Inside the search for the infamous slave ship Clotilda

1. Two 'last' slave ships

MOBILE, Ala. — The fog lifted just in time, and the late afternoon sun cast the river in copper. At the dock, Ben Raines waited in his 22-foot skiff. “You wouldn’t have been able to see anything an hour ago,” Raines said. The fog was gone, but Raines knew the white curtain would fall again as the sun set. Just enough time for a trip to the present and past.

Raines is in his early 50s, a splash of gray in his dark beard. He's an investigative journalist, author and filmmaker. He also does boat charters on the side, taking visitors beyond Mobile’s paper plants into swamps known for their ghosts and ghost ships.

Raines calls the Mobile-Tensaw Delta "America’s Amazon." It has hundreds of freshwater fish species and 18 different types of turtles. Few systems in the world have such biodiversity hidden in the eddies and canebrake, he said. Few places have kept so many secrets in those same tawny currents and reeds.

Last year, Raines published “The Last Slave Ship,” a book about his search for the Clotilda, which is fast becoming one of the most infamous ships in American history. In 1860, the schooner smuggled about 100 captive Africans into Mobile Bay, this despite a law in 1808 banning the importation of enslaved people. Soon after, the Clotilda’s captain burned and sank the ship, perhaps to conceal the evidence. The ship’s location faded like an old scar.

For 160 years, stories about the Clotilda came and went like the delta’s floods, merging truth with the embellishments that so often form when you tell stories over and over. Even some descendants of the Clotilda’s enslaved Africans weren’t sure what was fact and what was folklore.

But in 2018, Raines made a startling discovery: a submerged shipwreck that appeared to be Clotilda. Raines would head to that area once again on this afternoon in January.

Climbing on board was another journalist, Erik Calonius. Like Raines, Calonius also has written about “the last slave ship.”

But not the Clotilda.

His book in 2006 was about the Wanderer, a yacht that smugglers used in 1858 to haul more than 400 captive Africans into Georgia, a year and a half before the Clotilda. Calonius, who lives in Mount Pleasant, had researched the Clotilda for his book, and he’d grown skeptical about certain aspects of the Clotilda narrative. What’s more, you couldn’t have two “last” slave ships. Had he gotten it wrong? He’d traveled to Mobile to learn more.

Raines pushed off the dock at Meaher State Park. He steered the boat north toward the Tensaw River, swollen and silty from heavy rains. Along the river banks, canebrake formed a wheat-colored wall. Raines pointed toward a patch of wild rice. Behind him rose the distant spire of downtown Mobile’s tallest building.

The swamps and distant skyscraper created a feeling of being both hidden and exposed. In this area after World War II, the Navy moored dozens of Liberty Ship freighters, binding them together in great metal rafts. “You could hide them here then because it was pre-satellite,” Raines said above the din of his outboard. Locals dubbed the ships the “Ghost Fleet.” The delta’s braided rivers had long been used to cloak things.

Five years ago, when Raines began his search, he knew a few tidbits about the Clotilda story. But history wasn't his focus. He was with the Mobile Press-Register and AL.com at the time, and he’d done groundbreaking investigations into the area’s industrial polluters.

One of the most affected communities was Africatown, a pocket of neighborhoods north of Mobile. Some of the captives on the Clotilda had settled there after the Civil War. But over time, corporate interests surrounded Africatown with noxious paper and petrochemical plants. Governments punctured Africatown with highways. Raines knew about the Clotilda mainly through that journalistic lens.

Then, one day in 2017, a friend suggested he look for the Clotilda itself.

An unsolved mystery can have centrifugal force. His research began simply enough. “I plugged ‘Clotilda’ into Google,” he recalled. Then he plugged into his network of sources. He knew the river; he was an investigative reporter. Soon, he had new clues.

Raines had no inkling about what would happen next — that his search would lead to a ship graveyard in early 2018, that this in turn would trigger million-dollar research missions, that crews from National Geographic, CNN and "60 Minutes" would soon travel to Mobile to do their own stories, that he would serve as a guide for the ambassador to Benin, the country in western Africa where the Clotilda’s smugglers procured their human cargo.

