Was the Newly-Discovered NYC Ship Used to Transport Slaves?

People are willing to rewrite the story of the Wall Street-World Trade Center area in New York without knowing its history from a few centuries or even a few decades ago.  But historical artifacts remind us where we’ve been.

The remains of a 32-foot section of a wooden ship, estimated to be about a third to a half of the hull, was discovered at the base of the World Trade Center site in New York.  Archaeologists and scientists are collecting, testing and dating the wood of the ship’s hull.  They are also testing a semicircular piece of metal arc, possibly part of the cooking galley, a shoe, spikes, anchor and other materials to identify the ship’ origins and use.  They estimate that the ship dates back to the eighteenth century.  They have determined that it was a cargo ship, from the size and shape of the hull.  They have surmised that it was a sea-going vessel, since the layers of wooden planks are reinforced by layers of large, strong timbers.  They figure from how it is situated in muddy ground that was once watery shore, and from maps of the harbor, that it was placed in the site as part the landfill that expanded the Lower Manhattan neighborhood in the late 1700s.

Scientists and archaeologists are comparing what has been found here to what’s been found and identified on other ships uncovered in the waters around Manhattan Island.  Research is what we view in light of what we already know.  Archaeologists and scientists say the ship was used in some sort of commerce, but what they have not said is for which commercial trade.  Because of the size of the metal arc, one archaeologist rules out that it was used to melt blubber on a whaling ship, because a whaling ship’s oven would have been larger, suggesting instead that “the metal arc and bricks” are remnants from “an ordinary cooking platform in a galley.”

Of significance is the fact that the southern tip of Manhattan Island’s harbor, with the East River (appropriately) to the east and the Hudson River to the west, has been created over centuries by colonial and modern landfills.  Significant in these landfills are ships:  other ships have been uncovered and archaeologists found what they describe as “shipworm casings”—tunnels burrowed, chewed by tropical worms in the ships’ bottom.  They determined that an 82-foot British merchant frigate found in 1982 at 175 Water Street in the East River landfill, dating to the early 1700s, sailed the waters of Caribbean Sea because of the worm holes speckled on the bottom of the hull.  Ships were commerce, so there are ownership and insurance records, many still buried in archives in Holland and England.  In the wooden remains of ship in the 1982 East River landfill, they also found gun ports in the sides of the ship.  That ship was named after the developer of the building site, Howard Ronson.  Hopefully, on the World Trade Center ship, we will uncover more of her details.

I live in a building on former Washington Street, now filled in, between Greenwich Street and the West Side Highway on the Hudson River.  My terrace overlooks the World Trade Center pit from a few blocks away.  The location of the ship, on a 1797, map was south of the Bathing House, between what was then Lindsey’s Wharf and Lake’s Wharf.  Much has changed today.  I went to the site between Washington and Greenwich Streets, between Liberty and Cedar Streets, to see the remains of the ship, but this is a now a security area and construction site, being rebuilt to fill in the 9/11 attacks, and the ship cannot be seen from the streets.  But as a New York resident who traced my ancestors, including researching the ships that transported them from Ghana, West Africa to the Jamaican Colony in the Caribbean to the thirteen northern colonies, especially South Carolina, Virginia and New York, these historical remains are very familiar to me.

Though what I found in my research was shocking, I learned to embrace the history.  I saw images of cooking cauldrons and gun ports on the ships that carried American ancestors.  On ships such as the Henrietta Marie, a 80-foot, 120-ton slave ship raised in Florida, they discovered a 1 ½ foot, 16 1/2-gallon cooking cauldron for the crew, and a 3-foot, 85-gallon cooking cauldron that was used for the slave passengers it carried.  So when I read about the metal arc, several feet wide, uncovered on the ship in the World Trade Center’s muddy pit, I thought of a cooking cauldron that fed minimal grub to hundreds.  Only slave ships carried hundreds of passengers in the 1700s who were fed in this manner.

These ancestors left visible signs and we have to be courageous enough to face them.  I followed the nicknames that survived in my family, traced them to African nicknames, identified the place in Ghana, West Africa where they originated, found the people who had those names, interviewed their known descendants, compared DNA, and had all the details of the past I needed.  I found the forts and ports where they embarked in Africa and disembarked in America.  I found the names of the ships they traveled on, in the early 1700s.  I found ancestors in Ghana, Jamaica, Virginia in the 1600s and 1700s, and even in New York in 1801.

One detail that shocked me in my research was the ships that transported my ancestors from Africa to the Jamaican Colony in the Caribbean and from the Caribbean to the thirteen colonies—were armed, and some had such romantic names.  The 40-ton Happy Returne, which sailed the waters in 1702, carried eight guns; the 200-ton Duchess of Portland (1728) had nine guns; the 90-ton Batchelors Delight (1730) carried twelve guns.  Amistad, which was celebrated in film, was 136 tons, 85 feet.  Pirates, knighted by Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, including some of my own noble English ancestors, attacked each other’s colonialist ships.  And there were slave rebellions on the ships, including those of my ancestors, Africans who became Maroons in the Caribbean.

I have found dozens of ships that traveled Ghana’s coast to the Caribbean for several decades in the early 1700s, and a few that traveled from the Caribbean to the thirteen colonies.  I cite a few here, to save the archaeologists and scientists the shock of discovering that there were gun ports on the slave ships.  It takes courage to face these details.  The 100-ton Aurora, which traveled the waters between West Africa, Jamaica and South Carolina in 1731, mounted six guns; the 200-ton Provis Gally, which traveled the waters between Guinea, West Africa, Jamaica and South Carolina, carried twelve guns in 1712.  The 120-ton Scipio, which traveled the waters from Gambia, West Africa to Jamaica to South Carolina, carried ten guns in 1733.  The 100-ton Pye Snow, which traveled the waters from West Africa to Jamaica to the Upper James River in Virginia, sported six guns in 1733. Even the Sarah Snow, which displaced a mere 60 tons, mounted a pair of guns during its travels from the waters of West Africa, Jamaica, and the Carolinas in the 1730s.

Uncovering lost history, even painful history, helps us see where our ancestors have been, and how they prevailed.  When the earth and the seas reveal their secrets, as was just uncovered in New York at the World Trade Center site, we go where the secrets are buried.

Much of the U.S.’s history is squirreled away in places like Holland and Britain, and we have to be willing to go wherever the early records are to retrieve them.  I did.