Years after the transatlantic slave commerce was criminalised, a ship often called the Camargo transported greater than 500 enslaved Africans from Mozambique to the south-eastern coast of Brazil. The ship was covertly sunk shortly after it docked in 1852 in Angra dos Reis, within the state of Rio de Janeiro, to destroy proof of the crime. Though the wreck of the Camargo has been identified to native communities for generations, researchers are solely now starting to review the ship, which is regarded as the oldest slave ship ever found.
Analysis on the Camargo is being spearheaded by a multidisciplinary workforce of archaeologists, lecturers, film-makers and group leaders of the Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracuí—descendants of enslaved Africans dropped at the area. The nonprofit AfrOrigens Institute was established in 2023 to manage the venture, and it obtained a $295,000 grant from the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation final yr.
Consciousness across the shipwreck first emerged within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, when the Brazilian historian Martha Abreu found newspaper clippings referencing the ship. “There have been data of a slave revolt in a close-by plantation, and the enslavers wrote that each one the insubordination was linked to the Camargo, the final slave ship that arrived after slavery was banned,” Abreu tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Though we have no idea how many individuals survived the Camargo, it was reported that the police apprehended 72 Africans who had arrived on the ship.”
Round a decade later, Abreu launched an oral historical past venture to protect the tales of descendants of enslaved individuals, visiting the Quilombo and connecting their accounts of the Camargo along with her previous analysis. “The group knew in regards to the ship and that it was sunk,” Abreu says. “We had been capable of hyperlink this necessary info however didn’t have the monetary help on the time to go and discover the Camargo.”
Momentum to find the shipwreck restarted when the marine archaeologists Gilson Rambelli (who revealed a analysis paper calling for additional examine on the Camargo) and Luis Felipe Santos launched into an expedition of the Bracuí river in Angra dos Reis in 2022. They discovered timbers and a hull that aligned with historic data of the Camargo and accounts from the Quilombo group.
“We can not talk about anti-racist struggles, historic reparations or social justice with out contemplating the necessity for archaeological proof and materials tradition,” Santos says. “Archaeological websites associated to slavery within the Americas are political instruments in advancing the financial empowerment of communities most affected by the legacy of slavery and colonialism.”
Past Brazilian historical past
Further funding for the venture has come from the Slave Wrecks Mission (SWP), a maritime archaeology initiative co-organised by the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition and George Washington College in Washington, DC. The SWP offered technical help that enabled archaeologists to make use of survey strategies like magnetometry to search out the shipwreck in 2023; it was formally declared “found” in 2024.
“Our mission is to help our nationwide companions, who’re making an attempt to recuperate this world and shared historical past of the slave commerce,” says Stephen Lubkemann, a maritime archaeologist and co-director of the SWP. “It’s not simply Brazilian historical past; the Camargo additionally speaks to the methods Individuals had been concerned within the slave commerce lengthy after it was unlawful in america.”
It was the slave dealer Nathaniel Gordon, an American from Maine, who each captained and sunk the Camargo. He evaded arrest for a number of years after his departure from Brazil however was apprehended in 1860 whereas captaining one other slave ship off the coast of West Africa. He was sentenced to loss of life in New York Metropolis in 1862.
The primary section of fieldwork on the Camargo concluded in June and lasted two weeks. It’s anticipated to be accomplished in round three years and price as much as $2m. Many of the funding will likely be designated to learning and conserving historic artefacts, getting ready the location for future visitation, and making a digital map of the wreck and its environment.
Quilombo group members had been educated to help with the fieldwork, studying learn how to dive and incomes scuba certifications, and can advise on the ship’s artefacts as they resurface. Sooner or later, researchers envision that group members will be capable to take guests to the underwater website and promote tickets for the excursions.
Though Brazil banned transatlantic slavery in 1850, slave buying and selling is assumed to have lasted into the 1860s. Archaeologists are researching not solely the Camargo shipwreck—which is assumed to have been nicely preserved by layers of mud—but in addition the world round it, the place there have been farms, sugarcane plantations and mills that used slave labour. Researchers look forward to finding an assortment of artefacts like shackles, bottles, ceramics and different objects.
“We’re concerned with preserving the location and ethically eradicating sufficient artefacts to inform the story, however not develop into a burden by way of conservation,” Lubkemann says. “We need to create a website of memorialisation—someplace individuals can go to and that can profit the area people.”
The filmmaker Yuri Sanada, a co-founder of AfrOrigens who’s collaborating within the fieldwork, is engaged on a movie in regards to the Camargo. (He says that, till lately, slave shipwrecks obtained “no funding or curiosity” and remained a “taboo” topic.) AfrOrigens can also be supporting analysis on a shipwreck in Maricá, Brazil, and different websites of curiosity to strengthen scholarship of the African diaspora within the Americas.
“There was little archaeological analysis on slave shipwrecks,” Sanada says. “Lots of of shipwrecks—from the First World Conflict to historical Greece—have been researched, however solely about six slave shipwrecks have been recognized and studied, though greater than 12,000 ships crossed the AtlanticOcean with enslaved individuals onboard. For those who got here right here as a slave, the historical past of your ancestors was erased. The Quilombo knew that it was that ship that introduced their ancestors to this a part of the world. The shipwreck is their first materials proof, and it helps them to have a declare to their land.”