He had no idea that this would coincide with the publishing of "Barracoon," a book by Zora Neale Hurston about Africatown, a manuscript that also had been submerged by the passage of time. How this book would become a bestseller and fuel even more interest in the Clotilda. He never expected that former President Barack Obama’s production company would back a Netflix documentary about Africatown called "Descendant."

Or that his new obsession would raise timeless questions about the malleability of history, recent and long ago, how historical interpretations change depending on the teller — and how his search would both fill him with pride and embarrass him in front of millions of viewers and readers.

2. Calonius, the skeptic

Riding with Raines that recent January afternoon, Erik Calonius knew that questioning the Clotilda’s place in history put him in treacherous waters. The Clotilda story was important to historians, for sure. But also to global media conglomerates hungry for compelling new content. And then there were the people of Africatown.

For many there, the Clotilda was much more than an artifact. It was about their descendants and the enduring community that sprang from their captivity. It went to the heart of who their ancestors were, and, therefore, who they were, their places in the world. For some, the discovery of the Clotilda was akin to finding evidence in a cold case, evidence of a criminal act that happened to 12.5 million Africans stolen from their homes. Question a piece of that evidence, and you edged closer to questioning that larger crime.

Calonius had no doubts about the crime of slavery, only whether the Clotilda’s smugglers were culprits and their schooner a weapon. What was the evidence? Calonius noted that many writers leaned on a standard backstory. That didn’t surprise him. Many journalists didn’t have the time to question the established narrative. He'd questioned that standard story and found holes.

Some accounts mentioned that the Clotilda smugglers were put on trial. But Calonius found no records of a trial. Also, the Wanderer was front-page news day after day in 1858 and 1859, but the Clotilda generated much less coverage just a year later. Was it because reporters thought it hadn’t happened? He came across a story in the Mobile Mercury in July 1860 that said it was “a mere fabrication” to send federal officers “hither and thither.” Was the Clotilda just a ruse to mess with the North?

As Calonius studied individual pieces of the Clotilda puzzle, he began to wonder about the whole puzzle itself.

Didn’t people of Africatown, and history in general, deserve the truth instead of some embellished or false narrative? He’d spent 50 years interrogating world events and wouldn’t stop now.

***

Calonius is a thin man in his early 70s, with a whisp of white beard and the sharp features of his Nordic ancestors. He began his journalism career at 21, when he helped start the Boston Phoenix, an alternative newspaper that became a force in social justice circles. He held reporting and editing jobs with The Wall Street Journal in London, Newsweek and Fortune magazine. He met with IRA operatives in Ireland, drug dealers in Miami and the American pilots who dropped arms to Nicaraguan guerillas.

Over time, he realized he enjoyed fixing stories that hadn’t been told properly — elevating them with livelier prose and richer context. The Wanderer was one of those.

He first learned about the Wanderer in 2002 while vacationing on Jekyll Island in Georgia. In an alcove at his hotel, he spotted a painting of the Wanderer with its sails billowing. Underneath was a bare-bones caption. The majestic image and thin caption seemed to give the slaving expedition a false glow. He was looking for a book project. He dug into the archives and found a time of growing paranoia and fear.

In the 1850s, a group of Democrats known as the Fire-Eaters were pushing the nation toward war, he learned. Among the leaders were Leonidas Spratt, editor of the Charleston Standard, and Robert Rhett, editor of the Charleston Mercury. Spratt and Rhett viewed the South and North as two different societies heading toward an inevitable clash. They amplified divisions by stoking fears among poor White settlers that enslaved people might take their land and jobs if slavery ended. The country had banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade for 50 years; the Fire-Eaters wanted to reopen it.

Against this smoldering backdrop, Charles Lamar of Savannah hired Capt. William Corrie of Charleston to smuggle enslaved Africans on the Wanderer, a yacht converted into a slaver. In July 1858, the Wanderer left Charleston for Africa, its destination and purpose well known to “the crowd which lined the shores, and the waving of flags and the adieus from the fair women,” the New York Times reported then.

The Wanderer returned about five months later, landing on Jekyll Island with its captive Africans. Federal officials arrested Lamar and Corrie, among other conspirators. But after well-publicized trials, none of the smugglers were convicted.

