Found her descendants and an extraordinary reckoning. It is rains who in 2019 discovered the infamous ship which brought the last enslaved africans to america and then disappeared for 160 years. The book is a powerful timely narrative described by the washington informer as an actionpacked. Whip smart true account thats filled with science history and compassion. Rains conversation partner tonight is professional professor schwande mustachean. So before i introduced the two of them, i have a few very quick notes first. We are going to put in the chat a link to the website of a local brooklyn bookstore the Community Bookstore so that you can easily with a click or two explore the book and purchase it if youre so inclined. Second like all of our talks you have the option to use closed captioning. That button is at the bottom of your screen and finally in most importantly youre invited to share your questions tonight. Just type them into the q a box at the bottom of your screen and we will take as many as possible towards the end of the program. Now, let me say a word to about each of our guests and and hand it off to them. Ben raines is an awardwinning environmental journalist filmmaker and charter captain who lives in fairhope, alabama. His earlier book is called saving americas amazon the threat to our nations most biodiverse river system. Hi, ben. Okay, i was muted. Im back good to see you. Thank you for having me. Im excited to be here. So one day and was was the kim is a historian with specializations and slavery at sea medicine black womens history terror violence policing and public memory. Shes currently in associate professor in the departments of history and african and African American studies at washington university. She is the author of the awardwinning book slavery at sea terror sex and sickness in the Middle Passage. Welcome day. Thank you so much. Well, im excited to hear this conversation. So im going to disappear and hand it off to you. Thank you both for being here. Okay . All right, and thank you to everyone being here this evening and for seeing value for these incredible conversations that were about to have this evening. So again, i want to thank the Brooklyn Public Library and more importantly for bringing us both myself and been into direct conversation with the world all at once. So ben i have to start you open up pull me in immediately a secret beneath the murky waters of an alabama swamp has been revealed. A secret in alabama, so can you maybe pull back and tell us how you came to the secret then . Well talk a little bit more about the secret and then ill follow up with Something Else that perhaps is even connected with believability of African Americans or africans. So lets start with what drew you in . So i was an Investigative Reporter here in mobile for 20 years and i did a lot i was an environmental journalist primarily writing about contamination in often in minority Communities Just like africa town and so in that 20 years i never once thought about looking for the clotilde and it was this sort of urban legend almost in in mobile where people said, oh, yeah the clotilde and but you know, they just talk about that in africa town and it was kind of dismissed, but there was a big mural you would drive by all the time, you know my association with africa town was that they were big paper mills there and asphalt factories and a lot of sewer spills and i would go, you know one of my first stories here in mobile 20, some years ago was a woman who every time it rained her yard flooded with raw sewage and i would go there and i would put her in the paper over and over and we would be talking about across a mode of sewage. That was africa town, you know to me that was like they were i was trying to fix these problems and stuff. So a few years ago a buddy of mine who used to work in the paper with me. Jeff dude called me up and said hey, you should look for the clotilde and i didnt really even understand at that point. This was 2017. I didnt really even understand it was lost. I just knew the last slave ship had come into mobile. I didnt know the whole story that involved burning this ship to hide it and that it had been illegal to bring in enslaved people when it happened and all that stuff. My friend had heard a local historian on the radio whos actually the city of mobile historian. And he said this is the greatest mystery in americas maritime history if we could ever find the clotilda that would really be something so im on the phone. My friend says you got to look for the clotilda and i just dismissed it. I was like thats like looking for pirate treasure. Thats ridiculous. Im not gonna find a ship thats been missing for 160 years. But we hung up the phone and i typed clotilde into google and was instantly sucked in bought all the books and started going to the primary Historical Documents that were many of them housed in mobile in the Public Library in places like that. And that was thats how i got started and here we are now. Well, i have to say thank you for that because its interesting when we move beyond a legend and then begin to actually give credit to truth that that has been transmitted. So even by the fourth page were hearing descendants saying that we were called liars and that we werent believed. So what was it that made you believe . This story this this you know these many black people who had passed along history and history. Well one of the key elements had to be sylvia induce book and and its a dreams of africa in alabama and the moment i started reading that you know, it is such a welldocumented history. Theres no denying it. It was you know, it was very clear to me. This all happened. This is all this is all true. This ship is somewhere in this giant swamp north immobile, which is called the mobile 10 saw delta where i happened to make part of my living as a river guide i take people in my boat and we go look. This is the most diverse swamp in the but the most diverse river system in north america, and this is a quick little side, but alabama has more species of fish turtles salamander