SPEAKER_06: Hey, I'm Carla Wills from the Nat Geo audio team. All of June we're playing some of our favorite episodes. This one is episode six of Into the Depths with National Geographic explorer Tara Roberts, who follows a group of black scuba divers who traverse the globe in search of long lost slave shipwrecks. Cute little car.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's really little. I can find one. I'll get that child to do you later.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. You might tell me you're not looking for somebody. You don't call now, baby.
SPEAKER_20: Mom, please don't call me 10 times. Oh, I need the keys to the house. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Sunday evening. All right, my dear. Let's get a good hug.
SPEAKER_13: God bless.
SPEAKER_20: I'm off to Edenton, North Carolina, the town where my mom grew up to visit her family estate. That sounds super grand, doesn't it? The family estate. It's really just the house and land where she was born. When I used to visit my grandmother as a kid, my impression of the place was miles and miles of cornfields, lazy quiet, only the droning of bees and singing of crickets to break up the monotony of the day. I felt the oppressive weight of the silent country resting upon my shoulders back then. But now I wonder if there was something in this place for me, something necessary and strong that could also help ground and root me. In the last episode, we talked about collective trauma and the power of ritual and ceremony to heal. We also saw how healing can come from a direct connection to the ancestors on these ships. In this episode, we'll get even more specific and explore what kind of difference knowing your particular ancestry makes. I heard about this unique community right here in the US in a place called Africa town located in Mobile, Alabama. Many of the people who live there know that they have ancestors who were brought over on the Clotilda, a ship that trafficked humans during the transatlantic slave trade. And so I wanted to know more. Plus, I wondered if I could go as deep into my own history. Could I also trace my ancestors all the way back to a slave ship? And does it matter if I can? If you're not connected to your ancestors, it's like you always going to be wondering
SPEAKER_18: lost misguided, not knowing what direction you should be taking.
SPEAKER_20: This is our last episode y'all. And we're headed back into the depths to bring it all home. That is right after the break.
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SPEAKER_20: My trip to North Carolina was inspired by the people who came over on the Clotilda. The Clotilda is the last known ship that brought captive Africans over to the United States to Mobile, Alabama. And the incredible thing about the Clotilda is that some of the people who live in the area now in Africa town actually descend from those original captured Africans who were on that ship. These residents know the names of their ancestors. They know their stories. There is a direct connection. I had been to Africa town a few months earlier to meet them.
SPEAKER_10: My name is Joycelyn Davis. My name is Jeremy Ellis and I'm a fifth generation of Polly and Rose Allen, Charlie Lewis and
SPEAKER_10: Maggie Lewis who were enslaved Africans on the slave ship Clotilda.
SPEAKER_20: And say just a little bit more about who Polly and Rose are exactly. What you know about them.
SPEAKER_12: Rose Allen. Rose was one of the enslaved Africans on the ship. She was the first wife of Polly Allen. So we know that he was a reverend. We know that he, when he was enslaved, worked on the steamboat. That's how he found out about his freedom. He was a gardener. He grew onions and garlic and plums and apples. And also he was a carpenter. He built his house. The descendants grew up hearing the stories of how their family had reached Alabama from
SPEAKER_20: what is present day Benin and Nigeria. Growing up, I heard about the story of Timothy Mayer making a bet.
SPEAKER_20: It was 1859 and the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished by countries around the world. A plantation owner and ship builder in Mobile, Alabama named Timothy Mayer had heard that West African tribes were at war and that King Glele of the kingdom of Daome, in what is now modern day Benin, was willing to sell enemy prisoners to be enslaved.
SPEAKER_10: I heard that they came from different villages and they wanted to make sure that they spoke different languages so they wouldn't communicate with one another. So that was, I was like, wow. So it was a carefully thought out plan.
SPEAKER_20: Mayer's friend and partner, Captain William Foster, sailed there to purchase the local prisoners. He was there for about nine days where he would go down into the Barracoon and he would
SPEAKER_12: literally select Africans. What we know is that for every man, he would look to select a female, a woman to go. And so $9,000 plus some gold and silver, he was, he purchased about 125 slaves.
