The Henrietta Marie was an English slave ship that mysteriously sank off the coast of Key West in 1700.
It was returning from a trip to Jamaica where 191 slaves were sold. Nearly 300 years later, a team of archaeologists from the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society surveyed the long-forgotten ship and unearthed what is likely the largest source of objects from a vessel involved in the early years of the transatlantic slave trade.
This rare discovery is now shedding light on a cruel and pivotal period in history at a new exhibit in the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum.
The exhibit, which opened to the public earlier this month, features artifacts from the Henrietta Marie as well as other items sourced to help explain about 245 years of history relating to the slave trade, its global implications and impact locally in the Florida Keys.
“Our history as a nation does not begin in 1776,” said Madeline Burnside, chief curator for the Mel Fisher Museum. “So that was kind of the underlying thing, ‘how are we going to explain this?’ And we have a lot of artifacts that really speak to that.”
READ MORE: FWC recovers 37 stolen gold coins from 1715 fleet shipwrecks
The controversial treasure hunter-ship salvager Mel Fisher set out on a years-long quest to uncover the site of the deep sea treasures rumored to lay with the wreckage of “Nuestra Señora de Atocha,” a Spanish Galleon part of a fleet of 28 ships. The fleet left Havana, Cuba, bound for Spain in 1622, but several ships sank in the Florida straits after they were overtaken by a hurricane.
Fisher is known today for finding the Atocha and uncovering great wealth in the form of silver, gold. Emerald, and pearls taken from across the Americas intended to be shipped to Spain. But his notoriety is marked by the sale of counterfeit coins and the tragic deaths of three crew members including his son and daughter-in-law.
Before his big discovery, divers working for Fisher found the wreck site of the Henrietta Marie, instead, in 1972. It remained largely unsurveyed for several years, but was finally excavated in 1983.
The ship’s impact
Corey Malcom, the Florida Keys History Center's lead historian, said the artifacts found at the Henrietta Marie constitute one of the largest collections of tangible evidence from a slave ship in North America.
“There are literally thousands of objects from that ship,” Malcom said. “I don't know that that will ever be equaled.”
Malcom worked firsthand as an archaeologist to process and research the artifacts recovered from the Henrietta Marie and several other ships found by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society.
The collection includes several pairs of iron shackles, many of which are still intact, that were used to chain the ship's captives together.
“ It just brings an undeniable reality to the whole notion that people were forced to sail across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the Americas,” he said.
In 1993, the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS), an organization focused on connecting African American divers and addressing the concerns and issues unique to that community, placed a memorial plaque on the seabed near the Henrietta Marie wreckage site.
The plaque reads “Henrietta Marie: In recognition of the Courage, Pain and Suffering of Enslaved African People. Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors.”
The Henrietta Marie is the only excavated slave ship in North America, according to Madeline Burnside, the museum’s chief curator.
It also helped inspire the creation of Diving with a Purpose, an offshoot of NABS, according to reporting from National Geographic. Diving with a Purpose is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of African slave trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African-Americans.
Diving with a Purpose collaborates with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to train and certify volunteer underwater archaeologists who document shipwrecks in places like the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
A final resting place for the artifacts
Many of the Henrietta Marie artifacts were compiled into a traveling exhibit in the 1990s that was on the road for years. The small exhibit was sent to places like Mobile, Alabama, and the Pompey Museum of Slavery & Emancipation in the Bahamas.
“Part of the reason it was on the road was we had nowhere to put it,” said Burnside.
Most of the museum’s exhibit space was dedicated to the 1622 fleet and Spanish colonial collections. That was until museum staff got access to an entirely new floor of the building that was previously used as office space.
Now, the museum has the opportunity to keep the artifacts in Key West, and even put some on display that were too fragile to travel — like a nearly 100 gallon-cauldron believed to be used to feed the ship’s captives.
Despite the global impact of the slave trade, part of the new exhibit is dedicated to its impact on the Florida Keys.
”You've got to serve the people who live here,” Burnside said. “You've got to tell them their story. You'd like it (to be) a story that everyone could be proud of. It isn't always. History's dirty.”
The exhibit explores the different ways the Florida Keys were involved in both the slave trade and anti-slavery operations.
“I think people don't realize that we actually do have an incredibly strong connection,” Burnside said.
Another significant find with artifacts at the museum are a pair of shipwrecks — the Guerrero, a Spanish pirate slave ship, and the HMS Nimble, an anti-slavery patrol ship — that were grounded near Carysfort Reef.
“Our strongest connection is actually to the suppression of the slave trade after 1807,” she said.
That connection includes a U.S. anti-slavery squadron that captured three slave ships near Cuba after the trade had been deemed illegal and brought them into Key West in 1860.
Key West was one of the first cities in the South to receive word of President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation, according to Burnside.
“Key West heard about it on January 18th,” she said. “That's only 18 days.”
The exhibit also covers Florida Keys stories like that of Sandy Cornish. He was born into slavery in Maryland but after working on a railroad project in Florida, bought his freedom for himself and his wife.
The two very-nearly escaped re-enslavement after their papers were burnt in a house fire, and made their way to Key West. Cornish and his wife, Lillah, created one of the island’s first successful farms and they grew to be among the richest people in the area and leaders for Key West’s Black community in the late 1840s.
“I really want (museum visitors) to understand that slavery was never a monolith,” she said. “It wasn't the same everywhere.”
Now, she hopes, many people may learn that through the new exhibit.
IF YOU GO
What: A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie
Where: Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, 200 Greene Street, Key West, FL 33040.
When: The museum is open 7 days a week. Ticket information here.
