‘The Last Slave Ship,’ Alabama author dives into Clotilda’s history and his role in a historic discovery

Ben Raines Clotilda site

Ben Raines holds a piece of a wreck discovered in the Mobile River near Twelve Mile Island. A team of researchers has confirmed the site to be the wreck of the infamous Clotilda.Ben Raines

In the book, “The Last Slave Ship,” Alabama author Ben Raines dives into the history of the ship Clotilda and the enslaved passengers who arrived in Mobile before the Civil War following a harrowing journey to and from the African country of Dahomey (now, modern-day Benin).

He also writes about his discovery of the hull of the ship during the spring of 2019, which has sparked celebration and hope within the Africatown community that was founded by the ship’s survivors. Raines, a former AL.com journalist and a longtime environmental writer, has been exploring the Mobile-Tensaw Delta for 23 years and utilized his familiarity of the region to pinpoint the area where the ship was sunk.

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But Raines hopes the readers biggest takeaway from “The Last Slave Ship” is the story of the enslaved Africans who “survived slaughter and bondage” to build a community that could be on the brink of a revitalization more than 160 years after Timothy Meaher orchestrated his illegal transatlantic voyage.

“The Africans demonstrated two traits as soon as they arrived in this country: they would stick together, and they would fight anyone who tried to harm them,” Raines said, diving into the history of the ship’s survivors after they arrived in Mobile. “They proved this on Timothy Meaher’s plantation just after they arrived, when an overseer whipped one of the African women. The rest of the Africans attacked the overseer, took the whip from him, and proceeded to beat him with it. That gets to the core of what allowed the group to thrive. Similarly, I believe the Clotilda captives were likely the first Black people to demand reparations from their former enslavers, doing so just weeks after gaining their freedom.”

Darron Patterson, president of the Clotilda Descendants Association, said the book and other forthcoming projects—including Margaret Brown’s film, “Descendants” and the documentary, “110: The Last Enslaved Africans Brought to America” – are part of telling the truth about “so much stuff that has been hidden for years.”

“Now it’s about the truth and no more window dressing and sitting around and acting like stuff didn’t happen,” said Patterson. “Ben brings about a lot of truth to his book.”

Raines said the true story of the Clotilda is one of “loss and hardship.”

“But it is also a story of incredible resilience,” he said. “Anyone reading this history is overwhelmed by the brutality of the times, but also by what the Africans accomplished. That’s the true legacy of the Clotilda survivors. They overcame almost unimaginable adversity and banded together to create a community. They took turns building each other’s houses. They built a church and a school. They reconciled with their past and the people who wronged them, and they moved on.”

The following is a Q&A with the author whose book, published by Simon & Shuster, was released Tuesday.

What makes the Clotilda unique in the history of the Atlantic slave trade?

The most unique thing about the story of the Clotilda and its passengers is how well documented everything is, from the captain’s journal chronicling the voyage and purchase of captives, to interviews the freed captives gave later in life. The ship’s voyage in 1860 came more than 50 years after the U.S. outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Most of the enslaved people in this country at the time were born in the United States. This meant that by the end of the Civil War, the Clotilda’s passengers were some of the only people alive who had actually endured the middle passage sailing from Africa to America. Likewise, the Clotilda shipmates were some of the only people in this country who could talk about being captured in a slaving raid in Africa, or of the pain of being snatched from their families and homeland.

Additionally, most of the captives were younger than 20 when they arrived in this country, and 25 or younger at the end of the Civil War in 1865. A large number of them lived into the 20th century and were interviewed dozens of times by journalists and historians. Because of this, we know more about the people who arrived in the Clotilda’s hold than is known about any of the millions of people who were enslaved in the Americas. We know exactly what part of Africa they came from, who captured and sold them, who bought them, exactly when they arrived in America, and what happened to them once they were here. The record of their experience illuminates and informs the lost histories of millions of African American families who know only that their forebears were also stolen and shipped across the ocean.