SPEAKER_20: Only 110 made it onto the Clotilda. One was Kosala, later given the enslaved name Kujo. We met him in episode four. He was interviewed starting in 1927 by writer, anthropologist, and one of my personal sheroes, Zora Neale Hurston. I actually named my cat after her. The book Barracoon, the story of the last black cargo based on those interviews with him was published recently. Kosala shared a firsthand account of the voyage as a captive.
SPEAKER_16: The boat we on called the Clotilda. Kujo suffer so on that ship, oh Lord. I so scared on the sea. The water, you understand me, it makes so much noise. It growl like the thousand beasts in the bush. The wind got so much voice on the water.
SPEAKER_12: And they were actually under in the bottom of the, of the Clotilda. And so it was a very brutal trip for them.
SPEAKER_16: Soon we get in the ship. They make us lay down in the dock. We stayed out 13 days. They don't give us much to eat. Me so thirst. They give us a little bit of water twice a day. Oh Lord, Lord, we so thirst. The water taste sour.
SPEAKER_12: What we do know is that they arrived July the 8th and they actually avoided customs. They knew that what they were doing was illegal.
SPEAKER_20: The ship arrived in the middle of the night and after those on board were taken off and hidden in the swamp at the edge of the river, Captain Foster needed to hide the evidence. He set the ship on fire and sank it in the muddy Mobile River.
SPEAKER_16: First they vied us up with some clothes. They kept us in the care of the Alabama River and hide us in the swamp. But the mosquitoes, they so bad, they bought us soap. So they took us to come burn Mayor's place and vied us up.
SPEAKER_20: The group was then dispersed, distributed to the financial backers of the Clotilda, with Timothy Mayer keeping 32 of the captured people. The punishment for this illegal act? Next to nothing. Maybe because of the close ties the mayors had with the city government. So with the kind of money and power he had, it was easy to take these kinds of risks. Then came the Civil War and in 1865, five years after reaching Alabama, the people who came over on the Clotilda were free. Their first wish? To return to Africa. But they didn't have enough money to buy passage. So the community decided to pool their earnings and purchase 57 acres of land. It probably cost around $300. With it, they formed their own version of home and called it Africatown, incorporating their agricultural knowledge and folk traditions. And Africatown took off. The residents built three dozen houses, a church, a school. They even had their own graveyard.
SPEAKER_12: That's a 14-year time frame. Essentially, out of those 14 years, only nine of those years, they were free. And they had the brilliance and the intellect and the passion and the wherewithal to do all of those things. I look back and I even try to reflect over, what did I do in 10 years? If that doesn't motivate you or get you excited, understanding that that DNA resides in you, then I don't know what will.
SPEAKER_20: More after the break.
SPEAKER_13: Welcome to North Carolina. So I'm here.
SPEAKER_20: I made it to the house. And I am parked. And Joseph Beasley, the guy who cuts our grass, is coming. But I'm just sitting here and looking at the property. Do you know if that's our land? If that's my grandfather's land?
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm not sure because all the way back to the—it's another path where you can come
SPEAKER_03: in and go down. I'm going to finish taking care of this very good. OK.
SPEAKER_20: I made it to my mom's childhood home, my grandparents' house in Edenton in Chawaun County, North Carolina. It was actually a big house, two stories with a porch and columns. But it was in a state. There was a big hole in the side wall, a hole I could actually bend my leg, stoop down, and walk through. Most of the ceiling in the kitchen had fallen down. There was plaster, debris everywhere, even visible mold on the walls. The windows had all been broken and there was glass below them. I don't know why this just dawned on me. But my grandfather, who only had a fourth-grade education, managed to buy a former plantation with around 100 acres of land back in the 1930s. How could I have not understood the significance of this growing up? I think it was learning the story of Africa Town and understanding the legacy of that land that put this acquisition in a new light. It made me realize I'd probably miss more about my family's legacy. Plus I'd never really thought to see how far back I could go. I decided to hire a genealogist to help me go back further and deeper. Can you hear me? Renata Yarbrough Sanders specializes in African ancestor genealogy. So do you think that I can find the ship that my ancestors came over on?