As part of his research, Calonius looked at other illegal slaving missions before the Civil War, including the Clotilda’s. In Mobile, the Clotilda had been well-chronicled since the 1890s. But outside Mobile, the plot was just a footnote in many history books, if that. The noted African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois had written a definitive account of the American slave trade in 1896 and didn’t mention the Clotilda by name. On Du Bois’ timeline, the Wanderer was the last-known slaver. Two later historians had questioned whether the Clotilda’s journey happened at all.

Still, an unwritten rule in journalism warns against calling something “first” or a “last” without a “among the” or “likely.” Too often, new information surfaces, and your story suddenly has a wart.

At the same time, superlatives have magnetic pull. They instantly set your work apart. In a race for the public’s attention, that singularity can make or break a book. As Calonius finished his research in the early 2000s, he saw no serious debate among historians and called his work “The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy that Set its Sails.”

But in 2007, a year after “The Wanderer” landed in bookstores, Sylviane Diouf published “Dreams of Africa in Alabama.” Diouf, a historian of the African diaspora, had sifted through government records and newspaper accounts. She corroborated oral histories with fieldwork in Africa. The Clotilda, she wrote, was the last slave ship. 

Then, in 2008, another historian, Natalie Robertson, published “The Slave Ship Clotilda.” Robertson called the Clotilda “one of the last slavers to enter U.S. territory on the eve of the Civil War.”

Suddenly, Calonius was in the uncomfortable position of having authored a book with a potentially erroneous title: Was the Wanderer now second-to-last?

That question seemed to grow more urgent in 2018 and 2019, as the media storm grew over the Clotilda’s possible discovery. Calonius wondered: Was the wreck and its story a figment of history's imagination? Or would he need to revise his thinking?

Now, with those questions burning off like the morning’s fog, Calonius was on the swollen and merging rivers north of Mobile, heading with Ben Raines toward a graveyard of ships, both men eyeing the horizon, as all writers do, through lenses shaped by their own pasts.

3. Course corrections

Erik Calonius sat in the front of the boat, wind whipping at his face. Ben Raines steered the skiff deeper into the delta. Raines pointed at an eagle above, then dodged pieces of drifting logs in his path. He slowed for a moment to take in a stand of cypress trees. Hidden behind these trees and reeds were bogs filled with alligators and carnivorous pitcher plants.

Raines said he’d always been fascinated by nature; “I was the kid who had six aquariums in my bedroom.” But he also grew up steeped in journalism.

His father, Howell Raines, worked for Alabama newspapers and then The New York Times. In 1992, Howell won a Pulitzer Prize for "Grady's Gift," a story about his childhood in Birmingham and the family’s Black housekeeper. He wrote how she “taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see — honestly and down to its very center — the world in which we live.”

The New York Times promoted Howell Raines to executive editor in 2001. But two years later, allegations surfaced that one of the paper’s reporters, Jayson Blair, made up facts and plagiarized other works in more than 30 stories. Raines was dismissed. Far from the drama in New York, Ben Raines’ career in Alabama began to flow faster.

He won national awards for stories about the government's slack response to BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. He won more awards for his essays on the Mobile River delta. “Writing stories about bad people doing bad things to the environment felt like my calling,” he would write in another book, “Saving America’s Amazon.” From a journalistic standpoint, Alabama was a great place to cover the environment.

“We’re number one in biodiversity. And we’re also number one in extinctions,” he said, as the boat motored north on the Tensaw River. His reporting beat was the environment, not history. So, "at first, I didn’t tell my editors I was looking for the Clotilda,” he said.

But he was soon hooked by the mystery surrounding it.

***

There were clues, and as he began his search in late 2017, Raines found many conveniently tucked away in the Mobile Public Library’s local history and genealogy branch, hidden, but close. Raines dove deep into the Clotilda story's details. 

The plot’s central characters were two men from Mobile, Timothy Meaher and Capt. William Foster.

Meaher had moved to the area from Maine in the mid-1830s, and established a lucrative steamboat and timber business. Foster had moved from Nova Scotia and would command the Clotilda. As for the Clotilda itself, a license showed that it was built in 1855, had one deck, two masts and that it was 86 feet long.

Shipping reports were common in newspapers then, and papers covered the Clotilda’s arrivals and departures throughout the late 1850s. Cargo manifests show it crisscrossed the Gulf of Mexico. Records showed it had a centerboard, which could be lowered to improve its speed in deep waters and raised in the shallows along the Gulf Coast. The Mobile Advertiser noted its launch in 1855 and predicted that “she will prove a fast sailer.”

