The Clotilda, the last ship to import slaves into the United States nearly 200 years ago, may have been found.

I may have found the Clotilda, the last American slave ship. Check it out! https://t.co/tOAZdksE6h— Ben H. Raines (@BenHRaines) January 23, 2018

As reported by AL.com, low tides in Mobile-Tensaw Delta (a swamp area in Alabama) recently revealed the lower portion of a ship that may date to 1860. The hull of the ship is encased in mud, and possibly buried up to ten feet. Parts of the ship that remain visible from the surface show evidence of burning, and building techniques prevalent in the 1850s-1880s.

"You can definitely say maybe, and maybe even a little bit stronger, because the location is right, the construction seems to be right, from the proper time period, it appears to be burnt. So I'd say very compelling, for sure," archaeologist Greg Cook told AL.

On a bet in the 1850s, plantation owner Timothy Meaher concocted a plan to capture 100 slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey, an African kingdom in what is now Benin, and secretly ship them into the United States. Meaher had no intention of using the slave trade to benefit financially, but sought to simply prove it could be done despite laws signed by President Thomas Jefferson that criminalized the importation of slaves. Despite death as a possible punishment for such a crime, Meaher purchased the Clotilda, a boat often misreferenced as the Clotilde by false reporting, for $35,000 and hired Captain William Foster to sail his prize. According to AL.com, the ship remained undetected during its journey due to its regular stops at Caribbean ports, where supplies for the captured slaves were quickly shuffled under piles of lumber, fearing British, Dutch or Portuguese military ships would spy them.

Instead of continuing with the original plan of unloading the slaves in Alabama and steering the ship to Mexico for remodeling and to acquire a new license, Foster and Meaher agreed to burn it to destroy all evidence of their successful act.

Historian Sylvianne Diof, who studied and relayed his findings of the journey in his novel Dreams of Africa in Alabama, wrote, "He knew – and Meaher did too – that they might have been spotted, so they had decided to destroy the evidence, the telling signs of a slaving voyage: the partitions, the platforms, the empty casks of food and water, the big pots, the tubs, the blood, the vomit, the spit, the mucus, the urine, and the feces that soiled the planks, the awful smell that always floated around slave ships.”

After the burning, the ship inevitably went missing, with little physical evidence left to be found.

The next step for researchers and archaeologists is to obtain federal and state permits that will allow for further exploration into the ship, and may put an end to the Clotilda mystery.

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