You really go into vivid detail about the atrocities that Cudjo Lewis and others aboard the Clotilda experienced in their homeland at the hands of a brutal king and his followers before they ever were sold into slavery. This is part of the Clotilda tale that is little known to most folks, and why is that?

Even beyond the Clotilda, that part of the history of enslavement is little known to most folks. In America, our focus has understandably been what went on in this country. In part, that’s because it was readily available to people here, including the writers and historians who recorded what happened during enslavement and the aftermath of the Civil War. I went to elementary school in the south, and I remember being taught that white people went to Africa and caught people in nets and stole them. That happened in the earliest incarnation of African slavery, with people from Europe catching people from North Africa in the 1500s, but for most of the 400 years people were being sold, they were being captured by fellow Africans and sold to people from America and Europe. And by the time of the Clotilda’s voyage, certain African kingdoms had turned the capture of fellow Africans into an industrialized enterprise, capturing tens of thousands of people per year. The Kingdom of Dahomey, which captured everyone onboard the Clotilda, was focused almost solely on catching fellow Africans to sell, and the entire economy was based on the sale of people from its port city, Ouidah. France, Spain, England, and the Netherlands all built prisons in Ouidah to hold captives purchased by their citizens until they could be loaded onto ships.

The truth is we have very few first-hand accounts of what happened in Africa during the 400 years its people were being sold. But amazingly, many of the existing accounts of what an African slaving raid was like, or what life in the barracoons was like, or the Middle Passage, many of the only accounts in the historical record come from the passengers of the Clotilda. They watched their families and friends murdered during the slaving raids, suffered through life in those prisons built by the Europeans, and survived the middle passage. Because they were captured so late, in 1860, many of the Clotilda passengers survived into the 1900s and were interviewed numerous times.

Timothy Meaher was described as a braggadocious man whose caper was no secret to those within listening distance. Yet, he and his family kept the location of the sunken ship a secret for generations. Who was the real Timothy Meaher – a big-mouth Alabamian who was lucky throughout his adult life not to have experienced any true justice for the Clotilda, or a shrewd enslaver who meticulously orchestrated every detail of the voyage that left investigators and researchers bamboozled?

Meaher was definitely the loudmouth bragger who’s boasting almost landed him in jail. He was arrested for the Clotilda’s voyage days after it returned because he had been bragging about the “secret” trip for three months to anyone who would listen. The only reason he wasn’t locked up over the Clotilda voyage is because the federal judge in Mobile was one of his closest friends. Judge Johnson let him off scot-free. Telling point in all of this: Meaher and the judge were so close that Meaher had named a steamboat after the judge long before the Clotilda voyage. This notion that Timothy was clever is just not true. The man was arrested for the Clotilda, and then he was arrested a few years later during the Civil War onboard one of his boats headed for Cuba with a load of cotton to trade for guns. He claimed in court that he was actually fleeing the south without his family to keep this load of cotton from falling into Confederate hands. This ridiculous claim was undone by the fact that he had his signed contract with the Confederacy on board the boat with him. It spelled out precisely what he was doing, and how much the Confederacy was paying him. (That’s not clever!) His boat, worth well over a million in today’s money was confiscated and he spent a great deal of the war in jail.

You credit a conversation with our former colleague, Jeff Dute, to inspiring you to go searching for the sunken ship. What about that conversation sparked you to start?

