“Clotilda”: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship

Jan 3, 2024 by Lincoln Paine, A Sea of Words

Delgado, James P., Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, and Alexander DeCaro. “Clotilda”: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship. Foreword by Lisa D. Jones and Stacye Hathorn. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023.

The idea of ships as the embodiment of an origin story is a powerful one. American examples include the Susan Constant at Jamestown, the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock, and the Kalmar Nyckel at Wilmington, to name only three.

More difficult to interpret is the story of the Clotilda, a two-masted centerboard schooner built in Mobile in 1855 for trade around the Gulf of Mexico. Clotilda’s career was enmeshed in the slave economy whose beating heart lay in the cane, cotton, and tobacco fields of the south, but whose tentacles reached into every corner of the nation and beyond.

Clotilda’s notoriety stems from its being the last ship known to have brought people directly from Africa to the United States, in 1860. This was fifty-two years after the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves made it a federal crime, forty years after the crime became a capital offense, and barely six months before Alabama seceded from the United States to preserve its right to uphold slavery.

More offensive still, the voyage was the result of a bet initiated by local businessman Timothy Meaher, one of three brothers who were “natives of Maine, and possessed [of] the New England love of the water and taste for the slave trade,” as Emma Langdon Roche wrote in her 1914 account of the story, Historic Sketches of the South. Meaher wagered that government enforcement of the ban on the slave trade was so lax that he could “bring through the port of Mobile a cargo of slaves” direct from Africa without getting caught.

Captain William Foster (originally from Nova Scotia) purchased 112 enslaved persons from King Glele of Dahomey (now Benin). One or two died on the return voyage, and after the survivors were smuggled ashore, the Clotilda was burned and scuttled just above Mobile. Word of the crimes spread as far as London, but the only punishment levied was against Captain Foster, for failing to produce customs documents from the voyage. His $1,000 fine went unpaid.

The approximate location of the Clotilda’s remains was widely known thanks to contemporaneous newspapers and other accounts, including those of some of the enslaved. These included thirty-two people who, after the Civil War, settled on 50 acres of land purchased from Meaher. Known as Africatown, the community was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

The Clotilda is thus fundamental to the origin story of one of the most distinctive places in the country, some of whose original residents lived into the 1930s and were interviewed by the likes of pioneering Black anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. If discovered, it would be the only ship known to have been involved in the United States slave trade to have survived in any form. As such, its remains have long been of interest to the people of Africatown as well as historians and others worldwide.

The sequence of events that led to the discovery and identification of the remains of the Clotilda began in 2018, when another wreck in a ship graveyard on the Mobile River was wrongly identified as belonging to the schooner. Archaeologists subsequently determined that that vessel was the Else, a much larger four-masted schooner built in the Pacific Northwest in 1916.

This work was followed by a remote-sensing survey of the ship graveyard, from which the remains of a hull whose dimensions seemed to approximate those of the Clotilda were identified. “Clotilda”: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship recounts the history of the ship as known from customs and other archival records and situates it in the context of both the maritime history of the port of Mobile and environs and the distinctive Gulf Coast shipbuilding tradition.

The book also discusses many specifics of shipwreck archaeology, ranging from permitting issues to how to analyze fire damage and the periodization of specific shipbuilding techniques.

There is no question that the book covers the Clotilda story thoroughly, but with five authors it lacks authorial direction and organization. The writing veers unpredictably between technical discussions of archaeological methodology and more general narrative, even within chapters, and there is a lot of repetition — sometimes with contradictory findings. At one point, oak is said to burn “at 300 degrees Celsius (561°F)”, but eight pages later “at 599°F (315°C).” (The latter figures are more accurate.)

The book is well illustrated and has a glossary of shipbuilding terms and a complete bibliography.

Delgado, James P., Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, and Alexander DeCaro. “Clotilda”: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship. Foreword by Lisa D. Jones and Stacye Hathorn. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023.

© 2024 Lincoln Paine writes and teaches about maritime history in all its guises — commercial, naval, technological, environmental. He is author of A Sea of Words. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and to support his work.