 Hi there. I'm Ben Rains, author of The Last Slaveship, book about the discovery of the clotilde, which was the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. And so we're going to talk about the book. I'm going to do a PowerPoint, but first I just wanted to introduce the story a little bit before we get going. So the reason we're going to talk about the clotilde and the people who arrived aboard it is because this is the origin story for the African diaspora, not just the African American diaspora, but for anyone whose ancestors arrived in another country in the hold of a ship, including all of South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. And the reason I say this is the origin story is because there's no other story like it. We have the entire story from the perspective of everyone involved, and there's nothing like it in the record of enslavement, particularly in the United States. So the reason we have all this information about the ship and everything is because it happens so late. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States in 1808 by Thomas Jefferson. So it was illegal to import Africans into the country after that. However, illegal slaving continued, partly for economic reasons. The time of the clotilde story, which is 1860, the price of enslaved people in the South had become quite high because cotton had exploded as an industry, and they were needing more and more bodies to work every year. So in the Northern slaves, you could buy an enslaved person for about $500 back then. Down here, I'm in the Mobile Alabama area, that price was $2,000. Now to put that in today's perspective in terms of money, that's about $60,000. $30 today is equivalent of $1 back in 1860. So that was part of the impetus for this, was to bring people in. So the trip to the clotilde was actually done basically by a bunch of plantation owners to thumb their nose at the federal government. So that's why this happened in 1860. But because it happened in 1860, the people who were brought into this country were actually quite young. The 110 people on the clotilde were between the ages of 12 and about 30. So they lived for a very long time after the end of the Civil War. They were enslaved for about five years, but some of them lived up into the 1930s. For instance, Kujo Lewis, the most famous of the passengers on the clotilde. And they were interviewed dozens of times over the years. And actually their records were captured in several books, beginning with a book called Historic Sketches of the South in 1914 by a woman named Emma Roche, who was from Mobile, whose father was actually a Confederate war hero, believe it or not. Some of the Africans who came on the clotilde worked for her father as brave diggers at his funeral home. And so she had known them growing up. And she had reason to interact with them later when Kujo, who I mentioned a moment ago, was hit by a train on his wagon. And she happened upon the accident and got him medical help. Well, out of that came this, her befriending, a bunch of the Africans, and visiting them in their homes in the village they founded after the Civil War, Africa town. And so she wrote a book, which included interviews with 10 of them, who were still alive in 1914. So from her work, we then had Zorniel Hurston, who came back 15 years later and interviewed Kujo Lewis for her excellent book, Veracruz. So right there, we have from the mouths of Africans the experience of slavery. These people were, we know what their lives were like before they were captured in Africa and quite idyllic in many ways. We know what the slaving raid that captured them was like from their own mouths. We know what the march into captivity down the slave road. We know what life in the barracoon was like from their mouths. We know what the middle passage was like from their mouths. These are our records we don't have for the 12 million people who were enslaved because they were lost. They were not captured. And most of the people, by the time of the Civil War, most enslaved people in the United States had been born in the United States. So none of them had the experience of the middle passage. None of them had the knowledge of what life in Africa was like. So with the Clotilda people, we get this little time capsule sort of cast forward where we learn these things about them. But we also have the story from the side of the white enslavers. We have a detailed journal from the captain who sailed to modern day Benin to buy the people who were on the Clotilda. And then we have interviews with the people who perpetrated the crime straight over the next 30 years. So in the Clotilda story, we have the entire story of what happened to a group of enslaved people from the moments they were captured until they died in their new country many, many years later. So let's jump into the slideshow and get going from there. And I have to share my screen real quick and get us into the view. All right. Let's see. Okay. There we go. This is the cover of my book, The Last Slave Ship, the true story of how Clotilda was found, her descendants, and an extraordinary reckoning. And hopefully we are going to make it through all of those topics. So here we go. So as I mentioned, we have this story from the mouths of the people who were involved. You see here Kujo Lewis, who is on the left side of the screen. Then this is Charlie Lewis, who was not related to Kujo, but was also on the ship. And these people were the leaders of the group in Africa town for many years. And then Kupuli Allen, Poli Allen. And so these are some of the faces that this story is told to us through. These people were all interviewed. They were, I'm sorry, this is Peter Lee or Gumpa on the right, not Kupuli. These people were all interviewed by Emma Roach. So when we tell this story, this is their story. It is from their mouths that we're hearing this story. So our story begins with this man, Timothy Mayer, who was a wealthy Alabama plantation owner. Timothy Mayer was actually born in Maine and moved down to Alabama in 1835 as a young man and worked as a deckhand on steamboats. He was quite successful. He brought a bunch of his brothers to town. And by the time of the Clotilda story, by the late 1850s, they were all incredibly wealthy. They owned a fleet of nine steamboats. They owned a lumber mill and they all owned plantations. And together the three Mayer brothers, employed, not employed, enslaved about 50 people. So this is the man who financed the trip of the Clotilda. And it was his brain shot. Now, if you're familiar with the story, you've heard that it was done over a bet, that the Clotilda was sent to Africa based on a bet. And that's true. And it was Timothy who made the bet. So Timothy was running his regular steamboat run, up to Montgomery, to pick up cotton and deliver it down on board one of his steamboats, which was the Roger Taney, which he had named after the Supreme Court judge who presided over the dread stock case that ruled that enslaved people were not citizens, didn't had no rights, essentially. And so that gives you a glance into Timothy Mayer's mindset, the fact that he named a