FACING UP TO HISTORY WRECK FIND ADDS HUMANITY TO LEGACY OF SLAVERY

In 2015, a delegation from the Smithsonian Institution travelled to Mozambique to inform the Makua people of a singular and long-overdue discovery: 221 years after it sank off Cape Town, claiming the lives of 212 enslaved people, the wreck of the Portuguese slave ship the São José Paquete D'Africa had been found. When told the news, a Makua leader responded with a gesture that no one on the delegation will ever forget.

-  Sam JoneS

"One of the chiefs took a vessel we had, filled it with soil and asked us to bring that vessel back to the site of the slave ship so that, for the first time since the 18th century, his people could sleep in their own land," says Lonnie Bunch, now secretary of the Smithsonian.

For Bunch and his colleagues, the importance of the find cannot be overstated. Although the São José - which was bound for Brazil - is the first ship to be recovered that is known to have sunk while transporting enslaved people, it was just one of the tens of thousands that plied their trade over the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, during which more than 12 million African men, women and children were enslaved.

And yet, as Bunch points out, maritime archaeology has tended to focus its masked eye on the wrecks of rich and famous ships rather than those that traded in flesh and blood.

Redressing that archaeological, academic and sociocultural imbalance was the driving force behind the Slave Wrecks Project, a partnership established in 2008 between the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and other institutions and organisations in Africa and the US.

"People talk about the slave trade; they talk about the millions of people who were transported, but it's hard to really imagine that, so we wanted to reduce it to human scale by really focusing on a single ship, on the people on the ship, and the story around the ship," says Bunch. "Yes, we tell you about the thousands of ships that brought the enslaved, but we also say: 'Here's a way to humanise it.""