[SAM] The Atlantic Ocean floor
is one giant graveyard and a crime scene.
♪
Remains of over 2,000,000 of our ancestors
once covered these dark recesses of the world.
♪
For centuries, the transatlantic slave trade seemed unstoppable,
but it was brought to an end.
♪
What got this many people so fired up that they spoke out?
[MICHAEL] There's a greater than 99% probability
that all living African Americans
have at least one relative
who landed here, really the epicenter of slavery.
[JAMES] The world of print would bring slavery right up close.
It's something that you can't avoid thinking about anymore.
[KRAMER] These Africans had actually
fought and won their freedom.
They ended up dying in chains in freezing cold water.
♪
[KINGA] This was equal in value to a human being.
[AFUA] So, researching the details and the horror
of the transatlantic slave trade radicalized him.
[guns firing]
[SIMCHA] Is it fair to say Lincoln freed the slaves?
[CHRISTOPHER] Not quite.
[MARK] The captain said, "I come from hell
and I'm going to damnation."
I think I know exactly what he was afraid of.
♪
[chain scraping]
♪
[SIMCHA] London was at the very center
of the transatlantic slave trade.
England's enormous wealth was in part created
by the trafficking of enslaved humans.
♪
[AFUA] But it was also the place where the first political steps
were taken to bring the awful chapter
in human history to an end.
♪
[door opens]
- Hey. - Hi, Sam.
- Hello. - Good to see you guys.
- You, too. - How are you?
Wow.
- Wow, look at this. - It's kind of awesome, right?
The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807,
as the King wishes.
So it had royal assent.
Yes.
This is a "wow."
"The same should be forthwith abolished
and prohibited and declared to be unlawful."
But this doesn't abolish slavery.
It abolished the purchase and transfer of slaves
from African countries. It's all about the trade itself.
Britain was the biggest trafficker in Africans,
and then it was the first European country
to abolish it.
♪
It was a really momentous time in British history
because after decades of campaigning, petitions,
Parliament finally decided to stop British ships
and British merchants kidnapping
and trafficking Africans.
[sobbing]
But they left the institution of slavery in the Caribbean,
on which the economy was still very dependent,
that remained intact.
- Exactly. - If you were a slave,
you wouldn't have felt any different.
It would take almost another 30 years
to abolish slavery altogether.
♪
Okay, so suddenly in 1807, this is possible.
Why wasn't it possible in 1806?
There's another document that I want to show you.
♪
[MARI] Right, this is the Manchester petition
against the slave trade.
It's got many thousands of signatures on it,
as you can see.
These just would have been ordinary people
trying to influence Parliament.
There were hundreds of petitions like this that were presented
to Parliament, especially in the 1790s
and in the years right up to the Act of Abolition.
And this is just Manchester?
This is just Manchester.
It's really strange, what your eye is drawn to
when you look at this.
You know, I've found like four Samuels already.
I'm used to seeing "Samuel", so I was like,
"Oh, wow, there's a "Sam." There's a "Samuel."
♪
Think there's an "Afua" on there?
[laughs]
That I doubt.
[laughs]
Never say "never."
All these ordinary people.
That made a difference.
Regular old jobs that are trying to make a difference,
just like now.
Another thing here is you can see women signed it.
I mean, this was an era before women had the vote.
♪
What I want to know is what happened
that suddenly got this many people so fired up
that the attitude changed and they spoke out?
What turned this country into the first European country
to abolish slavery?
Exactly.
♪
[seabirds calling]
[ALANNAH] In this small town, on the Western coast of England,
just at the moment,
when the tide was finally beginning to turn
against the slave trade,
a slave ship called "The London" was wrecked in a storm.
[thunder cracks]
It was carrying over 60 enslaved Africans.
[all screaming]
[wood cracking]
Almost all of them died as the ship smashed
on the cliffs of the Bristol Channel.
♪
Yet the tragedy was practically forgotten
until recently when Professor Mark Horton
and his colleagues began the process
of reviving the story.
♪
The story starts in 1796.
A convoy of ships was coming in from the West Indies,
carrying loot, but also Africans
from the former French Colonies,
who'd been fighting for independence in St. Lucia.
They'd be captured and re-enslaved.
And one of the ships, "The London," got separated out.
A great storm erupted, and as you can see,
it's a very dangerous coastline.
And in a trice, the ship was dashed onto the rocks just here.