In early March 1860, the schooner left Mobile for the Virgin Islands. A manifest listed seven crew members and Foster as master. Then the schooner’s paper trail vanished for four months, until a cryptic report in the New Orleans Picayune.

The newspaper said that on July 9, 1860, the Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay with “a cargo of Africans, amounting in all to 103.” The Mobile Advertiser republished the New Orleans story three days later, writing “it is all news to us” and asking readers: “Has anybody heard of it?”

A few days passed, and the Mobile Advertiser ran another New Orleans story. This one described how a group of 23 Africans “landed a few days ago in Mobile Bay” would be sold at auction. “The importation and sale, in such a public manner, is a refreshing act of boldness,” the writer crowed. A newspaper in Montgomery said that planters “received” the captives “twelve miles above Mobile.”

Relayed by telegraph, news of the Clotilda spread across North America and Europe, with some newspapers writing 103 Africans were aboard, while others counted 124 and 110. The Charleston Daily Courier lauded the New Orleans newspapers for their scoops and chided the Mobile newspapers for missing out. "But, then, a great many interesting incidents happen in and around Mobile that escapes the Mobile press,” the Charleston paper wrote.

Amid the scattered news coverage, federal officials began to create their own paper trail.

The U.S. marshal in Mobile accused Burns Meaher, brother of Timothy Meaher, and John Dabney, a plantation owner, of importing 103 enslaved Africans, court records showed. Federal officials charged Capt. Foster with evading customs duties, but the charges didn’t mention his cargo was captive Africans. Timothy Meaher appears to have escaped charges altogether.

But the cases never went to trial. In January 1861, Judge William Jones dismissed the charges against Burns Meaher and John Dabney. The next day, Alabama seceded from the Union.

What happened to the schooner?

***

Raines had several other clues, including sketchy ones from Timothy Meaher himself.

A British journalist had described Meaher in 1862 as having “a gray eye full of cunning” who “favored me with wonderful yarns, which I hope he was not foolish enough to think I believed.” And in 1890, at age 77 and partially paralyzed, Meaher began spinning yarns about the Clotilda to journalists.

In interviews, he bragged about how the expedition had begun as a bet with some Yankees, a detail that was never corroborated. He spoke about a big trial, of which there was no record. He also said the crew unloaded the Clotilda's captives at the mouth of the Spanish River and towed the schooner to Bayou Conner and sunk it. That story made no sense, Raines thought.

The Spanish River and Bayou Connor were far apart. Why tow it so far away? And the Spanish River was narrow in places and shallow, no place for sailing vessels. Meaher was a known liar. Had he intentionally tried to throw people off the trail?

Then, in the Mobile library’s archives, Raines opened a folder and found 12 yellowing pages. It was a letter by Capt. Foster in 1890 that described the voyage and where he scuttled the schooner.

“At Twelve Mile Island, I transferred my slaves to a river steamboat and sent them up into the canebrake to hide them until further disposal. I then burned my schooner to the water’s edge and sunk her.”

That rang true. The Meahers had owned land in that area since the 1850s. Why not unload the captives onto your own property? And as far as Raines knew, no one had looked for the Clotilda on that particular edge of river.

With those clues, Raines and a friend set out one day in January 2018 for Twelvemile Island, so named because it was 12 miles from downtown Mobile. It was an ideal day for a search because a storm system had blown water out of the bay. With the water level abnormally low, they soon spotted the bones of an old schooner.

Raines returned with boat experts and marine archaeologists, who told him the wreck might be the Clotilda. He contacted the Alabama Historical Commission for comments, but they didn’t return his calls, he said. So, on Jan. 23, 2018, he published a story: “Wreck found by reporter may be the last American slave ship, archaeologists say.”

He’d soon learn that it wasn’t the Clotilda after all.

4. Descendant

Psychologists who study conversations have found that we talk about our pasts two to three times as much as our futures. Revisiting our personal histories is a uniquely human trait, they say. Old stories help forge and then reinforce our identities: who we are, our sense of belonging. So it was with Emmett Lewis, who one early evening in February talked about his ancestors, including Cudjo Lewis, one of the captive Africans on the schooner Raines thought he’d found.