ship after this guy. He named another ship the Southern Republic, a hint at what he was looking for. He wanted a country in the South where the Atlantic slave trade would be reopened. So on the deck of his boat one night, he was after dinner, they were out on the deck smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, a bunch of the wealthy passengers in Timothy Mayer. And so think Antebellum, Alabama, Gone with the Wind, that's what this was, and these were very wealthy people taking passage on this steamboat. So they were discussing the news of the day, which happened to be a court case going on in Georgia that was being covered by newspapers all over the country. And that was the case of the Wanderer, which was another ship that had brought in a load of illegal captives and spread them around the country or around the South. And it was the same reason Timothy was doing it, both to make money, but also to thumb his nose at the federal government. This guy, Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, that's who brought the Wanderer in. Well, he had been arrested afterward. And so on the deck of the boat they were discussing the case because it was in all the local newspapers. You know, the New York Times was covering it, the New York Tribune was covering it, and this is the case being tried in Georgia. We know they were covering it because Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar actually challenged the editors of both papers to a duel. So when they were talking about it, there was a Northern passenger on the steamboat, a Yankee passenger, who said to Timothy Mayer, well, I think they should hang the lot of them. That'll scare anybody else off from doing it. And Mayer very famously said, nonsense, they'll hang nobody. I could go do it myself and bring a load of slaves into this country inside a year. And he bets $1,000, which is about $30,000. Now with the Wanderer case, Timothy Mayer was exactly right. No one was hung, even though it was a hanging crime to be caught importing people and had been since 1808. The fact is, the nine presidents between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and including Thomas Jefferson, all nine of those presidents, and these are founding fathers of America, people like Adams, had all freed convicted slavers. They had all let people go who had been caught slaving instead of having them hung. So no one had ever been hung for slaving, and no one was in the Wanderer case. In fact, the only person who spent any time in jail related to the Wanderer case was the captain of the boat. During the trial, the captain was kept because he was the only one, he was physically on the boat. So in the captain jail, Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar actually went to the jail one night, broke the captain out at gunpoint, and took him to a hotel where he was throwing a party. And the sheriff showed up with a posse of men to take the captain back to jail. Lamar and his friends held them off with guns and said, we'll bring him back tomorrow. So everyone gets off for the court case, or for the slaving. But Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar was fined $200 and given a month of house arrest for breaking the captain out of jail. So Timothy Mayer was, he made his bet, he was right, no one was hung, and he was determined to make sure that he was not going to be hung for this crime. So he enlisted his neighbor as soon as he got home to go to Africa. And this is his neighbor, Captain William Foster. Foster was not a rich man. Foster lived next door to Mayer's plantation in a rooming house. And he built ships. And he had about five ships that he had built that were sailing the Gulf as basically 18 wheelers. So the Clotilda would have looked like this. It was a two-masted schooner, and it was designed for Gulf of Mexico service. It was very shallow draft. It had a keel that was retractable. So you could drop the keel down for ocean crossings, but pull it up when you got in the shallow coastal bays. And so it only drew about four feet of water. But the Clotilda, contrary to what has been written in many history books, was not purpose built for the trip to Africa. It was actually built five years prior. The reason Timothy Mayer went to Foster was because the Clotilda was well known to be incredibly fast. When it was built, the local newspaper, the Mobile Press Register, actually wrote about the ship and how fast it was. And Foster had done some things to make it fast, including at the Copper Hall and things like that, is sheathing the hull in Copper, which prevents barnacles and algae from growing on it. And helps kind of smooth over all the seams with the planking and everything like that. So Mayer went to Foster and said, I will pay you $35,000. Now multiply that times 30. So we're talking about a half million dollars or so. And he tells Foster, I'll pay you a half million dollars to sail to Africa, pick up a load of captives, bring them back, and then I will give you 10 of the captives. Now remember, I said that they were worth about $50,000 to $60,000 a piece in today's money. So this is another half million dollars if Foster successfully completes this illegal voyage. So he's going to go from living in a rooming house to being essentially a millionaire. So that was his motivation to do it. So then the next task was to figure out where to go. And the local newspaper came to the rescue for that as well. In this case, with an article about this man. This is King Gizo. And the mobile newspaper ran an international news item that said, Wida is back open. Wida is the slave port of the Dahoman Empire. And the Dahoman Empire existed in modern day Benin, which is next door to Nigeria on the west side of Africa. So the Dahomans were well known. They had gone out of the slave business for a few years at the behest of the English and the point of a gun, essentially. And the English told them, we will buy so much palm oil from you. You won't need to do slave business anymore. The English were trying to do this. In fact, this portrait of King Gizo here was actually drawn by an English Navy Commodore. You see his name in the bottom corner, Forbes. Because the English were focused on the Dahomans because they were considered the best armed group in Africa and the most ruthless in terms of capturing people to sell into slavery. Historians believe that about one third of all people sold into slavery. So about four million people were captured and sold by the Dahomans. Now you see in this picture, Gizo is quite fancily dressed. This looks like some kind of imported silk from Europe. You see the tassels on his hat, the big ostrich plume feathers, the tassels on the umbrella. These are all signs of wealth coming from Europe. So the article in the Press Register said in Wiede, people could be had for $60 a person. So that's where Mayor and Foster decided to go with the clotilde. They would go there and buy people. Dahome was well known even in the 1600s as the place to go to get people. There was a Dutch slave trader who wrote a journal. It was actually called Diary of a Dutch Slave Trader, published in 