[thunder cracks]
All of the people on the deck survived, but of course,
the people below decks...
[all screaming]
shackled in their positions,
down there as cargo,
would have drowned as the ship stoved in.
The water would have rushed in.
It was a dark night in October, nobody would have bothered
to come and rescue them.
[screaming]
So, these people died in shallow water
and no one bothered to unshackle them
or even give them a fighting chance.
Yes, everyone was looking after their own skin.
Are any of those remains, any of that,
is that still down there today?
Well, surprisingly, nobody has ever looked.
♪
We will be the first try and explain this tragedy
from the very last days of the slave trade.
[gulls squawk]
♪
[AFUA] The slave trade took place at a time
when it was not easy to spread new ideas like abolition,
but one man found a way to do it.
Who was Thomas Clarkson?
Thomas Clarkson was a native of Wisbech.
He was born in 1760.
And he was set an essay, and the subject
was is it lawful to make others slaves against their will?
♪
Thomas didn't know too much about the subject
but immersed himself in it.
It completely changed his life.
He realized then that something had to be done
to abolish this dreadful slave trade.
And Thomas just became completely overtaken
by this desire to see the end of the slave trade.
So, researching the details and the horror
of the transatlantic slave trade radicalized him.
Yeah, very much so.
♪
He spent the rest of his life dedicated to that cause,
traveled thousands of miles all around the country
on horseback.
He would be this figure turning up in the towns,
talking to groups of people,
getting them to set up societies to abolish
firstly the slave trade and then slavery.
Basically, anything and everything that could be done
to support the cause of abolition,
Thomas Clarkson was there doing it.
So he tried to make people understand that Africans
were not chattel, but human beings
with knowledge and culture.
Yes, he did.
Is this what he referred to as his African chest?
His African box, yes.
♪
The first division, as he called it,
was the manufactory items, items from nature
that could be used in this country for medicines.
He would also have the fabrics
to show the craftsmanship of the people in Africa,
basically to argue that we've got these amazing things,
why are we selling Africans when we could be
trading with them for this wonderful objects?
♪
So, these were items to make a positive case
as to what the potential for trading Africa was.
Looks like there were some things that also made
the more negative case about what was wrong,
how African slaves were treated.
Yeah, he had some items in the bottom of the chest.
Division four contained the instruments of torture.
♪
This is a sinister- looking object.
What was this?
The neck collar.
This would have been torture.
This would be put around the neck.
You've got these spikes sticking out,
which meant that the person who had to wear it
wouldn't be able to escape into the bush
because they'd get caught on the growth.
♪
You also couldn't lay down.
You couldn't sit comfortably.
They wouldn't be able to get close to people.
Must have been absolutely horrific,
not to mention the weight of the object itself.
♪
And then we have a long chain
to put around the ankles to fix people,
a row of them.
♪
So people's feet would have been clamped together with this
and then also attached to either a row
of other-- - Yes.
also chained people to an object, to keep them tied up?
Yes.
To keep them from running away because they were
a commodity, they were being sold.
♪
It would have probably shocked people to know
that these were being manufactured
within this country.
Clarkson had a tremendous influence on people.
♪
The Bristol Channel has the highest tidal range
in the world.
It's about 40-50 feet.
So we have to get exactly the right time of year
when we've got a really low tide.
And today is the lowest tide.
My team are going to work on dry land
with geophysical equipment to see if we can find
remains of the ship, on the beach itself.
Meanwhile, you're going to go out to sea,
dive to see if you can find remains of it underwater.
♪
This is our final mission,
and we've learned a lot up until now.
This mission is disturbing to me
because these Africans had actually fought
and won their freedom on the Island of Saint Lucia
in the Caribbean.
[guns firing]
And within a year of that time, the British came back...
[guns firing]
and re-enslaved them.
Took them back to England.
They didn't bring them from St. Lucia to here, right?
As prisoners of war, they brought them
as re-enslaved Africans.
They ended up dying in chains in the hull
of that ship in freezing cold war.
♪
The accounts from the time show that "The London"
foundered off the small bay called Rapparee Cove,
which is adjacent to the Harbour of Ilfracombe.
So this is where we're going to be looking.
This is where the wreck ended off at.
I plotted out some of the targets
that we should go look at.
So we'll move closer and closer and closer
into the area where she was sitting on the rocks.
♪
[ALANNAH] For the first time since "The London" foundered
more than 220 years ago,
an underwater search for the wreck is finally happening.
