SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Now we have a story about divers in the Florida Keys chasing sunken history. It's a past that's been hidden beneath the waves for nearly 200 years. Amara Evering of member station WLRN reports.
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AMARA EVERING, BYLINE: Shellie Baxter waits on a dock for a boat that will take her on another dive in the Florida Keys. The genealogist has spent most of her time helping Black and Indigenous people trace their ancestral roots through her organization, Our Genetic Legacy. But now her work is taking her out to sea.
SHELLIE BAXTER: Our end goal is to be able to do this archaeological research underwater to help find sunken slave ships and document them. We were studying for the Guerrero.
EVERING: The Guerrero was a pirate slave ship bound for Cuba that wrecked off Key Largo in 1827. Forty-one African captives on board drowned, and the 399 survivors were captured, then sold back into slavery. At age 55, Baxter took up diving to help uncover sunken histories like these.
BAXTER: It's a whole 'nother level of diving because you're diving to stay in place, take measurements, write them down underwater, and then come back up and create a schematic drawing to scale so that they can create a recreation of that shipwreck in order to try to identify what ship that is.
EVERING: Divers like Baxter have helped discover shipwrecks in Florida. For marine archaeologist Corey Malcom, slave shipwrecks often have one obvious feature.
COREY MALCOM: The telltale sign of a ship that was engaged in selling people would be the iron shackles.
EVERING: He said shackles were discovered on one shipwreck in the 1970s.
MALCOM: I know on the Henrietta Marie, 84 sets of those were found on the ship. That's enough to hold 168 people because they held people two-by-two.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Does anybody have extra weight?
EVERING: Back on the dock, Baxter is joined by a group of young women who she's teaching how to dive. One of them is Angeni Nettles.
ANGENI NETTLES: We were at the site of the Guerrero, and it was so impactful to be, like, I'm here, breathing in this water where this tragedy took place.
EVERING: Sixteen-year-old Alana Lara is the youngest member of the group. She says Baxter has given her a new perspective.
ALANA LARA: I was a person that didn't like history, so having this opportunity - being underwater is, like, an entirely new world - I realized how much more there is to the world that we don't know. If we learn from the past, we can maybe make it right in the future.
EVERING: Before heading out for one last dive of the day, Baxter reflects on the powerful contradiction of safely breathing underwater at a shipwreck where so many drowned but many survived.
BAXTER: When you're looking at documents and you put names to those ancestors, and you look at locations, it just increases that understanding and allows you to be able to see that the strength that they had to survive is in you.
EVERING: Baxter goes out to sea with the young divers. She's told them that the Guerrero is just one of over a thousand ships that wrecked during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Fewer than 20 of these ships have been recovered so far.
For NPR News, I'm Amara Evering in Key Biscayne, Florida.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAM WILKES & DYLAN DAY'S "I'LL FIND A WAY (TO CARRY IT ALL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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