1619. And in it, he wrote that at most African ports, you could procure three or four people in a week. At Wiede, you could get a thousand people in a few hours. And so that's the story of the Dahomans. That's what's noteworthy about them. They industrialized the capture and sale of people. Their entire economy was predicated on the capture and sale of people. So by the time Foster reached Dahome, this man had become king. This is Gizu's son, King Gleile. And Gleile, to give you an example of sort of the incredible, the number of people they captured and killed, he did what's called a custom. So Dahome is where Voodoo comes from. So the Voodoo in Louisiana, in Haiti, in Brazil, that all comes from the Dahoman Empire. The Dahomans, Vodun, they called it, that is their native religion, the Voodoo that's spread around the world. And so it involves a lot of ancestor worship but also a lot of sacrifice. And so in honor of his father, a year after his father died, King Gleile here had 250 people ritually sacrificed to honor his father out of their captives. So the Clotilda ends up in this incredibly murderous place. The Clotilda arrives to get people and there were plenty of people to be had because the Dahomans had just finished a slaving raid when the Clotilda arrived. So the Dahoman army would go out with about 50,000 people and attack surrounding kingdoms. And they would first offer to take half their props and tribute instead of attacking them and kingdoms that refused were attacked. So this person you see here is a warrior of Dahome. It's actually an Amazon. This is a woman. The Dahoman army was incredibly famous and well known worldwide for having this elite strike force of 5,000 women. They were called the Amazons. They started because a Dahoman king who had a twin sister died. His sister decided to assume his role as king and pretend to be him. So she surrounded herself with a group of women to keep her secret that she was a woman. Well these women took their jobs very seriously and became very fierce. So much so that when the female king died, the next king, a man, kept the Amazon women to surround him. Now I mentioned we hear these things from the mouths of the people involved and we hear about the Amazonian women from Kuja. We hear about the slave raid from him, from another woman named Sally Radoshi Smith who was on the Clotilda. And we know what happened. The trader of Kuja's village revealed how to sneak into the village to the Dahomans. It was a walled compound. You can see the fortifications behind our Amazon warrior here. Notice she also has a European gun. The trade with Europe was brisk. It involved gold and guns and fabric from the European side and people from the Dahomans side. So the reason this woman is holding this head. In the Dahoman army you were not allowed to brag about having killed someone unless you had their head to prove you had done it. And we hear about this first hand from Kuja who talks about the women coming into the village in the middle of the night and starting to murder people. And the way the Dahomans attacked, they killed everyone who was not of the age to be a slave. Anyone younger than about 12, anyone older than about 30 were just murdered in their beds, in the street, whatever. So Kuja actually wakes up and sees his neighbors and family members being killed all around him. He runs out to escape out the gates of the village. The village had eight gates and that was the big secret. There was the main gate. The other gates were hidden. And so if the village was attacked, the people were supposed to run out the other gates and escape into the forest. But the trader had revealed the secret of the eight gates. So there were soldiers around all of them. So imagine 5,000 women have scaled the walls of the village in the dead of night. They are busy slaughtering the villagers. Kuja and all the others who are intended to be captured race out these doors into the arms of 45,000 soldiers who captured them. And so the Dahomans marched with such a large army to manage all the captives. Kuja talks about all the soldiers carrying the heads, tying them together on ropes that come up through the neck and out the mouth. He talks about marching for three or four days and the Dahomans stopped and built huge fires. And they built the fires to smoke the heads of the people they had taken to stop them from stinking. And he actually talks about having to sit there and watch people he knows having their faces disfigured into these ghastly masses. It's incredibly brutal. I went to elementary school in the south and we were taught basically that white people went to Africa and threw nets over Africans and brought them home with slaves, which is absurd. As an adult, you realize that's impossible. Instead, it was this incredibly deliberate industrialization of the business of capturing people. Now the Dahoman women actually have appeared in history quite recently. Anyone who saw Black Panther, these are the warrior women of Wakanda. They were actually based on the Dahoman Amazons. We get a window into how feared the Dahomans were in modern day Benin. So Benin as a country is about the size of Pennsylvania or Alabama. And the Dahoman Empire was about the size of, say, a big city in Philadelphia, for instance, in Pennsylvania. And so the Dahomans spent 300, 400 years raiding the rest of the area around their kingdom and capturing the people. What you're looking at here is a village called Ganvi that is in Benin. It is outside the main city Kotnut in a lake. And this village has been here since 1704, when the Tofenu tribe, who knew they were going to be attacked by the Dahomans, decided to move out into the middle of the lake. They set up a village on stilts, five miles from shore. And the reason they did this is because the Dahoman army would not travel over water before battle. Because in the Vodun Vudu religion, that was bad because the gods, many of them, were water servants and sea servants. So the Tofenu knew, all right, let's move out in the lake. Then they can never attack us. So they're still out there today. There are 50,000 people living in this community on the water because their ancestors fled the Dahomans and moved out there. It's a fascinating community. You see it stretching off into the horizon. On the left of the image here, you see a hotel. On the right, you see people gathered up to get drinking water from the drinking water source. And this is actually a little video where you can see motor boats moving around, the people moving around. It is, they call it the Venice of West Africa. It's quite extraordinary. This is the school in Ganvi. And the big boat you see there with all the kids on it is the school bus. And the kids are traveling home. This is a little five-year-old kid. He's battling a 40-foot-long boat. I am a charter captain. I take people on my boat in the Mobile Tensaw Delta, the place where I found the Clotilda. And I was just fascinated to be in this waterborne community. Incidentally, the flowering plants you see in some of these pictures. You see them on the shoreline there. And you see them here in the foreground of this