In the summer of 1860, the schooner Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay with a cargo of more than 100 enslaved people brought illegally from present day Benin in west Africa. The slaves were transferred to a river boat, taken up river, and Clotilda was burned to the water line and sunk. The slave trade had been banned in 1807, and this is believed to be the last slave ship in the United States. Clotilda remained submerged in the mud of the river, but in 2018 a reporter claimed to have found the wreck.
Since the preservation of historic shipwrecks are the domain of the states, the Alabama Historical Commission launched an investigation. It soon determined that the wreck in question was far too big to be Clotilda, but the publicity enabled them to launch a scientific quest to find the wreckage. A professional maritime archaeology firm, SEARCH, Inc., was commissioned to conduct a new search and by 2020 they found a wreck that they identified as Clotilda.
This engaging volume tells the story of Clotilda written by the professional archaeologists and scholars who searched and found the wreck. It is a fascinating case study of a daunting maritime research project that successfully used all the latest archaeological, historical, and scientific tools to find an important part of America’s past.
