UNEARTHED

How Researchers Found a U.S. Slave Trafficker’s Long-Lost Ship

The exact location of the ship’s remains was unknown for nearly 200 years.

In waters between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, a team of researchers believe they’ve unearthed the Camargo, an American slave trafficking vessel that’s laid underwater for nearly 200 years, The Washington Post reported. The Camargo was one of many American ships involved in illegally trafficking enslaved Africans to Brazil in the 1850s. The Camargo’s captain dropped anchor at the mouth of the Bracuí River in 1852, sent about 500 enslaved people ashore, then burned and sank his ship before fleeing capture. A search team spent years scanning the depths for the ship but turned up empty handed, attempting to match historical documents to local myths to determine its whereabouts. But a breakthrough finally came from a local fisherman whose family had lived in the area for generations. He approached the researchers and brought them directly to a spot where divers, donning mask and flippers, pulled up copper and wood debris from the ocean floor that matched records of the lost ship’s material. “This is an answer for the communities here, that the stories they’ve always told were true,” researcher Luís Felipe Santos said. “They weren’t just stories.”