snails muscles you name it aquatic creatures than any other state and has more species per square mile than any other state. So thats my association with the swamp. Ive been writing about it and studying studying it for 20 some years. And so i was already intimately familiar with it and the mayors famously that this the family that that did the clotilda mission the was this man timothy mayor who was a steamboat captain in alabama and became very very prosperous and prominent had nine steamboats and basically made became one of the richest people on the gulf coast moving cotton up and down the rivers and he owned plantation and his brothers all had plantations. Um, so theyre still here theyre descendants are still here. Theres a state park that i launched my boat from all the time. That is mayor state park named after one of the brothers who participated in the clotilda in bringing these, you know, kidnapping these people and bringing them. So thats how present they are in modern day mobile. And so that you know, there was that it just it was right there and i was like well if that ship is in that swamp, which i know intimately and and this is a big swamp. Its about 13 miles wide and about 60 miles long. Um, so imagine that for a minute were talking about 250,000 acres and they supposedly burned a ship somewhere in there. So that was kind of the you know, the it i new it was real. I knew these were real people their descendants were here and it wasnt that long ago. I have interact had interactions with one of the members of the mayor family. Who was timothy mayors greatgrandson. He just died a few weeks ago, but thats how close this is, you know, the descendants in africa town are great. Great or great grandchildren. This is not that long ago and i just thought i could i could tease out the mystery if i started digging into it. Well, thank you for believing the story and then again pursuing the mystery. So lets dive into the mystery. I really want to start with the bit because something so casual within lead to absolute destruction of lives. So can we can we start there possibly . Yeah, and so the bed is very famous. Timothy mayor famously made a bet on his steamboat one night that he could bring in a load of enslaved people. One of the things i did was tease out why he made this bet what was going on in america that made him make this bizarre bet if you think about it, and so um to set the stage bringing in enslaved people had been outlawed in 1808. There was when they when they wrote the declaration of independence and the constitution there was they were trying to kind of cater to the Southern States and they said all right, were not going to do anything regarding slavery for 20 years and 20 years to the day after they made that deal in the Constitutional Congress and all that thomas. Jefferson signed a new law making it illegal to bring in enslaved people in 1808. So Flash Forward we are now in 1859 on the deck of mayor steamboat. And theres this debate going on and so you know, this was picture antebellum, alabama the South Plantations big hoop skirts. Thats thats the world. Were in. Incredible wealth here in mobile very wealthy people are on mayor steamboat within and there its after dinner. Theyre out on the deck. Theyre Smoking Cigars drinking whiskey and talking and what they were talking about is a case that was going on in georgia regarding regarding a ship called the wanderer. And a flamboyant playboy there and named Charles Augustus lamar ridiculous name. Who was mixed up in horse racing and gold mining all kind he was wasting his familys massive wealth all kinds of ways. Um, and so he sent a ship to africa with the idea, you know, his dad was cutting him off financially because he was just a spendthrift so he came up with the idea of i can send a ship to africa and buy humans for a hundred dollars and bring them back here and sell them for a thousand five hundred dollars. So he was literally trying to make money. And so he sent the ship. It came back to, georgia. They offloaded the people and then a few weeks later word was out and and he got arrested and they put him on trot trial was covered nationwide the New York Times was writing about it the new york tribune. In fact charles the man i mentioned famously challenged the editors of both the New York Times and the new york tribune to duels and during his court case. He challenged a Navy Commodore who was testifying against him to a duel and they went out in the street and magically missed each other. So there this guys on trial for his life because illegal slaving was a hanging offense. It was a capital crime. So mayor and the people on his boat were talking about that case and there were a couple of yankees on the boat and one of them said, i think they should hang the lot of to scare everyone else off from doing this talking about people bringing in slaves. Well, the the south economy was tied up in the price of slaves. So in the northern slave states, maryland, virginia, you could buy a person for about five hundred dollars but down in South Alabama and in alabama period in georgia, you know where they were really growing cotton. The price of enslaved people had tripled or quadrupled so they were a or 2,000. Now you have to understand in todays money. Were talking about 55,000. Huge amount of money a big increase so a lot of people wanted to reopen the atlantic slave trade. So that the price of people would go back down to like charles said, oh i get them for a hundred bucks in africa. That that was the whole story of the alamo. You know that that whole deal was trying to make texas a slave state, you know, we hear this. Oh save the alamo, but theres another story there. So on the deck of the boat mayor says nonsense, theyll hang nobody i could do it myself and bring in a load inside of two years. And he said about doing it and within about eight months he had accomplished the task and and you know, he won this bet he made and his reason was a little bit different than charles who was trying to raise money mayor wanted to thumb his nose at the government. He wanted