Lewis is a muscular man in his 30s, an ex-Marine who practices meditation to manage what he said he experienced in Afghanistan. He has long dreadlocks and a gruff voice that softens when he talks on the phone with his daughters. He cuts hair in a room at the back of a house in Africatown. By the mirror, he had a doll from the Chucky horror series to keep kids in line. By a window was a poster from the Netflix documentary "Descendant," in which he had a prominent role. 

Lewis framed his view of the Clotilda through his father, momentarily echoing his voice: “He said, 'You come from Cudjo. You come from royal blood. Stolen from Africa and brought here.’ ” And echoing his grandfather, who’d lived with Cudjo Lewis for 14 years. “Cudjo used to say, ‘None of my kids ain’t never going to know where home is. But I know where home is, so I pass it to you.’ ”

So when Ben Raines broke the news about the Clotilda possibly being found, many people in Africatown had mixed feelings, Lewis said. “Once you pass a story down the generations, it starts to become a fairy tale. Not like a Disney fairy tale. It’s just that has been so long it feels like folklore.” Once the ship was discovered, “it wasn’t folklore anymore. Now, it was a fact. Now, everyone was able to say, ‘Those folks down there aren’t lying.’ ”

But the ship itself wasn’t something to glorify. “It’s like worshipping a murder weapon,” he said.

The deeper story was about family, courage and endurance. For generations after the Civil War, people in Africatown were leery about talking about their former enslavers, Lewis said. At least 359 Black people in Alabama were lynched between 1877 and 1950, records show.

“Cudjo spoke out anyway,” Lewis said.

Among the first to mine Cudjo's recollections was Emma Langdon Roche, a White writer in Mobile best known for her book “Historic Sketches of the South.” Published in 1914, it described Cudjo’s capture in Africa, transport to Mobile and settlement in Africatown. Her work soon became the foundation for other journalists. But these writers retold Cudjo’s story through their own biased lenses and often introduced errors, said Sylviane Diouf, the slave trade historian.

The most intriguing writer to document Cudjo’s past was Zora Neale Hurston, a Black anthropologist and rising literary star in the Harlem Renaissance. She first met Cudjo Lewis in 1927, but it's unclear how that meeting went. More clear is that Hurston submitted an article about Cudjo to the Journal of Negro History that year, and that she took liberties with her writing. Much later, in 1980, her biographer found that she had plagiarized roughly three-quarters of the article from Emma Langdon Roche's "Historic Sketches of the South."

Hurston returned to Africatown a year later, and this time she spent more time with Cudjo, taking photos and doing a short film. From those later visits, she wrote “Barracoon,” drawing her title from the cells where Africans were held before enslavers crammed them into ships.

Hurston captured Cudjo’s words in his dialect. “De boat we on called de Clotilde (sic). Cudjo suffer so in dat ship.” But publishers wanted his dialect changed to standard English. Hurston refused. Her literary career stalled. She died in 1960, destitute in a Florida nursing home. And her manuscript ended up in an archive, retrieved now and then by historians. Then, seven years ago, her heirs realized it might have wider appeal. “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ ” was published in 2018. It raced up the bestseller charts, an old story made new again.

In Africatown, residents suddenly saw tour buses cruising through their narrow streets. In 2021, Mobile leaders broke ground on the $1.3 million Africatown Heritage House, set to open this July.

Emmett Lewis watched this explosion of exposure with a wary eye. Too much attention could turn Africatown into another commodity owned by outsiders, he said.

“We could be watching Africatown die with all this greatness coming, because tourism does kill a community, if used the wrong way.”

The Clotilda story was rooted in ownership, ownership of people. Now, with the tour buses and cameras rolling, it was fast becoming about ownership of their stories. And with ownership comes the potential for theft.

5. Raines redeemed

In 2018, after Raines posted his story about possibly finding the Clotilda, the head of the Alabama Historical Commission called and accused him of hunting for shipwrecks without permission, Raines recalled. He found that odd because he knew of no law against looking for one.

In the meantime, the commission scrambled to assemble a team of Africatown leaders, divers and archaeologists. A maritime archeology company called SEARCH Inc. also volunteered its services. Leading the SEARCH contingent was James Delgado.

