The wreck of the last known slave ship brought to the U.S. may have been found, potentially wrapping a mystery that’s lasted nearly 160 years."I'm quaking with excitement,” John Sledge, a senior historian with the Mobile Historical Commission, told Al.com on Tuesday. “This would be a story of world historical significance, if this is the Clotilda.”Ben Raines, the Al.com reporter who found the wreck, had been sifting through historical documents and interviewing longtime Alabamians to pinpoint the ship’s location when the “bomb cyclone” that hit the East Coast a few weeks ago gave him a lucky break.Low tides revealed portions of the potential wreck sticking out of the mud near an island in the lower Mobile-Tensaw Delta, a swamp a few miles north of Mobile. Now a team of archaeologists from the University of West Florida are hoping to gather input from state and local officials to positively ID the wreck and mark it for historical preservation.The ship has long been a prize of wreck-hunters because of its historical significance. Congress outlawed importing slaves in 1808, but Timothy Meaher, an Alabama plantation owner, snuck 110 captives from what’s now Benin, Africa, into the country on the Clotilda in 1860, and the boat’s captain burned the wreck to conceal the crime.Meaher was never punished, but Raines hopes the potential wreck can bring its victims and the country at large a measure of closure.“It is easy, standing in the wintertime gloom of these Alabama swamps, to imagine that old ghosts haunt these bayous,” Raines writes in his piece explaining the search for the wreck. “Maybe this could help put some of them to rest.”
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