Researchers claim to have found a slave ship dating from the 19th century off the coast of Brazil in the sea of Angra dos Reis. Scientists from the AfrOrigens Institute, the Federal University of Fluminense, the Federal University of Sergipe and several North American research institutes believe the findings match the sunken ship known as Camargo, which belonged to famous American trader Nathaniel Gordon.
In the early 1850s, during the transatlantic slave trade, Gordon was asked to lead Brig Camargo from San Francisco to New York. He stole the ship and sailed to Mozambique, where historical records indicate he transported around 500 enslaved Africans to a clandestine port in Angra dos Reis Bay, west of Rio de Janeiro. There, he is believed to have deliberately sunk the ship to cover his tracks during a navy search.
Although slavery was officially banned in Brazil in 1888, article five of a Piracy Act 1820 makes the practice of trading a crime punishable by death. Many American shipowners and merchants continued to illegally trade in slaves of African descent well into the early and mid-19th century.
In 1862 Gordon was executed for breaking the Piracy Act, making him the only American to be fully tried, convicted, and executed for such an act.
“Of the 12 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World, almost half – 5.5 million people – were forcibly taken to Brazil as early as 1540 and continuing through the 1860s,” reads a Princeton University research page. Brazil LAB project. “This reality was underpinned by a deliberate effort to ‘whiten’ Brazilian society through various state-sponsored immigration projects and border colonization schemes throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
For members of the Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracuí community in Angra dos Reis, some of whom are descendants of enslaved Africans, the possible identification of the Camargo wreck means significant recognition.
“They took our people, the Africans, across the Atlantic and brought them here, and that is why we are here today claiming this land as the Quilombo community,” Emerson Luiz Ramos said in a statement. video on the project produced by AfrOrigens. “Discovery [the ship] is a denunciation that says that the Atlantic slave trade was prohibited and that Brazil authorized this trade.
Filmmaker and co-founder of AfrOrigens Yuri Sanada, who is also currently developing a feature-length documentary on Gordon’s trials and the search for the Camargo, said Hyperallergic in an email that researchers are still trying to identify the actual wreckage, as the ship’s body is buried under a few feet of mud.
“Our plan is to clear the mud in the next phase, in October, so we’ll see most of what’s out there,” Sanada said.