When it comes to shipwrecks, Delgado is a silver-haired elder statesman. Over his career, he’d directed the National Park Service's maritime heritage program. He’d authored or co-authored more than 30 books. He’d hosted a TV show called “The Sea Hunters” and investigated more than 100 shipwrecks, including the Titanic. He once described the sea as a vast museum with wrecks that offered windows “into the human soul.”

In early 2018, Raines joined Delgado and his team as they motored to the shipwreck he’d found by Twelvemile Island. But as the divers measured the vessel's outline, Raines’ heart sank.

It was more than 120 feet long — too long to be the Clotilda.

Raines was devastated. That night, “much whisky was drunk,” he wrote in a 2019 story about his search for Lagniappe, a weekly newspaper in Mobile. “Now, on the biggest story I’d ever broken, a story that had spread worldwide, my central premise was wrong.”

Adding to the sting, he knew he’d let down the residents of Africatown. He saw people wearing T-shirts celebrating the discovery and then shedding tears when they learned he was wrong. During a public meeting, a woman gave him a hug and sang a Gospel lyric in his ear: "There's a bright side somewhere/I ain’t gonna rest until I find it." He phoned his father, Howell, who reassured him that he’d included enough caveats to cover himself.

“But in the court of public opinion in our soundbite world," he later wrote, "I knew I was toast.”

As he predicted, news media trumpeted his failure. Some called his find the “Notilda.” What had he missed? He’d found the wrong schooner, yes. But as far as he knew, no one had done a comprehensive survey of this area by Twelvemile Island. He decided he would do just that, even if it cost him thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.

Fortunately for his finances, he had a friend, Monty Graham, who ran the marine science program at the University of Southern Mississippi. Graham volunteered to bring a team to Twelvemile Island and map the riverbed. “It will be good for our grad students,” he told Raines.

The team began a few weeks later but didn’t find any promising targets. As they packed up, Raines called up the chart again on his phone. A local diver looked over his shoulder and spotted something they had missed, a shape that looked like a big shoe.

It was about 300 yards from the first wreck Raines had found. It appeared to be the right length.

“My heart started beating faster,” Raines later recalled.

Raines, in his wetsuit, dove into water the color of chocolate milk. Visibility was zero, so he had to feel his way. He stepped on a piece of metal on what seemed like a plank. He yanked on it and brought pieces to the surface. By the shore, he spotted a concrete survey marker painted in red.

On it was the name of the landowner: “Meaher.”

***

Convinced he’d gotten it right this time, Raines called the Alabama Historical Commission. The reception was chilly; “Stunned silence,” he recalled. The officials quickly put James Delgado from SEARCH Inc. on the line. Raines said he described his survey and gave them the new wreck's location.

Soon, the Alabama Historical Commission announced another mission. SEARCH Inc. would lead it, and the National Geographic Society would help fund it. Raines said state officials told him he would be arrested if he revealed the ship’s location.

The team returned, this time with camera crews and a writer from National Geographic. As a funder, the magazine scored first dibs to publish news of any discovery. Raines was now a competitor. Still, Delgado promised to give him credit for being the first to find it, Raines recalled, but Raines increasingly felt shut out.

More than a year later, in May 2019, National Geographic broke the story: The Clotilda “has been discovered in a remote arm of Alabama’s Mobile River.”

But the story was vague about who precisely discovered it, only that it followed “an intensive yearlong search” by the National Geographic Society-funded team. It didn't mentioned Raines or the researchers from University of Southern Mississippi he'd enlisted.

Raines fumed. To Raines, the commission, SEARCH and National Geographic were trying to bend recent history, siphon credit away from him. He fired off angry emails to National Geographic editors. Failing to mention his role, he wrote, was "journalistic skullduggery at its worst."

Soon there was a new passage in the online story about Raines: how he had found the wrong wreck.

“They actually made it worse,” he said.

Raines fumed even more when he saw the Alabama Historical Commission’s press release. The agency also didn’t mention Raines’ find the year before. He complained, and the agency reworked its statement to include him.

Raines raged again when Netflix screened its documentary “Descendant” at the Sundance Film Festival. On the film, a member of Delgado’s team claimed that Raines tried to hijack credit for the discovery by sneaking into the wreck area while the SEARCH-led team was out of town. While the film was still rolling, Raines fired off angry texts to the producers, who eventually cut the offending clip.