SPEAKER_13: I never say never, but it is something that not very many people have been able to do.
SPEAKER_20: Renata explained that the problematic date in the research is 1870.
SPEAKER_13: That's when you get to that fork on the road.
SPEAKER_20: Many people call it the 1870 brick wall because before it, enslaved African Americans were not officially documented by name, age, gender, or otherwise. Renata said she'd see what she could find out about my great-great-grandpa Jack, who was born in 1837. Is there anything that maybe I didn't ask that comes to mind?
SPEAKER_13: Just a reminder for you to be patient and to not really get your hopes up because it's going to be tough, very tough to find those generations before him that will take us back to a slave ship. And so, as I mentioned to you, that's not a really, I don't ever like to say it's never going to happen, but it's not realistic.
SPEAKER_20: I may not be able to find the specific ship, but it feels good to be looking. The residents of Africa Town didn't have to do this particular kind of searching. There'd always been rumors and folklore in Africa Town around where the wreck of the Clotilda was located. It was known that when the ship reached Mobile, William Foster had wanted to hide the evidence.
SPEAKER_15: And there he says, I burnt and sank my schooner in 20 feet of water.
SPEAKER_20: Jim Delgado is the historian and maritime archeologists who has been at the helm of the mission to find the ship. Fred Hubert, the archeologist in residence at the National Geographic Society helped with the search along with DWP lead instructor Kamal Siddiqui. You met him in the last episode. There's always the people in the community and always asked the question, we need to
SPEAKER_18: find the ship. We need to find the ship. And I guess in a sense they knew how important it was to find a tangible artifact that got them where they are to help tell their story. But I think it was back in January of 2018 due to some meteorological conditions in the region the water level of the Mobile River dropped and it exposed its old wooden vessel, possibly the Clotilda.
SPEAKER_15: And then crusading environmental reporter Ben Raines went and figured out that there likely was a ship there. Had come to a pretty good idea of which stretch of the river it was.
SPEAKER_15: So we.
SPEAKER_20: Jim Delgado's company search along with the National Park Service, the Slave Wrecks Project, diving with a purpose and with support from National Geographic.
SPEAKER_15: We all reached out and offered to help. We all went out there working with the Alabama Historical Commission who were the stewards of all of the history and archeology. We met out in March.
SPEAKER_20: 2018.
SPEAKER_15: We went, we mapped, we measured.
SPEAKER_18: And came to the conclusion very quickly that this vessel was too big, too broad based on the measurements we knew of the Clotilda. You know, it had a depth of whole of about seven feet, a length of almost 88 feet. And the breadth was about 23 feet or so. So when we did the quick dimensions of this earlier ship, we know that it was over 100 feet long. And so we knew right off it wasn't. But it was an interesting vessel nonetheless.
SPEAKER_20: The local community though had gotten excited. So the following year, Jim, his team, Fred and Kamau went out again to a different part of the river, which their research showed was a more likely spot. And they started the search again.
SPEAKER_15: We went back twice, systematically mowed the lawn with sonar, with magnetometers that detect buried masses of metal that exert a magnetic influence.
SPEAKER_04: We're out there on this iron barge towing this sonar behind us, making a beautiful map of the bottom. Tara, it was so hot. It's like there's no shade. It's just, I mean, it's 120 degrees. You know, people cope. We had people who were fishing who came by and they kind of laughed at us and said like, you know, it's so hot. Even the alligators aren't out.
SPEAKER_20: They found hundreds of anomalies. It turned out the area was a ship's graveyard, meaning wreckage and debris from many ships.
SPEAKER_15: One target stands out though. It's the right size, but sonar records alone aren't good enough. It really needs to be systematically looked at. We have to dive and look at everything.
