Enslaved

My ancestors came from here.

They were taken from Africa in chains.

During the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans

were trafficked across the Atlantic

to North and South America and the Caribbean.

More than 2 million died en route.

For 400 years, the traffic in Africans

was an accepted part of life in the Western world.

How did people justify this?

The story of the slave trade is world history.

It's a world shame.

We're talking about going down 350 feet

to the depths of the ocean.

You have to come to terms with it.

You have to confront it.

Diving and investigating sunken slave ships

will reveal much about this overlooked history.

But to understand the broader picture

behind the transatlantic slave trade,

I'm enlisting the help

of two award-winning investigative journalists.

Every part of the system encouraged abuse.

What happened to them and why?

All of these Europeans thought that it was compatible

to conduct this horrific trade, and at the same time

these guys were going in to church

and saying their prayers every day.

Until that point, faith was everything.

- Yes. - Suddenly faith was not enough.

Now it was all about blood.

It would've been utterly

terrifying and miserable.

There were diagrams which showed the most effective way to pack

the largest number of captives into a given space.

This is what it is, man's inhumanity to man,

and this is almost like the capital of it.

We've come to the English Channel to investigate

a 350-year-old unidentified slave ship

that scientists call "35F."

We're briefed by Dr. Sean Kingsley,

an expert on the wreck.

The tragedy of site "35F" is this ship

was wrecked within a day's sail of England

at the very front door of the United Kingdom.

Sometime between 1672 and 1685, "35F" sailed from England.

It was bound for West Africa.

The ship almost certainly set out from London,

perhaps for modern Ghana, a 5 to 7-week journey.

It was owned by the Royal African Company.

At the time, the King of England,

Charles the II, had a monopoly on the slave trade,

and this was a company ship.

On its way back to England,

the slave ship hit a storm and went down.

"35F" was located by marine researchers in the early 2000s,

photographed by robotic camera, and largely forgotten.

This particular ship is probably the earliest slaver

in the world ever found.

And in this period, in the 1680s,

the Royal Africa Company was importing around

5,000 slaves every year.

And we know that vessels like this had the capacity

to carry 650 slaves.

If you look carefully and zoom in,

you can see remains of these iron cannons

and copper manilla bracelets...

Primitive currency that were used

to barter with West Africa for elephants, gold, and slaves.

All these types of material culture are typical of a ship

that's going out to West Africa to participate

in the slave trade.

So no one has put eyes on this wreck for 10 years now.

We don't know if it still even exists.

So your mission is to get out there, rediscover the site,

and see what other bits of information you can extract

to add to our story.

Let's take a look at the charts.

Well, this is the western approaches.

This is England. Over here to the south is France.

Out where I'm standing is the Atlantic.

And the big motion of the sea, it's coming in here.

It's getting compressed between France and England.

The waves become higher,

and the sea becomes more disturbed.

And that's why we've got around

5,700 shipwrecks around the British Isles.

And when there was a storm here, it was the perfect storm.

To dive this, we need conditions to be good.

We need them to be calm, flat.

For all those factors to come together,

it's just going to present a small window of opportunity.

So this is it.

It's not gonna be an easy one,

as the wreck is about 45 miles away from land.

We have the coordinates of the shipwreck site.

And to find it again, we'll be using one of the most

advanced research vessels available.

The local crew is very experienced,

and they know how treacherous and unpredictable

the waters can be.

My dad is British, but my mom is Bahamian,

descended from slaves that were brought over from Africa,

so I'm straddling these two lives,

these two ancestry lines.

This is probably the oldest slaver ever discovered,

so with that information, I-I suddenly...

my shoulders droop, and I feel this weight of responsibility.

The story of the slave trade is world history.

England was involved in it. Portugal was involved in it.

The French were involved in it. The Dutch were involved in it.

The Africans were involved in it, right?

It's a world shame.

The world bears responsibility for it.

You have to come to terms with it.

You have to confront it.

One mile away from target.

"35F" would have come to a fort like this one.

More than 30 of them dotted the coast of West Africa.

They were used as trading posts and dungeons,

where Africans were collected and processed

before being loaded onto slave ships.

The Portuguese came first, but after that,

almost every European power

tried to get their hands on Elmina at one point,

because it was a strategic location.

Right.

By the 1700s, the slave trade was the main business going on.

So one of the things that most strikes me, Sam,

about coming in here, is that building.

This part right here.

Yeah. This square bit in the middle.

- Okay. - That is a church.

As this castle became a primary site for slave traders...

Is this the Protestant church or the Catholic church?

Well, initially it was a Catholic church.

- Of course. - But when the British

took it over, they continued to use it as a Protestant church.

All of these Europeans thought that it was compatible

to conduct this absolutely horrific trade

in the dungeons of this building.

And at the same time, these guys were going into church

and saying their prayers every day.

One of the things that I think is most upsetting

is the kind of sexual abuse that happened here.

So in the governor's bedroom, there's a trap door

in the floor, and it leads through some ladders

directly down into the women's dungeon.

One of them would be selected and brought

straight up to the officer's bedroom.

Washed, because they were kept in a state of filth down there.

- Yeah, of course. - And then he would rape her.

And he would just have free access to these women and girls.

I'm sure there were little boys who were subjected to the same.

Yeah.

So it's a bit complicated for me when I come here.

I have Ghanaian family, and I don't know if anyone

who's related to me was actually trafficked in slavery,

but I do know that my sixth great-grandfather lived here,

not as an enslaved person, but as a slave trader.

He was Dutch.

He worked for the Dutch West India Company...

- He came here to trade. - Hmm.

...reading not very deeply between the lines.

Mm-hmm.

He would have been trading slaves.

And he had a child, as so many of the European men

who came here did, with a local woman.

I don't know the circumstances of their relationship.

Could it have been consensual? It's hard to imagine.

Doubt it.

I don't know anything about her.

So you got skin in the game.

- I've got skin in the game. - Ahh...

This place really means something to me.

As it pulled into port, perhaps to Elmina,

"35F" was carrying thousands of manillas,

a currency invented by Europeans to trade in Africa

for people, gold, and elephant tusks.

Once they finished their business,

they set sail for Caribbean slave markets.

To protect its valuable cargo from pirates,

the ship was heavily armed with dozens of cannons.

After five hours, we're finally approaching

shipwreck site "35F."

For the initial survey, we're deploying the ROV.

We're over the target.

Ready to bring down the ROV.

Yeah. Copy that. Over and 10.

It's like a remote-controlled submarine,

equipped with cameras, sonar, and various sensors

which allow the crew to see what's at the seabed.

Okay. Ready for dive in.

The live images are fed to us in the ROV control room.

Hopefully, there are still remains of the shipwreck,

and we'll find something down there.

We'll be down in about five minutes to the seabed.

5 minutes to go 330 feet.

Yeah, it's a bit quicker than a dive, eh?

Okay. So we're 106 meters now. Should be close to the seabed.

I'm just going to slow my descent.