♪
It's not a very deep dive, but the visibility is not good.
The Northern Atlantic waters are frigid
and the Bristol Channel currents are exceptionally strong.
♪
[detectors clicking]
[KRAMER] To find debris from the shipwreck,
we scanned the bottom with metal detectors,
looking for metallic components that could have been
on the ship or part of the ship.
Pieces of the hull, nails, guns, anchors,
chains, and shackles.
It could take hours to pick up a signal.
♪
So we work in shifts, each pair surveys underwater
for up to one hour and then the next team jumps in.
[beeping]
The magnetometer hit on something.
So we started digging, feverishly digging,
and fanning and digging and fanning.
You get into it.
You could hear the magnetometer going off,
hitting on something and you just want to be able
to find what it's hitting on.
I could see Valerie in this cloud of black
and it was super turbid.
I couldn't see her. I couldn't see my hand.
I couldn't see anything.
And you know, I found something. This is what I found.
Mallory, what do you think it is?
Oh, there you go.
Here you go, it's a wrench.
It's a wrench. Found a wrench.
♪
Guys, I'm coming up!
♪
So after hours of searching, we didn't find anything.
And now the tide is going down.
So we have to stop.
Pick it up again tomorrow.
Now it's time for the archeologists on land
to get to work.
Hopefully, they'll have better luck than us.
♪
[NARRATOR]On the other side of the ocean in the United States,
slavery was so infused with the local economy
that a change in public opinion
wasn't enough to end it.
Here, abolition was earned in blood,
in the deadliest conflict America has ever known.
So what's the significance of this place?
- There's a spooky feel to it. - Yeah. I mean--
That's not very scientific.
No, but a lot of people died here.
[men shouting indistinctively] [gunfire]
There were Confederate forces up on that ridge
firing down on the Union soldiers.
The Confederates are up there.
The Union soldiers are rushing over here.
Right, and you could see here, the Confederates
have the high ground.
And so they are able to pick Union soldiers off
as they're trying to cross this little bridge.
And I think the choice to make this charge, um...
cost a lot of people their lives.
[gunfire]
[NARRATOR] When it comes to the struggle for abolition
in the United States,
this battle was the turning point.
[gunfire]
[JUSTIN] We're standing in a Union-only cemetery
for soldiers that were killed in the bloodiest day
in US history, on September 17, 1862.
That's a day that lives in more infamy
than uh, D-Day or September 11th.
3,650 people have died here.
Another 2000 died in the days, months,
weeks that followed the battle.
Almost 6,000 soldiers, Union and Southerners--
That's correct.
Died in this one battle?
How did this battle impact African American's liberation?
The Battle of Antietam had a secret underpinning,
a secret agenda.
Lincoln had, hidden away in his desk, a document.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation
would elevate the war, would make it about a new,
higher purpose.
Make it not just about reunification,
but also about the ending of slavery.
So Lincoln has drafted this proclamation,
but he drafted in 1862 when things are going really badly
for the Union army and his advisors say
basically like we like this idea,
like we're, we're kind of in favor of this,
but it's going to look really bad and desperate
if you do it when the war is going so poorly for us.
And so, after the victory here at Antietam,
Lincoln decides I have the victory I need,
and I'm going to issue the proclamation.
♪
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation,
one of the things that did was they offered a first-time
invitation for African American soldiers
to join the Union Army.
They did so in droves.
By the end of the Civil War, about 10% of the soldiers
who fought on the Union side would be African Americans.
♪
What happens at Antietam enables Black people
to do what they had wanted to do for so long,
which was to fight slave owners.
[shouting and gunfire]
This is a chance for me to fight for freedom
for people who look like me all across the country.
♪
So is it fair to say Lincoln freed the slaves?
Not quite.
Lincoln was responding to Black people's own actions
to free themselves.
[shouting and explosions]
Starting in May 1861,
before a lot of major battles have taken place,
Black people are running to Fort Monroe in Virginia,
seeking out the Union Army and
demanding that the army should make them free.
And so what Lincoln does is open a door
through which they could travel to freedom.
The story of emancipation is... is just wrong
if it's told without African Americans
actually claiming their own freedom.
♪
"The London" came ashore at high water
and so she would have foundered somewhere here on the beach.
And so it's highly likely that the remains of the ship
were actually buried in the sand.