SPEAKER_18: It's a very dangerous sort of environment, simply because the wreck is in the condition that it's in. It could actually collapse at any point.
SPEAKER_20: The search team needed to put a technical diver into the water.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. That's got all wood holes.
SPEAKER_18: So when he got in the water, he immediately said, I can't see a thing. And so he started filling his way around and then he came up on this wooden wrestle.
SPEAKER_05: That's got all wood holes reaching over six to seven feet above. Particle release. Correct. And we all could hear the communications on the barge, right?
SPEAKER_18: And so that's when those things had sort of gotten real tense. What is he going to say?
SPEAKER_05: He said, I feel something here.
SPEAKER_18: I feel this bow. I'm lining my hands up. It's over the top of my head and I can feel it. Put another diver in the water, came back with some samples, some very small samples because we don't want to destroy anything. It was evidence. It was enough material to analyze the wood. So with that, we were able to then announce that we had identified this wreck as the likely
SPEAKER_15: Clotilda. It's a time capsule of sorts that has been cracked open. And in that, I will just say this simply. When you are in that space and you see how small it is very tangibly, physically, viscerally gives you a glimpse of just what happened here. This is it's it's a very sobering and terrible place to be. And yet it serves as tangible physical evidence, not only of the crime that was done, but of the ability of this site to continue to help tell this story.
SPEAKER_20: Back in Edenton, I went looking for my own history. Edenton totally charmed me this go round. Big porches, the pier downtown, friendly folks who wave at you from across the street. And as it turns out, my family's hometown has a surprising connection to an enslaved woman who had escaped bondage using a network I'd never heard of. Outside the historic Edenton State Historic Site, I found a plaque. It had on it the name Harriet Jacobs. When I met with the local historian Charles Boyette, he told me an incredible story.
SPEAKER_01: She essentially hid out in her grandmother's attic for about almost seven years before she was able to escape on a ship dressed as a sailor on the maritime underground railroad. Wait, rewind.
SPEAKER_20: What? The maritime underground railroad?
SPEAKER_01: The maritime underground railroad was the hidden network of connections and safe houses that allowed enslaved persons to seek their freedom along the waterways. The waterways were the major arteries of trade back then before paved highways. And a very large portion of the sailors, dock workers, fishermen, just people who made their living off the water and waterfront were African American, either free or enslaved.
SPEAKER_20: Harriet Jacobs went on to write about her experiences being enslaved and escaping from slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. When I entered the vessel, the captain came forward to meet me.
SPEAKER_19: He was an elderly man with a pleasant countenance. He showed me to a little box of a cabin.
SPEAKER_20: Her account was one of the few known narratives of the enslaved. That's where these excerpts come from. The vessel was soon underway, but we made slow progress.
SPEAKER_19: Until there were miles of water between us and our enemies, we were filled with constant apprehensions that the constables would come on board. Neither could I feel quite at ease with the captain and his men. I was an entire stranger to that class of people. And I'd heard that sailors were rough and sometimes cruel. We were so completely in their power that if they were bad men, our situation would be dreadful. Now that the captain was paid for our passage, might he not be tempted to make more money by giving us to those who claimed us as property? I was naturally of a confiding disposition, but slavery had made me suspicious of everybody.
SPEAKER_20: Harriet's story wasn't a one-off, by the way. The Maritime Underground Railroad operated for years, leveraging the shipping routes that were already delivering goods from the South to the North.
SPEAKER_01: We have a marker down here on our waterfront. We have a picture of the type of boat she probably was able to escape.
SPEAKER_20: Whoa, this is just a wooden boat. It's like a rowboat. Yeah, she would have got to the ship on that.
SPEAKER_01: They would have rode her to the ship. Then it was on a regular ship.
SPEAKER_19: Ten days after we left land, we were approaching Philadelphia. I was on deck as soon as the day dawned to see the sunrise for the first time in our lives on free soil. We watched the reddening sky and saw the great orb come up slowly out of the water.