My search was actually sparked by two people who were longtime fixtures at the old Press-Register, Jeff Dute, who was the Outdoors editor, and John Sledge, who was the books editor. John is also a historian for the city of Mobile who has written several excellent books, including The Mobile River, which touches on the Clotilda story. Jeff heard John on the radio one day saying that if we could ever find the Clotilda, that would solve one of America’s greatest maritime mysteries. Jeff called after he heard John and said I should look for the ship. At the time, I told him that was crazy, like looking for pirate treasure. But Jeff persisted and told me the most in depth version of the Clotilda story I’d ever heard. I was quickly sucked in. We got off the phone and I typed “Clotilda” into Google. I found myself thinking about where you could hide an ocean-going vessel in the Delta. It so happens that I run a side business taking people on nature tours in my boat in the same swamp. I figured I might stand a better chance than most of finding the ship. Ultimately, when I decided to look for Clotilda, it was because no one else was, and it seemed a mystery in need of solving. That was in August of 2017. I pulled up the first piece of the Clotilda to see the light of day eight months later in April of 2018.

You seemed focused on continuing the search for the ship after the confirmation that the first discovery was not the Clotilda. In your book, you describe a conversation with Thelma Maiben-Owens in which she encourages you not to quit your search. Had you not had those conversations, or if folks in Africatown told you to drop it, would you have walked away?

At that meeting where they explained in detail the ways the first ship could not be Clotilda; I was definitely thinking of giving up. Then several things happened that served to make me want to continue the hunt. First was being in the room with hundreds of folks from Africatown and seeing the entire community’s spirits fall when they said it wasn’t Clotilda. People started crying. That was the first moment I really began to understand how powerful a totem the ship was, and what it would mean to Africatown and the African American community writ large. Thelma came up to me after the meeting and gave me a big hug, then she sang a gospel song in my ear, the lyrics of which are: “There’s a bright side somewhere, don’t stop until you find it.” She let me go and said, “Don’t stop until you find it Ben.” After that, I sort of rallied myself to continue. Even though the first ship I found was not Clotilda, I knew I was on the right track based on the historical evidence I had unearthed. And ultimately, we found Clotilda a few hundred yards from the first ship I found.

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How has Africatown and the surrounding communities responded to the discovery of the Clotilda?

The discovery generated tremendous excitement in Africatown. When the find was announced, Africatown threw a huge party. The ship is viewed as both a vindication, that the story they’ve been telling was true, and as a vehicle that can resurrect the town and rebuild it from the destruction caused by decades of racist decisions and policies at the city and state level. Even today, there is concern in the community that the city of Mobile and the state of Alabama have done little to help Africatown celebrate its past.

With a museum, Clotilda and the story of her captives will be transformed into an economic engine for a revitalized Africatown. An Africatown museum hosting the shipwreck would instantly become one of the crown jewels along the Alabama Civil Rights Trail, which highlights critical places in the African American story, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Clotilda is a similarly powerful artifact, the only ship from the U.S. slave trade ever found. In fact, out of more than 20,000 vessels that participated in the global slave trade, only 13, counting Clotilda, have been found, most of those being ships that sunk in ports. The pieces of a slave ship on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture come from a South African slave ship that sank in Brazil. Clearly, the wreck of the Clotilda is of international historical significance.

Every effort should be made to help celebrate this remarkable story of human resilience.

As various museum projects are underway and the slow process of recreating Africatown into a tourism site moves forward, how important is it for the Meaher family to provide whatever Clotilda artifacts they have for these efforts?

Whatever relics they may have must make their way to the new museum in Africatown. It is shameful that the Meaher family continues to refuse to speak to any of the descendants in Africatown. I tracked down a descendant of Captain William Foster, who sailed the Clotilda to Africa for Meaher, and asked him to come to Africatown to meet with the descendants. He did and described it as the most moving and loving experience of his life, save for the birth of his daughters and the day he married his wife. People in Africatown want to reconcile with the Meahers, forgive them for what their ancestors did and move on. … It is past time for them to help in the healing, instead of keeping the wound raw and festering.

In as brief of a way as possible, complete this sentence: “In 5 years, the following changes and/or developments I would like to see for Africatown, and its residents include …”

“A world class museum, the National Monument to the Enslaved, built on the old housing project site, and a new business district surrounding it to replace the one destroyed by I-165 and the Africatown bridge.”

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