[beeping]
We're using a technique known as magnetometry.
So if there's any metal objects down there at any great depths,
they're likely to come up as an anomaly.
So we're very systematically going backwards and forwards
along the beach to measure every centimeter of the beach.
[beeping]
[whirring]
What the drone does, it enables us to provide
a three-dimensional map of the cove and the cliffs
and so forth around.
[camera shuttering]
So it provides a visual picture of what is there,
so it helps interpret our findings.
[gentle waves crashing]
[gulls squawk]
♪
There's something really strange
about the wreck of "The London."
[thunder crashing]
It was so close to the harbor, why did it crash?
Well, the locals saw the ship was in distress.
Lots of people from the harbor rowed out
to try and help the ship
and guide the ship into the harbor.
We even had a pilot
who tried to come on board, but the captain refused.
Refused?
Refused help.
The harbor is right there.
Why didn't he just go into the safe harbor?
Why was he still out here?
Well, the captain was reported to have said,
"I've come from hell, I'm going to damnation."
It's a really puzzling thing why he refused help.
[shouting and thunder]
♪
So we managed to bring together all the data.
There's clearly a lot of metal further down
to the end of the beach there, as we go lower.
There's a whole lot of anomalies in there.
And then there's a big anomaly, just in there.
So our job tomorrow is really clear.
We've got an hour and a half
of the lowest tide to investigate,
get out our shovels and literally find out
what's remaining.
And whether these rarely are part of a shipwreck,
and hopefully "The London."
♪
[NARRATOR] As the transatlantic slave trade expanded,
Western European cities, such as London and Paris,
became the biggest and wealthiest in the world.
But it was also here that technological advancements
gave a major boost to the movement for abolition.
And most of all, the printing press.
What do we have here?
[MICK] First of the iron presses from about 1800.
We've got a illustration on there, a wood engraving.
All engraved by hand, that was engraved in 1860.
This process I'm engaged in, helped put an end
to the slave trade and slavery.
You just place it on the image.
That's it. That's good.
And then pull the handle across to you
as far as you can take it.
♪
Just all the way up.
- It worked! - Excellent.
- It looks really good. - Yeah.
This technology really takes information
and ideas to a totally different level.
Print becomes cheap because of mechanization.
And what happens is that this material
is offered to the public in newspapers and cartoons,
and it becomes a great informer of opinion.
♪
Major issues, the death of Nelson,
or the abolition of the slave trade.
Big issues, puts them in graphic form
and gives them an extraordinary audience.
People make their political judgements
around the cartoons that they see.
♪
The slave trade and slavery
was something that the British and other Europeans
could keep at arm's length.
It was over the horizon out of sight, out of mind.
Cartoons, the world of print of the late 18th century,
bring it right up close.
It's something that you can't avoid thinking about anymore.
For instance, George Cruikshank becomes hugely influential.
This is a really horrific image.
[waves crashing]
[screams]
♪
[screams]
[sobbing]
Is this the captain, here?
That's Captain Kimber, torturing the young African
on board his ship.
♪
I've noticed that the white abolitionists
are widely known and celebrated,
but what's less known is the names
of some of the Africans who were involved.
It was an army of unknown soldiers
in the background of this.
And the most interesting one in some ways
is the African, Olaudah Equiano.
I acquired a first edition of his book,
which was published in 1789.
His autobiography.
- A first edition. - First edition.
That's incredible.
How did he make the transition from a slave
to being a published author
who was influencing public opinion in Britain?
It's an extraordinary story.
He traveled up and down the Caribbean
as a slave on a ship,
a lot of Africans are making money
on the edges of the slave system
and he actually buys his own freedom.
He has the cash to buy his own freedom.
What story does he tell in this book?
It's a story of violence.
It's a story of exploitation.
It's a story of cruelty on a monumental scale.
It's a denunciation of slavery
through the eyes of one man.
And through the story of his own individual life.
He is opening people's eyes to what it is like
for an African to endure the slave trade and slavery.
♪
Right now it's the lowest tide of the year
in Rapparee Cove.
The water level is 50 feet lower
than it usually is during high tide.
The boats in the harbor are literally grounded.
And while we're strategizing for our next dive,
the archeologists are in a race against the incoming tide.
♪
The targets closest to the shoreline
are at the highest priority right now
because these areas will only be accessible
for a little over an hour before the tide comes back in.
♪
[PAT] I've been coming to this cove for nearly 50 years.