SPEAKER_20: I had never heard about either the Maritime Underground Railroad or Harriet Jacobs when I was at school, or the Clotilda either. Harriet could have been my role model as a kid. She was from my family's hometown, and I was destined for maritime exploration. Perhaps I would have felt the same sense of pride for her that the descendants of the Clotilda felt for their ancestors.
SPEAKER_18: I think Clotilda should be particularly U.S. history, if not world history, but it has a specific role to play. If we're not aware of these stories, we're just going to go along merrily. And then all of a sudden these stories pops up and people start asking questions, what? Why? Why wasn't I told this? Why wasn't I aware of this? So in order for us to go forward with a sense of justice, a sense of honesty, being candid with each other, we have to tell the whole story.
SPEAKER_20: Renata sent me an email. She had some results. She told me that Jack was indeed enslaved and that she had managed to find out who one of the enslavers was, a guy called James L. Roberts. I guess we get our name from him. She hadn't found a ship, but she had found out other things about my great, great grandpa Jack. First, he had land, a lot of land, at least 174 acres in total. Renata showed me the deeds, outlining the boundaries of the land he left in my great grandpa.
SPEAKER_13: Allotted to J.H. Roberts, beginning at a ditch on the road, middle of swamp, then up middle of swamp.
SPEAKER_20: Second, Jack was a chosen delegate to the 1865 Freedmen's Convention in North Carolina to discuss constitutional rights for freed slaves. Finally, there was evidence that Jack fought in the Civil War in the United States Colored Troops, Second Regiment, Company B. If that's your ancestor, it is a huge big deal.
SPEAKER_20: Not only does this bring up feelings of pride for me about Jack and my family, but it makes him feel like a real human being.
SPEAKER_18: I can trace my ancestry back to my great, great grandparents.
SPEAKER_20: Jamal goes back about the same as me, but he sees his ancestry in the Clotilda, even though his family didn't come over on that ship.
SPEAKER_18: I see my story as part of Clotilda's story as well. I knew enough about history to know that we're connected in that way. We have very similar stories to tell. Our cultural experiences have been very, very similar too. You know, the whole discussion of race, people find it very sensitive to talk about that when it's the bedrock of why we're where we are right now. And so we should have open dialogue and discussion, honest discussions about, you know, can we get to the point where we can treat each other as an individual, individual human beings. And so if we don't tell the Clotilda story, I don't think we'll be able to get there because the Clotilda story plays in these other slave vessels and the whole history of race and the efforts of white supremacy and the deconstruction of reconstruction, you know, how it played into getting us where we are now.
SPEAKER_02: Fred, look at this. It's like 10 of them in here. All right. It's going to kill me. Do you want to get in the car?
SPEAKER_20: Fred and I had gone to visit the house that Kosala of the book Barracoon built and lived in. But when we got there, we found a literal swarm of mosquitoes, perhaps greeted not that differently than Kosala had been when he reached Mobile over 160 years ago.
SPEAKER_16: The mosquitoes, they so bad, they bout eat us up.
SPEAKER_20: Joycelyn said she'd never seen anything like this before. You know where it is, right?
SPEAKER_02: Ah, yes. Shit. It just went in like 10 mosquitoes.
SPEAKER_20: Had to be thousands of mosquitoes that suddenly appeared from nowhere. Diving, bombing, biting, filling my car because Fred wouldn't close the door fast enough.
SPEAKER_20: I wondered if the ancestors were speaking to us that day, trying to get our attention.
SPEAKER_11: Again, I couldn't have planned this if I tried, but I ended up in Edenton during the first
SPEAKER_20: ever national Juneteenth celebration. June 19th, 1865 was the day that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas got the news that they were free. In Africa town, Jeremy's great, great, great grandfather was on the steam ship working. Here in Edenton, North Carolina, who knows where my great, great grandpa Jack was that day. But I like to think of him running home to hug his wife, Mary, spending their evening planning their future. And there I was in Edenton experiencing the new national holiday in a place bursting with family.
SPEAKER_11: I just love Edenton. I'm connected to the Roberts family through marriage. I've married into the Roberts family.
