Black History from the Depths

Tara Roberts, a National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller, follows a team of Black divers on a quest to document and identify sunken wrecks of slave ships around the world.

Divers investigate an artifact as part of the effort to document wrecked slave ships. Photo: Brenda Altmeier (NOAA)/Courtesy of Chris Searles
Divers investigate an artifact as part of the effort to document wrecked slave ships. Photo: Brenda Altmeier (NOAA)/Courtesy of Chris Searles

Into the Depths explores, discovers, and documents wrecked slave ships from the Middle Passage.

The National Geographic six-part podcast, Into the Depths, which launched January 27, 2022, follows Tara Roberts, a National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller, as she follows a team of Black divers on a quest to document and identify sunken wrecks of slave ships around the world. The ships were part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, that trafficked millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

Roberts sets off on a journey of a lifetime with divers and marine archeologists, descendants of the survivors of shipwrecks, and historians investigating the lost stories of the slave trade. Along the way, she meets up with her family, friends, spiritual advisers, and a poet to help tell the stories of these ancestors and delve into her own roots—and challenge her own assumptions about home and belonging.

Diver and National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller Tara Roberts.
Diver and National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller Tara Roberts. Photo: Wayne Lawrence/National Geographic

Host Tara Roberts

Roberts earned her undergraduate degree in communications studies from Mt. Holyoke College and a masters in publishing studies at New York University. A former editor for CosmoGirl, Essence, Ebony, and Heart & Soul magazines, she believes deeply in giving shape and substance to the original ideas of women and girls and encouraging their bold action and achievement. She even founded and edited a magazine for and about women and girls called Fierce. Its tagline was “For women who are too bold for boundaries.”

Roberts herself is no stranger to action and achievement. She spent a year backpacking around the world to find and tell stories about young women who are change agents, which led to the creation of a social enterprise that supported and funded their big ideas. She first saw a picture of Black divers at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

“The picture showed Black women who were members and instructors of ‘Divers with a Purpose’—and that was an amazing thing to learn. These were people who looked like me, not necessarily historians, not scientists, but Black women, the majority of whom were just regular people—filmmakers, teachers, and so forth. And the placard next to it explained what the organization was doing: searching for and hoping to document slave shipwrecks!”

The Middle Passage

Historians estimate that approximately 12,000 slave ships crossed and recrossed the Atlantic during the four centuries of The Middle Passage; some 36,000 voyages brought about 12.5 million Africans to the Americas to become enslaved workers. As many as 1,000 of those ships were lost at sea, everywhere from off the coast of Africa to the Caribbean, and in the coastal waters of the southern states, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But fewer than 10 slave ships have been found.

Archaeologists Justin Dunnavant (left) and Ayana Flewellen are co-founders of the Society of Black Archaeologists, and instructors with Diving With a Purpose.
Archaeologists Justin Dunnavant (left) and Ayana Flewellen are co-founders of the Society of Black Archaeologists, and instructors with Diving With a Purpose. Photo: Wayne Lawrence/National Geographic

Divers with a Purpose

The group Divers with a Purpose was established to search for those wrecked ships and recover not just any artifacts still intact, but to recover their history—lost in the depths of time as well as the depths of collective memory. These were not ships, after all, that carried sunken treasure for hunters to find and recover—and get rich from. Instead, these vessels carried a particular cargo with the very purpose of changing them from human beings in Africa to beasts of burden in the “new world.”

Roberts was fascinated to learn about the purpose of this divers group, but even more fascinated that a Black divers’ group existed at all.

“This picture of Divers with a Purpose —the majority of folks are Black, though not all are Black Americans—what a revelation!” She then asks herself, “Would I have paid as much attention if it were a picture of Black men? I don’t know.”

But, adventurer that she is, she went to a place right there in Washington to learn to be a diver. She did her first training in 2018.

Learning to Dive

“I was not a scuba diver at the time, though I loved the water; I was a good swimmer and loved swimming in the ocean, in pools, but not with scuba equipment. And when I learned what the group was doing and learned about this history of wrecked slave ships, I also learned that fewer than ten wrecks have been found. That felt not right to me. This history hadn’t been a priority before, and they were making it a priority.

