Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal, Brazil and the United States. SWP has now amassed enough information in Cape Town, Mozambique, Portugal and Brazil to tell a story of the ship owners, captains and voyage of the São José. But what is most important is what can now be said about the enslaved Africans who perished in that shipwreck. The São José is the first known shipwreck to be identified, studied and excavated that foundered with enslaved Africans on board.

“Perhaps the single greatest symbol of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is the ships that carried millions of captive Africans across the Atlantic never to return,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, NMAAHC’s founding director. “This discovery is significant because there has never been archaeological documentation of a vessel that foundered and was lost while carrying a cargo of enslaved persons.

The São José is all the more significant because it represents one of the earliest attempts to bring East Africans into the trans-Atlantic slave trade—a shift that played a major role in prolonging that tragic trade for decades.”

The identification of the São José ship off the coast of South Africa provides an unparalleled opportunity for SWP to diligently excavate, conserve and prepare authentic objects of the trans-Atlantic slave voyage. The artifacts retrieved from the São José are uniquely powerful and authentic symbols of the Middle Passage. These objects and the story they tell will provide tangible and intimate touchstones through which people from around the world will be able to reflect upon and grapple with a trade that spanned the globe, shaped world history and through which millions tragically lost their lives.

Site of the São José slave ship wreck near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
Photo by Susanna Pershern, U.S. National Parks Service

Timeline

April 27, 1794—The São José, a ship owned by Antonio Perreira and captained by his brother, Manuel Joao Perreira, left Lisbon for Mozambique with more than 1,400 iron ballast bars in its cargo. Seeking new markets, it is one of the first attempts by European slave traders to bring East Africa into the broader trans-Atlantic West African trade.

Dec. 3, 1794—São José, laden with more than 400 captive Mozambicans likely from the interior of the country, set out for its destination: Maranhao, Brazil.

Dec. 27, 1794—Caught in variable winds and swells off the coast of Cape Town, the São José ran into submerged rocks in Camps Bay about 100 meters (328 feet) from shore. A rescue was attempted, and the captain, crew and approximately half of those enslaved were saved. The remaining Mozambican captives perished in the waves.

Dec. 29, 1794—The captain submitted his official testimony before court, describing the wrecking incident and accounting for the loss of property, including humans. Surviving Mozambicans were resold into slavery in the Western Cape. Apart from the court documents and scant reports throughout the years, the incident of the São José and the fate of those 200 enslaved Mozambicans passes out of public memory.

After 1794—The Portuguese family who owned and operated the São José continued their international slave trade and make several complete voyages bringing captive Mozambicans to Northeast Brazil where they are sold into slavery on plantations in and near Maranhao.

1980s—Treasure hunters discovered the wreck of the São José and mistakenly identified it as the wreck of an earlier Dutch vessel.

2010–2011—SWP discovered the captain’s account of the wrecking of the São José in the Cape archives. Combined with the treasure hunters’ report from the 1980s, new interest developed on the site. Copper fastenings and copper sheathing indicated a wreck of a later period, and iron ballast—often found on slave ships and other ships as a means of stabilizing the vessel—was found on the wreck.

2012–2013—SWP uncovered an archival document in Portugal stating that the São José had loaded iron ballast before she departed for Mozambique, further confirming the site as the São José wreck. The SWP later uncovered a second document in Mozambique confirming the sale of a Mozambican on to the São José. Full documentation of the wreck site begins in 2013. Complementary archival work continues at an advanced stage and is supplemented by additional work in Europe, Brazil and Mozambique.

2014–2015—Some of the first artifacts are brought above water through a targeted retrieval process according to the best archaeological and preservation practices. Using CT scan technology because of the fragility of the site, SWP identified the remains of shackles on the wreck site, a difficult undertaking, as extreme iron corrosion had occurred.

June 2, 2015—Soil from Mozambique is deposited on São José wreck site during a solemn memorial ceremony honoring those who lost their lives or were sold into slavery and bringing their story back into public memory.