When I come down here, I come down to other look
to see what's around and I pick up whatever's there.
The vision of the wreck wrecking on the rocks in this cove,
have been in my mind for many, many years.
And I was looking for the story.
Who were the people on board and what happened to them?
♪
20 years ago, I was involved
with one of the most shocking finds in this cove:
human remains.
I saw finger bones
and I found a fragment of a skull
and three teeth sticking out of that bank.
♪
I felt in my heart, I was convinced
it was from one of the slaves.
I started digging into old documents
and I discovered shocking descriptions
of the morning after the ship had foundered,
when dozens of bodies of Africans
littered the beach.
♪
The morning after, the local population came down
to try to bury these bodies
because they thought they should do it
because of their religious convictions.
They started to move the bodies
and then the tide dropped back a bit
and then exposed a load of gold that came from a treasure chest.
It was tipped out of the rowing boat.
[gull squawking]
So they all rushed to the gold and left the bodies.
[gull squawking]
♪
[NARRATOR] While we wait for the tide to come up in Ilfracombe,
Richard and I have taken a small team
to the nearby Isles of Scilly.
Here lie the remains of an English ship
called "The Douro."
It went down at 1843, well past the time
that the slave trade and slavery were abolished
throughout the British empire.
In the case of "The Douro,"
as with thousands of other ships,
it is suspected that it continued
to illegally traffic and enslave Africans.
We're here to find evidence to support this claim.
♪
So "The Douro"
was supposed to have hit the rock
that can just see breaking there.
That round rock.
It's probably foundered on the reef,
just behind us here.
We need to try and find the manillas if we can,
see if we can find this currency that was used in slave trade.
♪
Visibility is probably only one to two meters,
which is not great down here.
♪
I can see what looks like
the first prong of the anchor.
♪
So, it's very large--
Larger than I thought it would be.
We are now going to focus on the manilla.
♪
Kinga is searching around with a metal detector.
♪
[detector whirrs]
It looks like she's got something.
It could be the right shape.
♪
And yeah, she's pieced them together.
You can see that is a piece of manilla that Kinga's found.
♪
We actually, we found a manila
with the metal detector, underneath the sand,
right by the anchor.
In two pieces, it's broken, some manila.
Here's what "The Douro" was carrying
when it went down in 1843.
So this essentially proves
that even after slavery was banned,
that ship was taking a currency that was used
to trade for human lives.
It's hard comprehend slavery isn't it?
In this world, and the freedom that we have,
but that's just, it's quite poignant. Right?
Unbelievable.
This was something that was equal in value
to a human being who, who laughs and dreams.
There were thousands of these aboard "The Douro"
when they were all taken in the West African coast
and each one of these was traded for a human life.
[gulls squawking]
♪
The story of emancipation during the civil war,
was a mosaic of thousands of individual acts.
But one story stands out.
It took place here in Charleston Harbor,
a great terminus
of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
It's the spot, where almost half
of all the enslaved Africans who came to America
throughout the course of the entire
transatlantic slave trade,
where they took their first steps.
Right here is called Gadsden's Wharf.
It was the largest wharf in the colonies.
It was the spot where more enslaved Africans landed
and were sold than any other place in the country.
♪
It became really the epicenter of slavery.
[crowd chattering]
There's a greater than 99% probability
that all living African Americans
have at least one relative who landed here.
[crowd chattering]
And your great- great-grandfather.
He was once a slave here?
Yeah, my great, great grandfather.
His name was Robert Smalls.
He is commonly known as one of the first heroes
of the civil war.
He was born on April 5th, 1839 in Buford, South Carolina.
Eventually became a laborer on a boat called "The Planter."
And over the years, because he had the ability,
he ended up becoming the pilot of that boat.
When the civil war broke out, he got his family
and the crew and their families
and head out.
There was a federal blockade just outside
the mouth of the harbor.
And he knew that if he could get there,
that he'd be free.
Robert put on the top hat and the long coat
of a Confederate captain, he knew all the passcodes,
blowing the whistle.
[whistle blowing]
There were about five forts that he had to sail past,
including the most dangerous and the biggest here,
Fort Sumpter, where the civil war began.
They had to sail past the range of the cannons
in Fort Sumpter.
And so they got a bit further down,
so they were beyond the range and they quickly lowered
the Confederate flag and they were free.
♪
Because of his bravery
and the capture of an enemy vessel for the Union,
Smalls became a national hero.