picture. That's an Amazonian plant. It's called water hyacinth. And when I got there, we have that plant here as well in the Gulf Coast as an invasive plant. When I got to Ganvi, all of the same Amazonian plants that are in our waters here in America were there. And for a moment, I thought, why are these here? And then I realized, of course, there had been a 400-year trade between the Dahomans and Brazil. All right, so now we're going back to Kujo. This is Kujo when he was 87 years old. This picture was taken by Zorniel Hurston. And so he is at the end of his life. But we're going to talk about the beginning of his life. So Kujo in Barakun describes an idyllic childhood. He had 18 siblings to three different mothers. His father had three wives. And they were farmers. They owned property. They lived in a prosperous village called Bonte that was a market town. So it was quite cosmopolitan. He talks about running through the jungle with his siblings, hunting for fruit, pineapples, oranges, things like that by smelling for them on the breeze. And having been to Benin, I can tell you it's a beautiful, beautiful country. Has all the things you would expect in an African, West African country, elephants and lions and fantastic birds and things like that. So Kujo is about 19 when he's captured. He had been training as a warrior for five years since he was 14. And he was going to be in the Oro, which is an elite group that guards the village. So Kujo was a warrior at this point when he was captured. The raid happened in the middle of the night, as I mentioned. He talked about when they tackled him as he came out of the gate, he started crying and telling them he needed to find his mother. And he just says the soldiers had no ears for crying. And of course, he probably knew his mother was dead. So all the people of his village, hundreds and hundreds of people were tied up with perhaps several thousand other people who had already been captured by the Dahomans in other raids during this trip. And they were brought here. This is the palace in Abome. The kingdom of the Dahoman Empire was not by the coast because they didn't want the English, the French, the the the slaving nations to be able to attack them from the sea with cannons and things. So the capital and the palace was well in. And this is it. This is the palace at Abome. You see a few, you see these two freezes here. These are very, they're the leftover from this palace was filled with art that was all stolen by the French when the French conquered the Dahoman Empire in 1892. But Kujo and everyone else who was captured by the Dahomans were brought here. And the Dahomans did a sort of, what would we call it, an interview with everyone that was captured. And if you had skills, like you were a baker or an artist, they kept you and enslaved you themselves. If you didn't, if you were like Kujo, just a warrior or what have you, they instead, well, they sold you. So this is a Dahoman person. This is in here so you can see the facial scarifications. We're gonna talk about that as we go forward. This is the old slave route. Route Kujo and the others were marched down this 60 miles from Abome to Weta, the slave port. You can actually walk this route today. Goes right through the jungle. Then they, when they got to Weta, which is the slave port city, they were marched around this tree, which is called the tree of return or remembering. And the reason they were marched around the tree was three times was so that their souls, when they died in the foreign nation, they were being deported to, would know their way home. A government official in Benin when I was there said something really interesting to me. She said, people think slavery is something that happened in Africa. It's not, slavery is what happened once you were sent to another country. What happened in Africa was Africans captured and deported other Africans, taking them away from their land and their lives forever. And I thought that was an interesting distinction. So this is the view from one of the barracoons. There were five barracoons in Weta by the slave powers, the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese. They had prisons, the barracoon is a Spanish word that means fort, but in the slave context, they were prisons. And this is where the captives were housed. And so each of these big nations had prisons set up where the staff spoke their language. And so traders from their countries could come and get people as quickly and easily as possible, which is what Foster did. He described the accommodations he was kept in as very luxurious. There were European liquors and things to drink, wonderful sheets and all that. And then he described going to the barracoon. Oh, got ahead of myself. And in the barracoon, he said there were about 4,000 people in the barracoon ready to be sold as slaves. And so he selected 110. There's a very sad moment in Kujo's story where he, as Foster was paying for the captives, Kujo was someone, a Dahulman took Kujo off of the coffin, the lineup of slaves and hit him under a building and left him there, apparently to steal him off of the coffin as like a free thing for the, a little extra money for the guards, I guess. And so the slave coffin with all the people from Kujo's village left. And so he talked about staying under the house for a few minutes, but he could hear the ocean. They had been able to hear the ocean in the barracoon but they couldn't see it. So they, he climbed out from under it to see the ocean and he peered over a wall and he saw the group he was with down on the beach, getting loaded into giant canoes to be taken out to the cotilda. And he saw his friend, Kibi, and he said, I didn't want to be alone. I wanted to be with Kibi. Now remember, everyone in his village had been killed and he knew that. So he hollered down to the men on the beach and basically said, hey, don't forget me. And so they came and got him and he ended up on the cotilda. And it's so heartbreaking because he probably could have run away, but he wanted to be with his friend. So this was the middle passage on the cotilda. And you see the people are in the hold. The cotilda, as I mentioned, was not purpose built for this trade. It was basically an 18 wheeler of the day. The five years before the trip to Africa, the cotilda was used to haul things like lumber from Alabama and turpentine to the Caribbean and South America. And it would come back loaded with fruits, oranges, rum, things like that, sugar, things that you would bring from down there. So it was just a cargo ship basically. They refitted it. And I tell the story of the ship and the journey to Africa and back in great detail in the book. But these are the conditions they were in. They were naked in the hold. They were chained around the neck by collars and chained to the floor in groups of eight. And so that was their version of the middle passage. When you see the images of ships where you see all the people laid out like wood in shelving and all that, those were purpose built slave ships that were made to transport, perhaps 1,000 people at a time. Whereas the cotilda was only 87 feet long. So we had 110 people in the hold, not 1,000. Timothy Mayer was trying to prove a point by bringing these people in. So Cujo's experience during slavery is well documented. He served on one of Mayer's steamboats. He talks about it as the most miserable time of his life. But it was a really interesting thing. I mentioned that the mayors had about 50 slaves on their three plantations. Well, Cujo working on the steamboat was one of the captives who ended up visiting with all the other people and he would see them every week. So typically when people were sold into slavery, they would go through a slave market and they would never see anybody they were sold with again. Certainly not someone they were related to. But because this was an illegal mission and because it was, they couldn't sell the people through a slave market, almost all of the 110 people on the cotilda were split up between the Mayer brothers and two of their neighbors. 