FROM THE TRENCHES

THE CASE FOR CLOTILDA

A shipwreck designated archaeological site 1Ba704 should, say archaeologists, also be called Clotilda, one of the most notorious vessels in U.S. history. The path to identifying the wreck as the last ship to carry enslaved Africans to the United States has been challenging. And it began with the wrong wreck.

In 1855, William Foster, a shipbuilder and businessman born in Nova Scotia and trained in the shipyards of the northeast, traveled south to Mobile, Alabama, where he built the schooner Clotilda. On the first of her 40 commercial voyages, she sailed to Havana from Mobile with unknown cargo. On her last, in 1860, she traveled to Mobile from Ouidah in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey, carrying 110 Africans destined for the slave markets of New Orleans. By then, it had been illegal to import slaves into the United States for more than 50 years.

The U.S.government first searched for Clotilda shortly after learning of her illicit voyage, but the endeavor proved fruitless—just after offloading his human cargo, Foster had torched and scuttled his ship. There have been periodic efforts to locate the vessel since then, but it was not until January 2018, when a ship in the Mobile River designated archaeological site 1Ba694 was speculatively identified as Clotilda, that archaeological investigation began. “It didn’t appear to me from the news photos and from the size of the wreck revealed by Google Earth to be a close match to what we know of Clotilda,” says maritime archaeologist James Delgado of the archaeology firm SEARCH. Close examination and documentation by SEARCH archaeologists soon revealed that 1Ba694 was built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century on the Pacific Coast and was 183 feet long, far too large to be Clotilda. From the firsthand account of the launch, the official registration records, and insurance documents, Clotilda was known to have been less than half that size.

Having been enlisted to lead, SEARCH, in cooperation with the Alabama Historical Commission, identified 14 potential targets for further exploration in a section of the river that had never been archaeologically surveyed. “Our priority was to focus our identification efforts on those wrecks that were possibly ,” Delgado says. “At first there were four candidates, then two, and then just one.”