In shipwrecks, new clues to a buried past

"Obviously a huge number of people are descendants of slaves," Dr. Abrahams-Braybrook says. "The story we want to tell is of human rights, despite the fact that the site itself is enmeshed in a history of human wrongs."

In 2000, Iziko researchers began excavating small areas of the slave lodge, and has so far found more than 3,500 artifacts.

Likewise, the Meermin could contain a veritable treasure trove of artifacts. Boshoff and his team hope to find Madagascan spears, jewelry, and other personal items in the wreckage.

The underwater search for slave artifacts is not limited to South Africa. Researchers at the Turks and Caicos National Museum have also announced plans to excavate the wreckage of the Trouvadore, a Spanish slave ship that was wrecked off those islands on its way to Cuba. But in this case the story had a happy ending. The captives landed on the island of East Caicos, a British colony that had abolished slavery in 1834, and were freed.

It was the discovery of an English merchant vessel off Key West in Florida that first opened up the slave trade as a field of study to maritime archeologists. Commercial treasure-seeking wreck divers found the ship in 1972, at first mistaking her for a sunken Spanish galleon. Digging through the sands in search of gold coins, they unearthed an ivory tusk instead - a sign that the ship had carried African cargo. For more than a decade, she was known simply as "the English wreck."

But when diver and archeologist David Moore returned to the site to investigate in 1983, he found a large cache of iron shackles among the debris. Today, the collection of shackles, cannons, Venetian glass beads, ivory, and other goods that were salvaged from the ship represent one of the largest finds of early artifacts of the slave trade.

The most significant discovery about this famous wreck was the name "Henrietta Marie," engraved on the ship's cast iron bell, which allowed researchers to trace a detailed history of the slave-trading vessel. In 1995, the museum exhibition "A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie" was unveiled in the US.

Studying records, historians were able to link these tangible objects - the shackles of an African slave and the dented pewter drinking cups of the sailors - to the notorious transatlantic triangle trade between England, West Africa, and the Americas that the Henrietta Marie had plied.

It is that link that makes the discovery of the Henrietta Marie so valuable and compelling, says Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, president of the African American Caribbean Cultural Arts Commission.

"(W)e are ... led into the complete story of a vessel that, while unique, was also typical and revealing in so many respects of the times and historical forces that dictated her - and the world's fate," she wrote in an article on the Historical Museum of Southern Florida's website.

While the prospect of locating multiple wrecks is an exciting one for researchers, too many of them in one spot may cause some confusion. South Africa's treacherous 2,000-mile coastline is littered with shipwrecks. Researchers know of at least 2,500. Confirming that whatever ship they find is indeed the Meermin presents a challenge that researchers predict will be difficult to overcome.

"We will probably find other wrecks, and hopefully they're not on top of this one," Boshoff says. "That's our biggest nightmare."

Fortunately, a strong clue lies among the piles of books and nautical charts in his office: plans of the Meermin's design, found in a 1940s catalogue from the Scheepvaart Museum, the Netherlands' maritime museum in Amsterdam.

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