30 of them were sold to a slave dealer in Selma and that group ended up being well documented as well. But most of the people on the cotilda were on these five plantations that Cujo visited regularly on the steamboat. So they were able to keep in touch. That becomes important in the founding of Africa town after the civil war. But two things emerge during the years that the cotilda captives are enslaved. The first is they fight back and the second is that they stick together. And we see two examples of this in the stories we have from their own mouths. Cujo talks about how one of mayors overseers whipped one of the cotilda women in a field for not working hard enough. The cotilda captives charged him en masse, tackled him, took the whip and beat him with the whip until the other overseers came and pulled him off. You know, remember, Cujo was trained as a warrior. These were not, you know, these were not people who had been born into slavery. They had been free all their lives. Then the other story is from Timothy Mayer's house boy, he had enslaved a guy named Noah Hart. And we have the story Noah tells where Timothy Mayer's wife had a cook, a paid cook. And she had the cook training one of the African girls, a 12 year old girl to sweep because Timothy Mayer's wife wanted this child in the house. She thought she would be a good house servant. She was pretty and delicate. So the girl is not learning to sweep to the cook's satisfaction. So the cook slaps her. And Noah Hart describes her letting out a blood curdling screen that he says raised goosebumps on his arm. The screen was answered by the Africans out in the field who started hollering back and all charged the plantation house and ran into the house carrying the farm implements they'd been using, sides and shovels and things like that. And actually chased Timothy Mayer's wife and the cook upstairs into a bedroom where they locked the door. So, you know, as Cujo said, nobody hit the African women anymore after that. So kind of an interesting tale. Now this is Cujo and his wife, Abache. She was also on the Clotilda. And this is Cujo at the end of his life. Tragically, his five children and his wife all died by the time he was about 60. So you're seeing him in his cabin here. He lived in a one room cabin from when he was freed after the civil war until he died in 1935. You can see his pots for cooking on the floor there. You can see his boater hats on the straw hats on the wall. And then you can see the chairs that belong to all of his family members piled in the corner with debris stacked on them because there's no one to sit in them. Incidentally, this house was torn down in 1992 by the city of Mobile in the state of Alabama. We'll talk a little more about that in a minute. But now we're going to jump into my part of the story which is the discovery of the ship. And the night they brought the ship back to Alabama, something interesting happened, they burned it up. And the reason they did this was because they had committed a crime. So a friend of mine called me up one day knowing that I was a river guide who worked in this swamp we're looking at and took people on my boat and had been a reporter here in Mobile for 20 years. He said, you should look for the clotilde. And I didn't understand the clotilde was missing. In Mobile, it's a well-known story that the last ship to bring slaves into the country came to Mobile, it was the clotilde. There's a mural of it in Africa town alongside a highway. But I didn't understand the ship was missing because I had only heard that the last slave ship came in to port here. I didn't understand that it was illegal at the time it was done. All the things I've just explained to you. So my friends started telling me the story. His name was Jeff Duke. He was a fellow reporter at the paper. And he was saying, no, they've never found it. The guys, they burned it and hid it in the swamp. And so I said, why did they burn it? Well, what happened when the clotilde left Alabama to go to Africa, Timothy Mayor began bragging telling everybody what he had done. I've sent the clotilde to Africa. He bragged about it so much the local newspaper wrote a story saying the clotilde has sailed for Africa for a load of captives. That story ran in other papers around the country. So by the time the clotilde was supposed to return three months later, Timothy Mayor is being watched at his house by federal agents who wanna arrest him for illegal slaving as soon as the clotilde comes in. So the original plan had been from foster to sail back into Alabama, Timothy Mayor to meet him down in a secret spot on the coast with a steamboat, take all the captives off and then foster and the crew would sail to Mexico and re-rig the ship. So it looked like a different ship. And come back without having an illegal cargo. Well, by the time, excuse me, Foster returns, Mayor has blabbed so much that he's terrified that he's gonna be arrested. So he goes, he sends steamboat down there and tells Foster we've changed the plans. We're gonna tow the ship up into the swamp and hide it there because the heat is on. We can't do our original plan. They know we sent the clotilde to Africa for slaves. So they do this, they bring it up, they tow it up into the Delta in the middle of the night. They cut the mast off the ship to pretend it was a cargo, a barge. They tow it up there behind a steamboat. It was the first motor the Africans had ever heard. And in the hold of the ship, they debated what it was and they thought it was a giant swarm of bees actually outside. So they tow the ship up into the swamp coming in through avoiding the port of Mobile. You see all these rivers. So they came in one of the side rivers and they got to the place right in the center of this picture, 12-mile island. And according to Timothy Mayer, they sailed right on past it and burned the ship up in several different places including this place Bayou Korn or Bayou Cannot. So for 160 years, people looked for the clotilde. In fact, people began looking for it the day after it arrived. The Mobile newspaper two days after the clotilde arrived wrote another story saying that clotilde has returned with 110 captives. They knew how many