(soothing music)
– There’s all this history that exists.
Maybe the metaphor of water is good when you dive.
It’s a completely different world.
It’s so below the surface.
Yes, let’s do some gear checking.
And I think African history is like that.
We have not touched the surface.
It’s worlds of it below.
So that makes me inspired.
It makes me excited.
My name is Tara Roberts.
I’m following a group of black scuba divers,
historians, and archaeologists who are searching
for slave shipwrecks around the world.
I often think of the middle passage
as the origin story.
Specifically for Africans in the Americas.
So the middle passage is actually the triangular
travel root that was taken during the slave trade.
They estimate that there were approximately
35,000 ships that brought about 12 million Africans
to the Americas.
But, likely, 500 of those ships
wrecked on the passage over.
Of those 500 ships that wrecked,
we know that somewhere around five
have been found,
and only two have actually been documented and excavated.
So, this whole portion of history,
it’s just missing.
That no one is looking for,
thinking about, adding back into our collective memory.
(chattering)
(bell ringing)
– Attention everybody.
Attention on deck.
Attention on deck.
We have
a log,
a master log, of every diver.
In this master log–
– The mission of diving with a purpose is
for people of African decent, specifically,
to participate in
restoration work
around our oceans.
And to resurrect and recover our history.
(bubbly music)
No we have an area of this artifact scatter
and we will use that area to place this along the baseline
to give us an accurate idea of how the wreck
was displaced over time.
– It’s everything down there on the sea floor
has a story to tell, essentially.
And so they’re just developing
the skills, initially, to go on a wreck site,
assist maritime archaeologist to tell the story
about what happened in the wrecking event,
where the ship came from, was constructed.
Just everything around the wrecking event
and the ship itself.
Right now we are going to measure
this area here,
a lot of
wreckage.
We’re not sure what it is, but we’re trying to
get the area surface of this whole area.
So we’re going to do that first.
– The search for slave ship wrecks,
it requires divers, for sure, to go down
and to be able to find the wrecks
an use their eyes and their skills to search.
But, it also relies very much
on historians and archeologists.
These wrecks are not intact.
Most of them were wooden boats,
so they’re in pieces all over the ocean floor.
It’s not like you could just be diving
and go “ah-ha, I found a slave ship wreck.”
Really, you have to go through the archival records.
– Welcome back.
(laughing and chattering)
– What’s happening with these scientists,
these historians, these archeologists
who are participating in the diving with a
purpose of work, they are gathering the evidence
that shows who we really are.
That shifts the story that’s been told for generations
about what it means to be black.
These people are doing the science,
they’re doing the work to disrupt that narrative.
(upbeat music)
– What we’re doing here with DWP,
what we do as like, historical archaeologists,
we tell untold stories.
We tell stories that haven’t made it into
our history books, because people like us don’t
write those history books.
So, there’s a way us being down there, under water,
on land, asking new questions, creating a new archive
so that people after us have the sources they need
to really ask thought-provoking questions about their past,
their present, and where they can go in the future.
– The human journey of Africans in the Americas
has not been told.
From this lens, anywhere,
and what a really
interesting story to tell.
(upbeat music)
