Shackles From the Deep: Tracing the Path of a Sunken Slave Ship, a Bitter Past, and a Rich Legacy

Nearby, a shiny barracuda crosses my path with a snapped fishing line dangling from his mouth. He had no doubt stripped the bait from an unsuspecting fisherman and fled quickly into the deep.

In the distance, I watch the ocean’s most feared predators zig-zagging in and out of the shadows—the saw-toothed blacktip sharks that are more interested in observing the bubble-breathing scuba divers than confronting them.

I exhale and drop slowly to the sandy ocean floor.

I am a deep-sea scuba diver.

My love of the sea started when I was young. I grew up in a mostly black, middle-class neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. In the evenings, I would sit in the living room watching Sea Hunt, an underwater adventure television program that aired when I was a boy in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

I enjoyed Sea Hunt because it was unlike anything I had ever seen. It featured ocean exploration and sunken ships and treasure—and I decided right then that I too would one day explore shipwrecks in distant oceans.

There was just one problem. Little boys from Detroit didn’t know much about scuba diving.

I was the only kid in my neighborhood who talked about diving, and I never missed an episode of this television show. My friends played basketball, football, and baseball. I enjoyed playing sports, too, but I yearned for travel and adventure.

For me, Sea Hunt was an escape of sorts, something to help me cope with the atmosphere surrounding the violent civil rights marches and demonstrations that were happening in Detroit at the time.

I didn’t know how to swim, but luckily my mother was not only supportive, she was also an excellent swimmer. She took me to the local pool and, in the protective shallow end, she taught me the “front crawl” and the breaststroke. Eventually she felt I was ready to master the deep end of the pool. I wasn’t so sure.

As I stood tentatively at the edge of the pool, looking into 10 terrifying feet of water, without warning, she pushed me in! I wish I could say that I swam around the pool with the grace of a delicate swan, but no—I sputtered and flailed to the side of the pool and clutched the cold tile as if it were a lifeline, gaping up at my mom and her sly smile.

But then, once my heart stopped racing, I looked back at the water and took a deep breath. I slipped under the surface and swam the entire length of the pool for the very first time. My mom told me how proud she was, and we drove home laughing about my first experience in the deep.

I’ve been swimming ever since.

This is a story about how my love of swimming, and later deep-sea diving, led me on a journey to three continents as I helped uncover the mystery surrounding a little-known 17th-century shipwreck. It’s about how I, along with others, pieced together a 300-year-old transatlantic puzzle that would teach me about myself—and where I came from. But more than that, it’s the untold story of millions of African people taken as captives to the New World, whose names and faces have been erased and eradicated by time, distance, and history.

CHAPTER 2

A patient person never misses a thing. ∼ Moroccan proverb

THE RUSTED

STEEL ANCHOR

CHAIN rumbled over the side of the Virgalona as the weathered boat engine sputtered to a stop.

Captain Demostenes “Moe” Molinar, a diesel mechanic turned boat captain from Panama and a legend among underwater treasure hunters, was at the helm of the Virgalona, his 51-foot salvage boat. He was monitoring the swift currents on the surface before making his decision to dive into the murky Gulf of Mexico.

It was July 1972 and Moe was searching for underwater treasure—and lots of it. He was looking for the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a three-masted Spanish galleon that sank in 1622 after slamming into coral reefs during a hurricane. At the time, the ship was carrying chests full of gold, silver, and precious stones from Central and South America back to Spain. Moe and his team knew that there was so much treasure aboard that it took workers back then two months to record all the jewels and load it. Moe was hired by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher to find glitter in the sand.

Over the course of more than a decade, Moe and his crew had researched the suspected location of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha by using a whole slew of technology and instruments, including side-scan sonars, metal detectors, and cesium magnetometers to search for piles of iron from Spanish galleons.

Moe and his mates were pretty confident that the fractured Spanish galleon rested on the ocean floor near an area known as the Marquesas Keys, about 25 miles west of Key West, Florida.

After Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World in 1492, the Spanish set out to conquer foreign colonies, and they would amass an array of riches during their voyages. During these roughly 400 years of plundering the New World, hurricanes occasionally tossed and sank Spain’s treasure ships, like the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, burying the bounty under layers of sand.