people were on board and said the captives have been secreted up into the state of Alabama on board steamboats. So they knew what had happened in every detail. So federal agents went out actually to search for the ship immediately and they couldn't find it but they arrested Timothy Mayer anyway. So Timothy goes to court and the Mayer family tells this story of how he outwitted the federal agents and he tricked them and got them drunk, the search parties, they couldn't find the ship and all this stuff, none of that is true. What actually happened is Timothy Mayer went to court before Judge Johnson, who was one of his best friends. Judge Johnson was so much one of Timothy Mayer's best friends that the first steamboat Timothy built he named after Judge Johnson. It was called the Judge Johnson. So his friend Judge Johnson lets him off. So he did not get prosecuted but don't believe the story that he was some kind of wizard who fooled his pursuers and all that stuff. So Timothy, after he gets away with the first part of the crime is quite famous. The story is told all of the country. It's actually in newspapers all over the country that the Clotilda has brought these people. So people start coming to Alabama to interview Timothy Mayer after the Civil War because it's come out that he brought in the last load of enslaved people on the Clotilda. He gets interviewed over and over by national publications like Harper's, publications we still have today and they keep coming to Mobile to interview Timothy Mayer and then they go interview the captives who at this point have built a community called Africa Town. And we'll talk about Africa Town in a little more in a minute but this is how the Clotilda story was captured so well because Timothy Mayer was treated as this swashbuckling hero by the national media and they would come and interview him and ask him to tell him the story of the ship and he would tell these cagey things like, well, if something like that had happened not that I was involved they would have burned the ship up and buy you corn and he names all these places in the Delta where the ship was supposedly burned. So when I start digging into the history of the ship looking for it I read all these different places he says the ship is burnt and from my knowledge of the river I know it can't be in a lot of those places. First, because he's named so many places it can't be in all of them and second, because some of those places you simply could not get an ocean going sailing ship into they're too shallow there's no way you could get a ship into that bayou. So I started digging into the historical research a little more in depth and I found a clue in plain sight that everybody had overlooked and it was in the captain's journal. Captain Foster who sailed to Africa 30 years after the trip he was so irritated that Timothy Mayer was getting all this publicity as the last slaver that he wrote a 12 page journal and we're looking at a page of it right here describing the entire trip. He never mentions Timothy Mayer once. He talks about my slaves and my steamboat and my ship to Clotilde and what he's trying to do is take full credit for what's happened. And so in this I found this sentence that's underlined in red and you notice in the center of the page he says took my schooner up Spanish River into the Alabama River at 12 Mile Island. He says he transfers his cargo to a river steamboat at this place 12 Mile Island and sends the captives up into the Cape break and then he says I then burn my schooner to the water's edge and sunk her. So right here the captain who sailed the ship to Africa is telling us he burned it at 12 Mile Island which is nothing. Timothy Mayer never said a word about 12 Mile Island. Then I found another clue this one out of Cujo's mouth. In an interview in the 1890s Cujo says they burned the ship at 12 Mile Island. Again Timothy Mayer never said this. Now Cujo would not have known 12 Mile Island the night the ship was burned but then he worked for five years on the steamboats. And so he would have learned where 12 Mile Island was. I knew Cujo would know exactly what happened because one of the people who was there the night the clotilde was burned was a Cherokee Indian who was enslaved by the mayors named James Denison. They had taught Denison how to drive steamboats and he drove the steamboat the night the clotilde was burned with the captives on it. So he was there. He then married one of the Africans and he and Cujo knew each other for the rest of their lives. So when Cujo's a 60 year old man being interviewed in this article I found and he says the ship's at 12 Mile Island I knew he was a reliable witness. So this is the 12 Mile Island area on the Mobile River. I now had two people who were there that night saying the ship was at 12 Mile Island. And nobody had ever looked around there, I could tell. This is 12 Mile Island again. And so I went up there and looked. I waited until a very, very low tide in January we have these northern winds that come down and they blow all the water out of Mobile Bay and out of the Delta. And so what we're looking at here the water is about three feet lower than normal. Normally the water would be all the way up at the cattails and things you see on the shoreline and covering all this mud. So I'm up there. It was January 2nd, 2018. It was about 25 degrees which is very cold in coastal Alabama. And I found this ship exposed along the shoreline and I figured out quickly it was from the built in the 1850s and it was a schooner. I brought archeologists from the University of West Florida. I brought a shipwright. Everyone concluded that this might be the Clotilde. And so it caused incredible excitement in Africa town. They had a huge party. They had me come speak about the ship and they talked about putting it in a museum and what it would mean that it had been found because people in Mobile, many people said the Clotilde story wasn't true because the ship had never been found. And so they were trying to take away this part of the origin story of Africa town. Africa town incidentally, I should mention was founded by the Clotilde captives after the Civil War. They actually saved up money and bought plots of land from the mayors and the other enslavers and built a town. They bought land in two and three acre plots and built each other houses and built a community. Then they built a school for their kids. Africa town took off by 19, by 1912 it was the fourth largest community in America governed by African Americans. Back to the story of the ship. So I write this story about the ship that says Wreck found by a reporter, maybe the Clotilde, it went viral internationally. I was interviewed by the BBC and all the American outlets and all this stuff. I knew just how widespread the story had become because two days after it ran, the ambassador of Benin showed up in Mobile and had me take him up here to the site. And he had me take him there on behalf of the government because the president of Benin had asked him to go there and do a Vodun ceremony, a Voodoo ceremony, asking the people sold on the Clotilde to forgive the people of Benin