By then, Raines was clearly at odds with Alabama Historical Commission leaders and Delgado. Delgado said he doesn’t remember getting coordinates from Raines, which Raines said is “an outrageous lie.” Later, in a new book co-authored by Delgado, the commission’s director said Raines' "unverified and unpermitted discovery” suddenly made that area of the river vulnerable to looting and vandalism.

In time, Delgado backed away from saying the Clotilda had been "found" at all. Generations of Meahers knew where it was all along, he said. “I’m not trying to rain on Ben’s parade. But insisting that (the Clotilda) was lost and had to be found basically gives cover to those who knew exactly where it was and used it to suppress and shut up people of Africatown."

In Raines’ mind, the fights showed how the stakes had grown. The Clotilda story had spawned worldwide coverage. SEARCH had access to tracking data and learned that more than a billion people were exposed to the Clotilda story during the 10 days after the announcement. In a world where eyeballs are internet gold, owning a story could be lucrative.

Now, back on the water in January with Erik Calonius, Raines slowed the boat as Twelvemile Island came into view. The conversation drifted toward why Raines felt it was so important that his role be recognized.

“Well, perhaps it’s the journalism of the thing,” he said, his voice growing sharper. “This is how it happened.”

6. The case for the Clotilda

Erik Calonius shared similar journalistic sentiments, but his focus was the Clotilda story itself, not who found it.

To him, the flood of media attention seemed to submerge any doubts about the Clotilda narrative and whether the wreck was truly a slaver. He saw one story after another repeat details that were unverified or based on the questionable recollections of Timothy Meaher: how the plot began with a bet; how the conspirators were put on trial. "There's so much fiction woven into it all," he said. "And you have to clear that away first to get to the facts."  

Left unspoken that afternoon as Raines and Calonius motored toward Twelvemile Island: Why was the Clotilda story so important to Calonius? Would he change his mind about the Clotilda being "the last" if there was enough evidence?

Because despite holes Calonius had correctly identified — the embellishments restated as facts, the thin paper trail in the early 1860s — that evidence had grown more persuasive.

Records clearly showed that the Clotilda was a working vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, and that it sailed out of Mobile in March 1860.

Records in federal archives show that after the Clotilda’s arrival in July 1860, the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, D.C., received letters from officials in Mobile about the “… recent importation of Negroes into Alabama.” News about the Clotilda had reached the highest levels of the U.S. justice system.

The reports were sufficient enough to charge Burns Meaher, John Dabney and Capt. William Foster. But there was either not enough evidence to go to trial or, more likely, no desire to do so. And the context helped explain why.

The case’s chief prosecutor then was A.J. Requier, who would soon become a Confederate poet and was an “extremist of the ultra Southern school,” according to a glowing New Orleans newspaper report at the time. The U.S. marshal, Cade Godbold, was a slave owner who would later fight for the Confederacy.

And the judge who oversaw the cases, William G. Jones Jr., had a long judicial record of siding with slave owners. The judge also must have known Timothy Meaher, the plot’s organizer. After all, Meaher named one of his steamboats the William G. Jones Jr.

Mobile’s newspapers then were pro-slavery and weak watchdogs. Instead of a hoax, as Calonius speculated, a more plausible explanation points to a coverup, of a group of wealthy people in Alabama who illegally imported slaves and got away with it because of friends and sympathizers in law enforcement and the courts.

But was the wreck actually the Clotilda, and had it carried enslaved Africans?

Archaeologists, including those with SEARCH Inc., analyzed more than 200 Gulf of Mexico schooners built before the Civil War. The Clotilda’s hold was unusually large and deep for a typical Gulf schooner, and the ruins off Twelvemile have the same large hold.

Old records showed the Clotilda was 86 feet long and about 26 feet wide; the wreck had those same dimensions. Records show it was made out of oak and yellow pine; pieces of wood retrieved from the wreck are made of oak and pine. Capt. William Foster had said he burned the ship, and there was evidence of burned wood on the wreck.

More recently, archeologists and historians uncovered an intriguing new paper trail, a circumstantial case that the Clotilda may have run slaving missions before its final trip to Africa.

Customs records showed that the Clotilda sailed to the Texas coast, a known drop-off point for illegal human smuggling from Africa, and then went to New Orleans with cargo consigned to two known slavers. “But there’s no cargo listed,” Delgado said.