to be a man of action. He wanted to aggressively say i can do this. And so the whole time the ship was sailing to africa, he bragged all over mobile that he had done this so much so that the point that the local paper ran an article saying the clotilda has gone to africa for a lot of slaves and that ran in papers around the country. Which later came back to haunt him, but we can get into that in a minute. Thank you. Yes it um again going back to what may seem so casual but quite the statement to say im gonna take on the government while an economy is crumbling and then trying to and then also being inspired openly then for that to be in the media while this is now illegal. So lets talk about the void. Well, you know the the passage over but more importantly the world of deals that he would walk into so youre going with confidence, but then lets talk about where he went and then the world that he went into well, so an important caveat here merit didnt go he hired somebody because he was trying to put somebody else at risk, so he hired this man captain William Foster and foster gathered up a group of itinerate sailors men of the masked as he called him, but he he sought out people who had no family connections in mobile. You have to see mobile back then was the so the ports in america the three top ports were new York New Orleans and mobile. New orleans and mobile were shipping cotton out all over to europe and the rest of the world. Incredible wealth had come to these places and and so foster goes, you know. Leaves from here with 27 pounds of gold that Timothy Mayer had given him and Timothy Mayer had paid him 35,000 to do this. Which and promised him 10 of the enslaved people when they get back so foster if he did this risking his life mission. And went to africa he was looking at making about a million and a half dollars in todays month. So he was purely a mercenary going to do this. So hes gathered these people from from you know mobile, which was like a pirates of the caribbean kind of port you have to i mean there were foreigners all over money everywhere was a very exotic place at the time. So he gathers up these itinerant sailors. They dont know that theyre on a slaving mission and they leave so mayor they set sail right after they get past cuba. They hit a hurricane that that just does bad damage to the ship and almost tears the rudder off. The ship is crippled. It cant make an Atlantic Crossing so they pull into a caribbean port. And and and to repair the ship. When theyre in the port well before they get to the port one thing happens. Theyre being chased by an antislaving squadron ship a british man of war. Patrolling the waters for slaving ships and even with his rudder almost torn off in the ship heavily damage foster decides to run instead of surrender and let them come on board and make sure hes not transporting people. This tipped off his crew because the ship they thought they were carrying a huge load of lumber going to the caribbean, you know, yellow pine from alabama and theyd come back with a little rum or sugar. You know, it was a standard you have to think of these ships as 18wheelers of the 1800s. They were delivering goods delivering goods all over the place. So the crew figures out that the wood down is just a cover. Theres only a layer of wood under the wood are supplies for for keeping a hundred and plus people alive in the hold of the ship on the way back and they realize instantly they were on a slaving ship and so they mute me. Foster offer to double their pay and they said, okay well go so they fixed the ship they sail to africa. They went to wida, which is in modernday benite which is next to nigeria. And the reason they went to wida is because the mobile newspaper had an article in it saying weeda has reopened to the slave trade because wed have had signed a treaty with the english that they wouldnt do slave trading anymore and a new king came in and said, you know what were going back to the family business. So wida at the time was one of the top three slave ports in the world and and had been for hundreds of years, you know, we there the other slate ports very famous and everything, but we do was in that group and you know a a dutch slave trader from the 1600s wrote in the 1600s wrote. You could go to various ports around africa and get three or four people in a week. You could go to wida and have thousands in an hour. And that you know, so that tells you they hit industrialized the capture of people the capture of fellow africans to sell them. So in the mobile newspaper foster and mayor read weed is reopen people can be had for 60 ahead. So thats where they sail they get there. And of course the slaving squadron is a big deal, you know fosters worried about being captured and being hung. And the heats kind of on thered been a number of captures and everything. So he gets there. They anchor the boat. He gets taken a short and negotiate with a prince who is one of the you know, the king was king lele and so they they go there and foster is ready to negotiate the day he arrives and they dont let him talk to anybody related to the sale for eight days. So he thinks hes being set up for capture and he writes about this in his journal. Um, and hes thinking theyre gonna wait theyre gonna load my ship up with people. Theyre gonna take my 27 pounds of gold and theyre gonna set the the slaving squadron on me and ill be captured before i ever leave. This almost happens. But foster comes into an incredibly strange country and and we learn a lot about it from zorniel hurston who wrote barricoon about the experiences of cujo lewis. So simultaneously while foster is sailing across the atlantic the dahoman army is marching to capture people to have more people for sale. When the day homan army marched then you have to think of this country is about the size of georgia or alabama or pennsylvania. Um, and the dahoman kingdom was about the size of a big city in one of those states, atlanta, philadelphia. And so for three or four hundred years the people in atlanta or philadelphia captured millions, three or four Million