and the Dahomans for selling them. He started doing these incantations in Fawn, the native language of the Dahomans and spewing vodka into the water, actually gin, I'm sorry, gin into the water. And then he started crying and he was sobbing and he was screaming. And then he asked to leave the area. So that night at dinner, I asked him what had happened up there and he explained to me. He said, I am a prince of Dahomey. My ancestors were the Dahomans and my father was a Dahoman. My mother was Yoruba. That's the tribe that Kujo was. One of the tribes that Dahomans captured. He says, so I was asking my mother's people to forgive my father's people for capturing and selling it. So that battle going on within the ambassador is going on in Benin today where people who are among the tribes captured by the Dahomans actually don't trust them. And there's a real rift in the country that the government is worried about and they're worried about it creating a genocide like Wanda, which was a tribal resentment gone awry. So a team of archeologists came down two months later and we're able to figure out this was not the clotilda by a couple of things. One, it was too long. We were there, it was dead of winter. It was bitter cold and we didn't get in the water because it was 25 degrees. When we got in the water with this group, we were able to tell that the ship was about 30 feet too long to be the clotilda and it was made of the wrong kind of wood. So they had a big meeting in Africa town to announce it. I actually went to the meeting and it was tough as a reporter. I was an investigative reporter for 20 years and prided myself on never having corrections, trying to get everything right the first time. And here on the biggest story I'd ever broken, my central premise was wrong. It was not the clotilda. So I was at this meeting in Africa town. The archeologists are announcing it's not clotilda. People are crying in Africa town. They're wearing shirts that said our ship has come in. They were so excited. And so it wasn't the clotilda. And I walked out of the meeting pretty dejected, planning never to look for the clotilda again to go home and drink some whiskey and kind of lick my wounds. And a descendant came up to me, a descendant of the clotilda passengers, a woman named Felma Maybin Owens. And she wrapped me in a big hug and then she started singing a song in my ear. And it was called, there's a bright side somewhere. It's a gospel song. And the lyrics are, there's a bright side somewhere, don't stop until you find it. And so after she finished singing it, she pushed me back and held me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye and said, keep looking for it, Ben. You're gonna find it, keep looking for it, don't give up. And I felt this sort of electric charge. As she said it, you know, I was kind of overwhelmed and almost started crying and felt like I had been kind of given a mission almost. And I turned and walked away from her not knowing what I was gonna do. And two men came up to me and told me they were marine archeologists. And they told me that they had been paid by the state of Alabama to look for two Confederate ironclads that were intentionally sunk in the river near the port of Mobile. And the state wanted to find them to dig them up and put them on display. So these guys said, well, we went and looked and we found the ships the first day but they had paid us to look for five days. So we spent the rest of the days looking for clotilde. And we looked everywhere up to the south end of 12 Mile Island and didn't find it. And they knew that I thought it was at 12 Mile Island. And they were telling me, hey, we did a modern marine survey using all the proper equipment to look underwater which is a side scan sonar that paints a picture of what's on the bottom. A sub-bottom profiler that looks through the mud to see what's buried in the mud and a magnetometer that detects metal. Well, they told me that they had looked all the way to the south end of 12 Mile Island and didn't find it. And I knew from my research that a Mobile historian had spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to look everywhere north of 12 Mile Island where Timothy Mer had said the ship was buried and that he didn't find it in any of those places. So I knew that all of Mer's places were lies. And then I knew exactly what I was gonna do. Nobody had ever looked on the backside of 12 Mile Island with modern survey equipment. So I called up my friend Moni Graham who runs the Marine Sciences Department at the University of Southern Mississippi because I knew they had a survey boat. They trained students to work in the oil industry and so they had the kind of boat that could do these surveys. So I called him up and I said, Moni, would you bring your big boat over here and come survey 12 Mile Island for me to look for the Clotilde? And he said, well, what's your budget? Now, one of these boats typically costs about $10,000 a day to rent to do a survey like this. Knowing that, I said, well, Moni, I have absolutely no money. And he laughed and he said, okay, we'll do it. And he said, it'd be good to help Africa town and it'll be good for our students. So they came over and we looked for the ship and we did this full survey. And got ahead of myself. It took about a day running up and down the river, surveying everything. Then they went back to Mississippi for a week and analyzed all the data and they created a chart of the river. And with this chart in hand, we went back to the river and we started diving the different ships we had found. We had found 11 objects that might be Clotilde on this survey. So we quickly ruled them out. Some were made of metal, some were too small. And so we had struck out at the end of the day. None of the things highlighted in our survey were the Clotilde. So I was sitting there on the boat, everybody's packing up their dive gear. And I was looking at the survey chart on my phone, I was hoping something jumped out at it because I was the one who'd been internationally humiliated with my false story. And so this guy from a dive shop was looking over my shoulder and he pointed at something on the chart and he said, what's that? And it was a shape. And I said, I don't know, it looks like a shoe. And he said, not to me. That looks like a ship. Let's go check it out. So we called back to Mississippi. We got the coordinates to the shoe. We went up river. It was about 300 yards north of the first ship I found, it turns out. I went in. I dove down to the bottom and I started pulling logs out of the way. And everybody on the boat was laughing at me saying, you found a pile of logs. You found a pile of firewood. But they didn't want to get in the water because it was cold. And so I kept doing this until eventually I grabbed something that was hewn. I could tell it was cut. It was squared off lumber. And I tugged on it and it came free in my hands. And this is it. This is the first piece of the Clotilde to see the light of day in 160 years. And I hollered to the guys on the boat, guys, we just found something from the 1850s. And I could tell because of these square nails coming