In a matter of months, the same notorious New Orleans duo would organize a plot with a slaver called the Echo.

“This was happening all the time,” Delgado said of illegal slave runs. Both the Clotilda and the Wanderer “may well have not been the last.” They’re just the ones we know about, he said.

In 2020, divers and archeologists also found that mud and silt had moved off some of the wreck, exposing part of its unusual hold. They found evidence of a partition in the hold, which slavers might need to separate the captives from where food and water were stored. “That’s the fingerprint,” Delgado said.

And during dives, they found posts for two levels of platforms, platforms similar in design to other slave ships. The wreck’s hold was about 500 square feet. That was enough space to carry about 100 people.

In 2019, SEARCH's official report had said the wreck was "likely" the Clotilda. "Now, we've moved to definite," Delgado said.

Beyond the archeological finds and records, the evidence in the Clotilda case also included the many accounts from Cudjo Lewis.

True, Cudjo’s recollections were filtered and distorted through lenses of writers. But Cudjo Lewis was as real as the blood flowing today through his descendant, Emmett Lewis, in Africatown.

7. Braided stories

Many neuroscientists believe we process our pasts through reconstruction rather than retrieval, that instead of pulling memories out like folder files, we take bits stored away in our cortices and braid them with newer feelings to meet the moments we’re in. Likewise, history isn't static. It moves as we make new discoveries, or see events in new light. 

Off Twelvemile Island, the cold brown river moved fast. Ben Raines fought the current as he moored his boat near the river's edge. A few feet away, you could see the red concrete “Meaher” marker, the one Raines had seen five years before.

Calonius had been quiet during the voyage. Later, after learning more about the Clotilda, his skepticism would remain. In his mind, there were too many unanswered questions; too many powerful groups invested in the Clotilda story to question it objectively. 

For now, though, Calonius listened to Raines talk about the past: The emotions Raines felt when he touched the ruins, and how, in retrospect, he’d really found the Clotilda in the library, with its old journals and newspaper stories, not in his wetsuit.

Then Raines moved from the past to the present. The fog. It would return soon and cloak everything again, he warned. You didn’t want to be trapped in these swamps, with their tricky currents, the interlacing rivers and cuts, feeling your way back.

And he still had something to show.

He pointed to some warning buoys, noting that they had drifted off position. He put the boat in a slow crawl along the channel. He switched on the sonar, and Calonius stood next to him.

There, two authors of books about two different last slave ships, watched the sonar’s yellow screen create a ghostly image of the riverbed.

Then, slowly, the bow of the ship appeared. Then the rest of it: the hold, hatches. The writers saw it take shape, before their eyes, through their own stained glass.

••• 

ABOUT THIS STORY

Beyond people quoted in this story, Darron Patterson, a former newspaper reporter and Clotilda descendant in Mobile, provided helpful context, as well as the most succinct summary of who discovered the Clotilda: "Ben found it, Delgado verified it."

Mobile historian John Sledge also provided key context, including this nugget: While working on a book about the Mobile River, he rode in a boat with a Meaher family member, now deceased, who admitted trying to dynamite the Clotilda ruins. (The wreck shows signs of an explosive disturbance.)

Ben Raines does regular boat charters, and The Post and Courier hired him for the excursion into the delta. Raines also is an environmental journalist and filmmaker in residence at University of South Alabama's School of Marine and Environmental Sciences.

Thanks also to staff at Mobile Public Library's Local History and Genealogy branch, Monty Graham, now director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography, and staff from the Alabama Historical Commission.

Africatown's story has many layers, and one unanswered question involves the Wanderer. In early 1859, a group of enslaved Africans from the Wanderer ended up in Mobile, according to old news reports. An 1860 court case in Mobile also referenced an enslaved African likely from the Wanderer.

In addition, in 1870, a Christian newspaper published a report about a missionary who had visited a group of recently freed Africans near Mobile in what likely today is Africatown. They reportedly told the missionary they had been brought over on the Wanderer.

Did Africatown's settlers include people from both the Clotilda and the Wanderer? The Mobile Delta still has secrets to reveal.

Reach Tony Bartelme at 843-790-0805 and tbartelme@postandcourier.com

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