It sounded like an April Fool’s Day story, but it appears to be true. Just as I was departing on holiday, the news broke that a Portuguese slave ship has been found off the coast of Camp Bay, which sank more than 200 years ago. The New York Times was the first to break the story!
In 1794 the São José-Paquete de Africa ship left Mocambique for Brazil with hundreds of slaves on board. Less than a month after their departure, they experienced the Cape of Storms, and landed on a reef off Camps Bay, only half the slaves with the captain and crew surviving the sinking of the ship.
Finding the shipwreck more than 200 years after its sinking was a joint venture by the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the Iziko Museums of South Africa, and the Slave Wrecks Project.
The National Museum is due to open next year, and its founding director was determined to find any remnants of slave ships that carried an estimated 12 million Africans to other countries. His search took ten years to find such remains.
First thought to be the Dutch shipwreck Schuylenburg, local maritime archeologist Jaco Boshoff had done several dives to the shipwreck, and came to the conclusion that the ship was a different one. Further dives led to the discovery of iron blocks of ballast, which had been used to counter-balance the variable weight of the ‘human cargo’, as well as shackles. Boshoff backed up his research at the National Archives, and found a record of the São José. The findings from the shipwreck will be loaned to the National Museum in Washington.
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