“I did a three-month course with a Black dive club in DC: Underwater Adventure Seekers. It had its sixtieth anniversary in 2019. It was formed in 1959 by a man who is considered the grandfather of Black diving. Professor Albert José Jones at the University of the District of Columbia was a marine biologist who had learned to dive in the army during the war. He realized that most diving clubs had no spaces for Black folk. Despite his credentials and training, he wasn’t always welcomed when he tried to participate. So he started a group, and slowly more and more people joined. Now the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABSD: www.nabsdivers.org), founded during the 1980s, has over 2,000 members around the country.

The slaveship Clotilda.
Kidnapped people being ferried toward slavery can be seen in the cargo hold of the Clotilda. Photo: National Geographic

The ships

Among the ships that Divers with a Purpose has worked on are one off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa; the Guerrero, discovered off the coast of Key Largo in Florida; and the Henrietta Marie, also in the Florida keys.

The Henrietta Marie was the first of the lost slave ships to be found. It was discovered by treasure hunters and salvagers who brought up artifacts without documenting them, took them on a tour, but also reached out to Dr. Jones. It was then that NABSD came to them and reviewed the artifacts, which began to spark the idea that maybe there are more. Ken Steward of Nashville, who is the southern regional representative of NABSD, got interested.

“Then,” continued Roberts, “around 2005, an archaeologist in Key Biscayne Park thought she knew where the Guerrero was. And since you can’t dive on these sites by yourself, she reached out to NABSD and invited Ken down. He then got more divers, got them trained, learned how to map and find a shipwreck.”

Bringing it to the Public Eye

Roberts explains how her own interests in adventure, history, women’s achievement, and writing and editing, came together for the National Geographic podcast currently being aired.

“We have a diaspora, we’re walking on the ground but with no real idea how and where we got here. It was that [mystery] that interested me in bringing it to a broader audience. So I got to know this crowd of divers; it was fun, but also serious, and so I wanted to focus on the story. So I quit my job and began telling the story.”

Roberts received a National Geographic grant to do the first leg of the work in 2018. She traveled with the group to Mozambique, South Africa, Benin, and Senegal in Africa; to Costa Rica, and to Florida and Alabama—where another ship, the Clotilda, was found in 2019.

A map shows the routes the Clotilda took to smuggle West African captives into the United States. Image: National Geographic

“There’s also a possible ship in St. Croix, and another in St. Thomas,” Roberts says. “The active mission now—though not positively identified—is in Costa Rica, where the shipwreck found has earned its first stage of proof but is still waiting for last stage. So it’s not official yet that it’s another slave ship, but it’s likely.”

From MIT, to National Geographic, to You

Roberts began working on a long-form narrative in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she was a 2019-21 fellow. While there she was forming the idea of an “Into the Depths” podcast.

“I was writing blog posts—200 to 300 words each—and I realized that talking about this history is too short. So at the MIT lab (which is all about thinking about documentary in innovative ways) I thought about what should be the right way to approach this? And I came up with the idea for an audio story.”

So Tara applied for and received a National Geographic grant; became an explorer/storyteller, did a blog post, and developed it into the current six-part podcast.

Inspiration, Grief, and Remembrance

We remarked that many African American children are adventure seekers at heart but have few outlets for their interests. Like skiing and hiking, scuba diving has long been a primarily White sport; this information could be a new focus for them. And indeed Tara Roberts’s work might help make it so. As our interview approached its end, we asked her for a summary of why this work is so meaningful to her and others. She shared this heartfelt statement:

“It’s believed that one million, eight hundred thousand—1.8 million—Africans died in the Middle Passage crossing. History books don’t give credence to that, there isn’t documentary proof, so the information doesn’t appear. And those are just the individuals who perished in the ocean. They are people who are not being mourned, not being grieved. Where are the memorials to them? Divers with a Purpose is working to elevate and reclaim that story from the depths.”

To watch Into the Depths online, go to www.youtube.com. To learn more about the podcasts, visit NatGeo.com/IntotheDepths. Follow Into the Depths on Instagram and Facebook at @storiesfromthedepths.