With the money he was awarded for delivering "The Planter,"
he eventually bought the southern home
he grew up in as a slave.
♪
- 511. - That's it.
This is it. 511 Prince street.
It's actually everything I would have imagined
a southern house.
Yeah. It's a beautiful home.
♪
- It's very homey. - Yeah. It's beautiful.
Generations of your family, right?
Absolutely.
Going back to my great, great, great grandmother.
♪
So this is it. This is the bedroom.
After the war he's here.
Apparently hears a knock on the door,
opens the door and there's Jane Bold McKee.
Jane was the wife of his masters, former master.
And she was ill, mentally ill, physically ill
and thought she was coming home to her house,
thought that she was going to resume life
in the way that she had lived it.
And Robert embraced her, brought her in
and took care of her for the remaining months
of her life.
He allowed her to live in the master bedroom
and they catered to her.
He was owned by this woman.
He was treated as a piece of property,
but yet he had the humanity in him to bring her in
and to care for her.
So.
What a gesture, what a man.
Robert smalls became a Congressman
and would later be remembered as the father of public education
in the United States.
♪
[clicking]
The tide's coming very fast now.
So we have to pick up the pace if we want to find something.
We're hoping to find wrought iron,
the old form of metal.
"The London's" wooden hull would have been reinforced
by that kind of iron.
There's all this iron standing all over the water
and all over the rock.
I need to get a second pair of hands in here.
But then finally, we got to one of the targets.
I don't know. What do you think it is?
That's angle iron, 20th century.
Come on, We haven't got long Patrick.
♪
[whirring]
It would be buried.
It's a coin, but I'm afraid it's modern.
It's got a picture of the queen on the back.
About there, come on chaps.
♪
But then our efforts pay off.
♪
[grunting]
Whoa!
So this is a great lump of iron.
And you can tell that it's made out of wrought iron.
Yeah. And what's happened at the end here?
It's been bent and it's been torn.
That wouldn't have been made like that.
It's been thumped.
[waves crashing]
Like in a wreck.
[all screaming]
♪
And it's exactly the right size from a ship isn't it?
Yes, yes.
If we took it like this, we put it underneath,
you would just see how it would fit
underneath some rigging.
♪
This iron is from the time period of "The London."
I mean, wrought iron is spot on for this date.
It's our right time period.
We actually got preserved here, a kind of frozen moment in time
when "The London" is being smashed up
against the rocks behind us,
and is actually twisting this strap.
[waves rushing]
[all screaming]
And hold it. Surprisingly heavy.
♪
[screaming]
♪
[gentle waves crashing]
♪
[indistinct speaking in native language]
[NARRATOR] Ghana, in West Africa, was one of the main
areas from where captured Africans were trafficked
and enslaved.
♪
[indistinct speaking in native language]
After centuries of the slave trade,
abolitionists tried to show Europeans
and people in the New World,
that the Africans among them
were human beings like them.
♪
The memory of the millions who perished on the voyages
across the ocean has been lost.
♪
Ghanaian artist, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo,
is trying to resurrect that forgotten part of history.
♪
Kwame?
[KWAME] Hello, Mr. Jackson.
Sam, man.
So let's look at what you got.
Okay.
♪
Are these just normally out like this?
Yeah.
♪
Wow.
- [laughs] - All right.
So this is a story of the people who were on those ships.
Yeah.
So right ahead...
How many are out here now?
Wow.
Mm-hmm
So, who are these faces?
Mm-hmm
Yeah.
It's crazy 'cause I can just look
in just one section right here,
and I can identify people that I know.
♪
[chains rattling]
♪
Now that the tide is up, we're back in the water.
♪
One big piece of the puzzle is still missing for me.
Why did Captain Robertson, the captain of "The London,"
refuse to accept refuge in the nearby harbor?
♪
[beeping]
Mallory has plotted to dive a little further out
in the ocean this time, as the wreckage of "The London"
may have drifted away from land over time.
♪
[beeping]
♪
Then, there it was.
It was this huge object.
It was an old mooring anchor, positioned outside the harbor,
providing incoming ships stability out at sea.
It's make and design correspond
with the timeline of "The London,"
and some of the local records mention the mooring anchor
being out there at the time.
♪
I saw it, and I thought,
"Hold on." Now I know why Captain Robertson
came out to Rapparee Cove
instead of going into the harbor.