SPEAKER_02: And can we note that like we've never met before and you're just passing by and I'm like the Roberts and you're like, wait, which Roberts? Like that's crazy. So say what the connection is exactly.
SPEAKER_11: Well, um, Tina is your uncle, right? And I'm married to his stepson.
SPEAKER_20: I'm not going to go into the details of Uncle Tina here, except to say he's my cousin Karen's father. She's the one from the first episode who started doing all this family research in the first place. Kismet. The point here is that in downtown Edenton, I kept running into people who were family or who knew my family and it made me feel great. That evening there was a vigil. They lit a candle to get rid of the negative energy of plantation culture and citronella to dispel it. And then they topped it off with sage to bring in positive vibrations. I've spent my life thinking that this area was boring and that black people were disregarded at the bottom of the heap. It depressed me coming here, but I did a full one 80. I started calling realtors about buying property in town. As I sat on the porch of my BNB on broad street, feeling the breeze, I thought about what I'd learned so far. The necessity of telling this history of who tells this history of involving the community as framers of this history. I thought about this new idea of a global blackness, not based on geography that is emerging in my mind. I am, we are more than something created as a juxtaposition against something else. I thought about the power of ritual around these ships to heal our collective past trauma and this connection to the ancestors, to seeing glimpses of their full lives and stories that can make us feel pride. I felt more grounded. This journey following diving with a purpose of learning about the ships and of digging into my past has given me a new sense of pride. It's helped me see threads of resistance and rebellion. And I see that we actually have healed some of this trauma as a community. We're not at the start of this process. Some of you have known this all along. People like Kamau, people like Karen, like Lonnie, maybe even like you. I was late to the party, but I'm so glad I finally accepted the invitation. Since great-great-grandpa Jack was born in 1837, it's possible that I'm only a generation away from finding a ship and a direct route back to the African continent to knowing my whole story, or at least the fullness of these particular chapters. I needed to check in with my girl Karima. I wanted to ask her what she thinks about where I am now. Do you think I've changed?
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_07: I think the change is going to be a certain amount of peace. I think you've understood and come to that aspect of grace. All migration or movement or journeys aren't all traumatizing. They actually are creating and reforming and rebuilding and, you know, it's adaptive too.
SPEAKER_20: But where do we go from here around the search for more shipwrecks? Only a few wrecks have been found out of a potential thousand, and these missions cost money. Missions like DWP, Ambassadors at the Sea, and others need more divers, more equipment, more resources. You know Kamau, but do you remember Ken, Ayana, and Justin, DWP divers from earlier episodes? Well I asked them about their visions for the future.
SPEAKER_00: DWP missions needs to be, obviously maybe finding some more wrecks, but telling the story of the Africa and the Aspern and bring it back to life. And not to undercut it, right, and put it into the background. It needs to be a solid piece of history, taught in the schools.
SPEAKER_18: We do know there's a number of vessels out there. Up and down the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and the Caribbean and South America, up the coast of Africa, around islands like St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic, and all these other island nations as well. So we would like to train individuals, particularly young people, to have the skill sets to do this kind of work.
SPEAKER_17: I think it's critically important that DWP takes a project from beginning to end. DWP has done so much critical work on existing projects. The work they could do on their own projects could be even more powerful and more impactful.
SPEAKER_09: I don't quite know what that looks like right now, but I know it exists. It sounds cheesy, but it feels free, you know?
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, and I like it.
SPEAKER_14: What I think history does is it teaches you nuance. It teaches you subtlety. It teaches you complexity. It teaches you ambiguity. Imagine what a contribution you make. If all of America could embrace nuance and complexity rather than simple answer to complex questions.
SPEAKER_20: The words of Lonnie Bunch III, now Secretary of the Smithsonian, still ring in my ears. Lonnie now oversees the 19 museums and 21 libraries of the Smithsonian. Progress is definitely being made.
SPEAKER_02: Do you think it matters to know that kind of history, where we came from?
