Photos courtesy Micheal H. Cottman
Michael H. Cottman and Dr. Ayana Flewellen conduct a first of its kind underwater interview
RETURN TO THE
Henrietta Marie
By MICHAEL H. COTTMAN
I strapped on my scuba tank and descended through warm blue water, drifting past a fat-faced grouper before settling onto the ocean floor near the wreck of the Henrietta Marie slave ship.
KEY WEST, FL – I was diving into the past, 25 miles off Key West, 25 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico— a painful history of the forced captivity of African men, women, and children aboard this infamous vessel. We embarked on an unprecedented mission: to conduct the first-ever recorded interviews underwater at the site of a shipwrecked American slave ship, moving beyond traditional site documentation to facilitating a real-time, underwater oral history conversation.
The Henrietta Marie sailed from London in 1699 to pick up captured Blacks in Africa. It sank the following year off the coast of Florida after dropping off its human cargo in Jamaica. The vessel, whose sole purpose was the trafficking of enslaved Africans, was known for its brutal conditions onboard.
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