Based on extensive research by Mel Fisher and his family, Moe knew the Nuestra Señora de Atocha was within his reach, but locating the exact location of the ship on the seafloor would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

“It’s a big ocean out there and the bottom changes regularly,” Moe often told his crew.

Despite the odds, Moe was determined to find a cargo of riches.

Moe slipped on his fins, strapped on his scuba mask, popped his regulator into his mouth, and rolled backward off the Virgalona, plunging 30 feet into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a familiar place.

Moe was known worldwide as one of the most accomplished treasure hunters in America—and certainly the most well-known black underwater treasure hunter in modern times.

Moe’s buddies say he used mystical abilities to locate underwater treasure when others had simply given up on their searches.

The Gulf of Mexico’s surface was choppy, so Moe knew he would need to descend quickly. His crew followed Moe into the water, one by one, and they all dropped under the foamy waves and down to the seafloor.

Swimming among the tall seagrass, Moe was annoyed by a fat-faced grouper that tugged on his regulator hose. The grouper probably confused Moe’s coiled scuba hose with the four-foot-long black worms that groupers like to eat. Moe gently pushed the grouper away and used his fins to kick through the silt.

He swam past sea fans, schools of colorful fish, and even sharks that circled nearby. Moe was accustomed to seeing sharks—big sharks, small sharks, aggressive sharks, and the kind of sharks that prefer to be left alone. And some sharks that just won’t go away.

On this particular day, Moe was harassed so much by a shark that he almost called off the search, worried for himself and his team.

After the shark finally left, Moe decided to make one last sweep of the shipwreck before calling it a day.

Moe saw something lying on the sand in the shadowy distance. After a few minutes of kicking hard against the current, he reached the object. Moe used his rugged hands to lightly part layers of sand and sediment from what appeared to be ancient relics.

As a veteran underwater treasure hunter, Moe had seen a lot of crazy things in his day, so he wasn’t easily surprised. But on that day, Moe was astounded by what he saw.

Moe stared at the small pile of iron caked in rust and limestone. He reached out to touch it. It was hard and menacing, and it sent a chill up his spine.

He gently picked up a large chunk of the iron and, with a sickening feeling, realized what he was holding in his seawater-wrinkled hands: a pair of hardened, ancient shackles—heavy manacles that he knew were designed specifically to handcuff the wrists of enslaved Africans, wrists that—he couldn’t help thinking—had probably looked much like his own.

Moe’s mind was racing with questions. Why were these shackles on this site? How did they get there? How long had they been there? He thought it unlikely that they would be from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which made him wonder, Where did these come from?

The discovery of the shackles made this shipwreck site different from all the other shipwrecks Moe had explored. He plunged his hands into the sand and began unearthing more shackles, several pairs at a time.

Each pair of shackles weighed six pounds and had two holes the size of quarters to hold a 13-inch-long bolt that locked into place to bind someone’s wrists tightly and efficiently. They were unyielding and they were sure to cause extreme discomfort and pain.

To give you an idea of how amazing it was that Moe even discovered this tiny mound of lost relics, you have to imagine how it must have been. A whole ocean stretches beneath you as, weightless, you peer hard through murky water and swirling sand, searching for a pinpoint of something slightly out of place—all against a backdrop of an ever shifting seafloor.

As he reached down into the sand again, Moe tugged at another pair of shackles from the pile, but these shackles were different from the others: They were tiny, thin, and almost flimsy, and they fit in the palm of Moe’s hand. He knew that these particular cuffs were designed specifically for the small wrists of children.

Suddenly Moe felt overwhelmed. Who would make handcuffs for children? And what kind of person would use these grisly tools? Where did these shackles come from and how many people had worn them?

Not all treasure is about glitter. Sometimes, along the route to discovery, we find something that is more valuable than precious stones. Sometimes we learn something about our human story and ourselves.

Moe’s discovery in and of itself was extraordinary—but it was even more so because of this: 300 years after those shackles were used to bind African people aboard a sweltering slave ship, the first man to touch those same shackles was Moe, a free black man.

While Moe and the crew began to survey the site in the Marquesas known as the New Ground Reef, they unearthed another artifact: an iron cannon weighing about 800 pounds. Moe was pretty sure he had stumbled upon the remains of a sunken slave ship. He surfaced with the shackles and went to work trying to make sense of what he’d found.

WHO WOULD MAKE HANDCUFFS FOR CHILDREN? AND WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD USE THESE GRISLY TOOLS?