SPEAKER_20: I'm here with my nieces, Wu and Shai, trying to be the conduit for them that my ancestors have been for me. We're learning from each other. I think it matters.
SPEAKER_09: I think it's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02: Let me ask you this. Do you know that your ancestors, like way, way, way back came from Africa? Did you know that? Yes, I did know that.
SPEAKER_09: My ancestors came from Africa.
SPEAKER_02: Do you guys know about the work I'm doing?
SPEAKER_09: The history of the slave ships and about your family.
SPEAKER_02: I'm following these divers as they search for slave shipwrecks. So what do you all think about that?
SPEAKER_08: I think that's pretty cool. You get to explore more about the world and you get to learn more stuff that you didn't already know. And I think that's cool. Do you care about that history, like knowing all that far back?
SPEAKER_08: It's awesome. It's cool. Like when you get older, you'll be able to tell people that you had this cool aunt and she did all this stuff and she got to explore the world.
SPEAKER_09: I wish I could do it, but I still got school to finish up, which is boring because if I didn't have school, I would have been joined you on it, of course.
SPEAKER_02: Will y'all come scuba diving with me one day?
SPEAKER_09: Yes, I will. Yes, I will. Yes, we will. All right. This is what you're saying instead of Obama's yes, I can.
SPEAKER_02: It's yes, we will. Yes.
SPEAKER_08: If you loved this podcast, you can dive deeper at Nat Geo.com slash into the depths where
SPEAKER_20: we've got a ton of resources to help you explore this history. You'll find more on my work with these divers and stunning photos from photographer Wayne Lawrence. And for all our teachers, we have some great tools you can use in your classroom. Also check out our special in-depth feature in the March issue. Plus don't miss Clotilda, Last American Slave Ship, a film from National Geographic Studios premiering on Hulu in February. You can find all the links in the show notes right there in your podcast app. Please rate and review us and to support more content like this, consider a National Geographic subscription and listen to Overheard, our weekly podcast. That's the best way to support us and hear more adventures from around the world. Go to Nat Geo.com slash explore to subscribe. I'm National Geographic explorer, Tara Roberts, host and executive producer. Into the Depths is a production of National Geographic Partners and is funded in part by the National Geographic Society. It's directed by the awesome Francesca Panetta, who got us to the finish line. Thank you. And produced by the tireless ever ready Bianca Martin and my ride or die, Mike Olcott. Our poet is the brilliant wordsmith National Geographic explorer, Alia Pierce. Our executive editor is Carla Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Devar Ardilon. Our fact checkers are Kate Sinclair and Heidi Schultz. Our copy editor is Jennifer Villaga. Our production assistant is Ezra Lerner. Our sound designer, engineer and composer is Alexis Lex Atamora. Our audio engineers are Jerry Busher and Graham Davis. Additional reporting was done by Tiffany McNeil. Thanks to Harper Collins, publisher of Barracoon, the story of the last black cargo. Joshua C. Thomas was the voice of Kosala. Special thanks to Helene Pellet and our consultants who offered sharp critiques, insights and encouraging words when we needed them. Our rom team are Arab Louie, John Asante, Greg Carr, Celeste Headley, Ike Sreese-Kondarajah and Linda Villarosa. Deborah Adams Simmons is National Geographic's executive editor of history and culture. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences for National Geographic. Susan Goldberg is National Geographic's editorial director. Thank you to Flor Paysor from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Slave Wrecks Project for opening doors literally. To MIT Open Documentary Lab for being an amazing sounding board. Thanks to all our friends and family who listened to these episodes and gave early feedback. We appreciate you so much. Finally, we couldn't have done this series without the support, cooperation and friendship of Diving with a Purpose, Ambassadors of the Sea, the Society of Black Archaeologists and the Slave Wrecks Project. To learn more about Diving with a Purpose, follow them online at divingwithapurpose.org. And to my mom, Lula Roberts, for being our biggest cheerleader and reminding us always that the best is yet to come. And thank you for listening. We hope it's been a great journey.