out of it. These are nails handmade by blacksmiths, which is how ships were put together in the 1850s. By the 1870s, we had screws and nuts and bolts in widespread use. But Clotilde was built with things like this. So I said, we got something from the 1850s. Everybody got in the water. And we quickly figured out that the thing we found had been burned, just like the Clotilde. We called back to the lab. They told us it was a little less than 90 feet long, and it was about 28 feet wide. These are the exact dimensions of the Clotilde. So we called the state and told them we thought we had found the Clotilde that we had surveyed 12 mile island. And this was the only object in the Mobile Tensaw Delta that could be the Clotilde. This is Monty Graham who I mentioned who brought the crew over. I want to put his picture of him in there so he could get a little credit for being the pivotal scientist with his team that found the Clotilde. And here we're gonna see the Clotilde come into view. You will see it in just a second. And that's the bow coming in. I'm gonna move the cursor here. This is the bow right here. This side and this side are the sides of the ship. And we'll pause it right there. This is the hold where the people were right here. And you can see the ship is still quite intact. And we're running a little long time so I won't get into some of the details about the archeology, but suffice it to say, Africa town was incredibly excited. They threw a huge celebration and we are still making plans to put the ship on display in a museum. And this man came. The ambassador to Benin told me that if this turned out to be Clotilde, somebody more powerful would come. It's the fellow in the middle, Dada, Dagbo, Hunan, Huna, who is the Pope of Voodoo essentially. He is the leading Voodoo practitioner on earth. And he is a revered figure in Benin. I will tell you, he's actually quite a fascinating guy. His business card will tell you that he is the king of oceans and seas, but he's also a lawyer and a labor negotiator. So it's quite a portfolio. And he did a ceremony here at the site. And then he invited me to come to Benin to see the other side of the store. And so I went, now I knew from the ambassador that the people in Benin were really angry at President Trump, because when Trump made the comment about the S whole countries, he was literally talking about Benin and the people in Benin knew this. So here I am in customs, about to come up to this military guy. He looks at my passport. He says, and I say we. And he says, and very aggressive voice. And so I stared at him and I gave him a thumbs down gesture like this. And he smiled and he said, beyond Vanua, Benin, welcoming me to the country. This is the view of my hotel rooftop pool in Kotinu, the biggest city. And this is Kotinu, the view you see from up there. This is a little shop along the street. This is a gas station in Benin. The small bottles are for motorcycles. The big bottles are for cars. I never actually saw a gas pump the whole time I was in the country. This is a street scene in a Bome, the capital. This is Bohi Khan. This is a market village that some of the captives came from. This is the tree where the slave market was. This is actually where Kujo was hiding under the house. The house was there. Now in Benin, you see this a lot. These are all the kings of the slavery era and they're celebrated by the fawn, the people who adhere to the vote on religion. This is actually King Glele. This is the last living grandson of the King Glele who sold the Kotilda people. This isn't that long ago. This is the grandson of the man who sold the Kotilda captives. And he was in the palace. So you see a lot of this kind of art in Benin. This is related to Vodun. And then you see this kind of art. This is the gateway for everyone leaving the country. They built this, but look at the art on top of it. These are people bound and chained being marched into slavery. This is public art in Benin. As I mentioned, the government is trying to heal this wound and they're not hiding from their past. Can you imagine seeing public art like this in America? You see these things all over the country. You know, Dada Dogbo, the Vodugai told me, I'm so proud of my country. We're not hiding from our past. We know what we did and we're embracing it. Statues like this where there's no face. This is meant to represent all the souls lost in slavery. And then there's statues like this, looking down and away in shame. This is to shame the Dahomans, the Fon, which is the largest ethnic group in Dahome for their contributions to slavery. And then there's statues of liberation like this. I'm gonna skip a couple of slides. I will tell you, I'm gonna talk about the food very briefly. Benin is the source of Cajun food, it turns out. Okra, black-eyed peas come from there. In Benin, the word for okra is gumbo. So the Dahomans, the Clotilda women were very famous in Mobile for selling stews after they were freed and they would go to factories and things and sell these stews. They were selling gumbo. We hear about how these things like the blues and dancing and food came to this country in the bodies of the slaves. We're seeing that with the enslaved people brought on the Clotilda in real time. We're seeing what we were talking about. And this is Dada's house, some of his rich doctor stuff. We're almost out of time and I wanna talk about this. This is some of the art from Benin. This is one of the Benin bronzes. Benin, the Dahomans, the Fon, they're very famous for their art. The French stole all of it. The French are now giving it back. They're giving back about 30,000 pieces of looted art and they're spending $25 million per museum to build two museums in Benin celebrating the history of the country with the Smithsonian Institution. Our Smithsonian is building two $25 million museums at Benin. Meanwhile, there's nothing in Africa Town telling this story. There is no museum. So we wanna put a museum in Africa Town. This is Africa Town seen from the river. You see it is heavily surrounded by industry, heavily. You see all the waterfront stuff. That's all property that was taken, that was houses for the Africans. So, Mobile built this big highway through the center of town and destroyed Africa Town willfully. The red areas were places where there were 500 houses that the mayor family tore down. They were rental houses. And the blue places are places where the original founders houses were and they were torn down in 1992 to build this road like Kujo Lewis's house. His descendants were still living in it. So here, I'll show you that this is the last thing left in town built by the Africans. And then there's this area in the green. This is an abandoned housing project site. We wanna build a museum here on the site to house the ship. We want it to be the national monument to the enslaved. And I'll stop my talk there because we're out of time. And I thank y'all so much for having me. I will stop sharing my screen. I really enjoyed talking to you. I hope you enjoyed the story. And if you wanna hear more, please try my book, The Last Slave Ship. And thank y'all so much.