He wanted to tie himself to the mooring anchor.
He wanted safety without scrutiny.
♪
[all shouting]
[thunder cracks]
And I think I know exactly what he was afraid of.
[thunder and shouting]
So, from what I've been reading and researching,
I think a reason why the captain may have been
apprehensive about coming into Ilfracombe
is because four years earlier, there was this case,
Captain Kimber.
He had done something terrible.
[waves crashing]
[chains rattling]
[sobbing]
You're out on a ship.
You have your slaves down below
in really inhumane terrible conditions.
And they need the slaves to arrive strong.
And they would, what you call, "Dance the slaves."
[drumming and chanting]
And there was this girl,
[drumming and chanting]
this slave girl.
This girl, as it was reported, was Christian,
and she had been ordered to take off her clothes and dance,
and she didn't want to.
Obviously not...
[drumming and chanting]
And Captain Kimber wasn't going to have any of this.
[drumming and chanting]
[all screaming]
He tore her clothes from her, tied her ankle to a rope
from the mast, pulled her up and down.
[chain scraping]
♪
[chain scraping]
♪
[chain scraping]
[impact thud]
♪
Over and over and over and over, until she died.
He killed her that way.
♪
The surgeon saw this and was horrified.
When they got back,
the surgeon reported this.
He couldn't stay quiet.
And at that point, the tide started to turn,
and there was a cartoon drawn
of this girl being dropped on the deck,
and Captain Kimber is watching.
And this was in the homes of many, many, many Englishmen,
and they saw this girl as a human.
And so, Captain Kimber went to trial.
And this had never been heard of before,
and everybody was watching.
This was a really big case.
But unfortunately, he was acquitted.
However, it became the catalyst of,
"You need to treat slaves like they're people
and not like they're cargo."
And I think that's exactly why
the Captain of "The London" was hesitant
to come into harbor.
Who knows how this captain had been treating his slaves?
Maybe there was something he wanted to hide.
He had re-enslaved free people,
and the world was not going to sit back and ignore it anymore.
♪
Hi.
Suddenly, my cousin and her family come along
to surprise me.
I recognized your face easily from up there.
Who's this?
It's Josh.
My father is originally from here,
and my mom is from The Bahamas, where I'm from.
I've never met my cousins in person before.
I've seen pictures.
I have no recollection of this, so this is kind of me
meeting all of you for the first time, really.
- Yeah. - Great.
This is absolutely crazy.
After all these diving missions we've gone through,
and the research we've done all over the world,
finally both sides of my mixed heritage
have become real for me.
[laughs]
That is so cool.
I've only seen you guys in pictures.
[laughs]
♪
For the past few years, we dove and investigated
sunken slave ships all over the world.
And now, hearing of our work,
we've been invited to Washington, D.C.
to meet a very special person,
the legendary civil rights leader,
Congressman John Lewis.
How many times have you been arrested?
During the '60s, I got arrested 40 times
for sitting in
at lunch counters and restaurants,
going on the freedom ride.
We were arrested, we were jailed,
we were beaten,
we were left bloody, left unconscious.
Just by sitting in places
that only white people were supposed to.
Just that.
You remember the first time you were arrested?
I remember the first time ever arrested.
Right.
I can never, ever forget it.
I felt free.
Free?
I felt liberated because my mother and my father
and grandparents had said,
"Stay out of trouble. Don't get in trouble."
And I got in trouble.
What I call good trouble, necessary trouble.
I didn't quite understand my own history,
and I have so many questions that,
each time I go diving,
some of it gets answered.
We dove and saw
relics, remnants of the chaos,
of the brutality, of the abuse.
Sometimes it's just too much,
but we have to tell this story.
This story needs to be told.
And that's where I guess I'm stuck.
Right?
All of the places that we've been,
you can see the beauty of it, and the wonder of it.
You see these islands or shorelines.
When we were in Suriname,
we're standing on the shoreline
of the most beautiful scenery
that you ever wanted to see.
But to know that 680 Africans were murdered
within a couple of hundred yards of the shoreline,
I'm conflicted all the time.
I understand very well what you're saying.
And we cannot sweep it under the rug.
We've got to bring it all out.
Make it plain.
And we have an obligation, a mission,
a mandate to do just that.
So the whole world can feel this.
[chanting]
Keep the faith. Don't give up.
- No, sir. - Never that.
♪
[waves crashing]