2015 and beyond—Full archaeological documentation of the shipwreck site continues. Initial archaeological surveys and continued archival and community-based research begins tracking origins of slaves and sites in Mozambique, possible fate of survivors in Cape Town and the descendants of successive voyages in Brazil designed to trace a line between points of origin in Africa, the wreck site and subsequent points of destination in the Americas.
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Researchers pay tribute to slaves who died in 1794 Cape Town shipwreck

Divers scatter sand from Mozambique in honor of the doomed slaves from the Sao Jose slave ship at Clifton beach on the outskirts of the city of Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday, June 2, 2015. (AP / Schalk van Zuydam)

Christopher Torchia, The Associated Press
Published Tuesday, June 2, 2015 -ctvnews.ca

 

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- Against a backdrop of exclusive, sea-view apartments in Cape Town, South African and American researchers on Tuesday paid tribute at the spot where slaves died when the Portuguese ship that was carrying them into bondage sank in 1794.

Three divers, deterred by rain and wind that evoked the stormy conditions that wrecked the Sao Jose--Paquete de Africa slave ship, ventured a few feet (meters) into the surf of the Clifton suburb's beach to scatter sand from Mozambique in honour of the doomed slaves, who were being transported from the former Portuguese colony. The divers hugged each other and one shed tears.

The memorial was the culmination of years of digging in historical archives and into the sea floor, casting new light on the century-spanning, Atlantic slave trade, in which millions from Africa were sent to labour in the Americas at the height of European colonialism.

 Divers hug each other after they scattered sand from Mozambique in honor of the doomed slaves from the Sao Jose slave ship at Clifton beach on the outskirts of the city of Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday, June 2, 2015. (AP / Schalk van Zuydam) 

The submerged remnants of the Sao Jose, which was starting a grueling journey to Brazil that would have lasted months and traversed thousands of kilometres (miles), are located near one of Cape Town's most scenic beaches, in a country that emerged from white minority rule in 1994.

"It's there and it happened, right in this spot of paradise," said Albie Sachs, a former judge and anti-apartheid activist who opened his Clifton home to researchers, diplomats and journalists who attended the ceremony. "We have to look history in the face."

Sachs, who lost an arm and sight in one eye in a 1980s bombing in Mozambique by apartheid agents, said a legacy oppression is in the "sinews" of Cape Town, a popular tourist destination in a postcard setting at the southern end of Africa.

The wide windows and balcony of his home, reached by stone steps cut into a slope, overlook the area where the Sao Jose broke into pieces. Far above looms Lion's Head, a peak that draws many hikers.

More than 400 African slaves were on board the vessel when it sank in bad weather and rough seas, according to Iziko Museums, a group based in Cape Town. About half the people on the ship perished, though the captain and crew survived.

This year, divers recovered artifacts from the ship, including shackle remnants, iron ballast and copper fastenings that held the ship together. Some items will be loaned to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is currently under construction in Washington and which worked with Iziko Museums on the project.

"This is a place of beauty, of pleasure and also of pain," Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the museum, said in Sachs' home. "For us, this is an amazing moment to bring history alive, to make sure those souls are no longer lost."

Milestone discovery: Underwater archaeologists have found what is thought to be the first ever sunken slave ship. Artifacts from the wreck of the Sao Jose-Paquete de Africa have been recovered.

Officials have known the site of the wreck for many years. Research in archives in Portugal, Mozambique and South Africa helped confirm that it was a slave ship.

The wrecks of ships previously used to transport slaves and later refitted had been discovered in the past, but it is unique to find the remains of a ship that was active in the slave trade when it sank, according to researchers.

Standing on the beach, an American researcher surveyed the bay.

Stephen Lubkemann, associate professor of anthropology, Africana studies and international affairs at George Washington University, said the cold, churning conditions were treacherous and that "diving here is like diving in a washing machine."

The Sao Jose ran into trouble around 2 a.m. in December 1794, and the captain later recorded that "'our final solution was to crash disastrously upon the rocks,"' according to Lubkemann.
The slaves who survived, he said, were sold at auctions in the Cape Town area.