The last slave ship to reach America
SURVIVORS The lost stories of the last captives of the Atlantic slave trade
HANNAH DURKIN 432pp. William Collins. £22.
THE LAST SLAVE SHIP to reach the United States anchored in the Mississippi Sound on July 7, 1860. There was no one there to meet it. Lookouts posted to spot the Clotilda had missed the 120-ton schooner. So the captain landed and rode north to Mobile, Alabama. He hired a steamboat to pull the Clotilda up Mobile Bay and into the Spanish River. At Twelvemile Island the crew loaded their human cargo onto another steamboat and burnt the ship which had carried them across the Middle Passage.
News of the Clotilda’s arrival soon spread. Within a week newspapers across the nation had reported on the ship that reached America with about 100 Africans locked in its hold. For centuries such an event would hardly have been considered unusual. But the slave trade had been banned across the British Empire in 1807 and in the US in 1808. The Clotilda had eluded the British vessels that patrolled for slavers off the western coast of Africa and the American vessels that did the same in the Gulf of Mexico. Now a US Marshal was sent to find and seize the African captives. There were delays. He never found them.
The captives of the Clotilda had been spirited further upriver to a remote plantation in the Alabama coastal plain. Soon all of them were sold into counties across the state. Once the state of Alabama seceded from the Union in January 1861 – an act that helped to precipitate the Civil War – all efforts to recover the final victims of the Atlantic slave trade were abandoned.
In the decades that followed the Clotilda all but disappeared from the public record. The African survivors of the ship were sometimes mistaken for survivors of the Wanderer, which had landed in Georgia in 1858 and was often believed to be the last slave ship to reach the US. It was a mistake the survivors of the Clotilda themselves were at first unable to correct, because none of them could speak English when they arrived in America. Late into the twentieth century, historians of the slave trade dismissed tales about a schooner that slipped in to the Alabama coast in the summer of 1860 as little more than rumours.
That is not the case any more. In the 1920s the Black novelist Zora Neale Hurston, who was then an unknown researcher with an interest in African American folklore, travelled to Alabama for a series of interviews with a man named Kossula, whom she believed to be the last survivor of the Clotilda. The narrative of his life that Hurston produced – titled Barracoon, after the Spanish term for the slave pens on the African coast in which Kossula and his comrades were confined – was never published in her lifetime. But in the 2000s the account became an essential source of information for the historian
