I took a leap of faith—and it led me in search of history’s lost slave ships

In this excerpt from her new book Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging, National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts recounts the start of her journey as a chance introduction to a team of Black scuba experts inspires her to learn to dive, and help reclaim Black history.

February 22, 2017—A colleague gets me a ticket to visit the Smithsonian’s newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). I don’t really want to go. All that traumatic history in one place. But this ticket is a big deal. The museum has been booked solid for months, with hundreds of thousands of people, including relatives and friends, clamoring, bidding, begging for tickets, traveling from all over the country to visit. I feel like I have to go, like I should be a good Black citizen, and be grateful for the free pass. I decide to play hooky from work and visit one day.

I take the silver metro line from my job in Rosslyn to Federal Triangle and walk eight minutes to the museum on the National Mall. It is an astonishing-looking place, three tiers of inverted half pyramids covered in a shimmering bronze facade. It cost more than $500 million and took 13 years to build. All reports say that it beautifully tells the history of Black America, like a song with a refrain and a crescendo. Big, sweeping stories of African American struggles and triumphs over the centuries. Stories I square my shoulders and steel myself to hear.

I start at the bottom level. In slavery. My chest tightens as I move deeper into the cool of the building. I am nervous to see how we came here. To see what we endured in graphic detail. I feel anxious. My pace quickens. But then I see a piece of her.

She is the São José Paquete d’África: a Portuguese slave ship found off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. I walk up a plank into a separate space that is dark and feels closed in. Immediately, I am surrounded by the dramatic sounds of wind and waves crashing and a deep male voice solemnly narrating the experience of the ship’s passage across the Atlantic. Two hundred twelve Africans died the night the ship sank. I see actual artifacts from the wreck.

The São José was one of 12,000 ships that brought some 12.5 million Africans to the Americas between the 1500s and 1800s. On a huge wall map with the ironic names of the ships—Liberty, Hope, Desire … even Jesus—are the numbers of Africans who embarked on each ship and the numbers who disembarked. The second number is always far less than the first.

The map lists the routes, lines indicating some 36,000 voyages made over those 400 years, more than 40 countries involved. I see the enormity of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—or the triangular trade, as it is known, because it followed a three-legged route. Leg one: Europe to Africa to trade goods for captured Africans. Leg two: Africa to the Americas to make a profit by enslaving those Africans as free labor. Leg three: the Americas to Europe with all the money and materials accumulated to build wealth.

Historians call the second leg the Middle Passage. They estimate that as many as 1,000 ships sank during this period. But to date, only a small number of those ships—fewer than 20—have been found, and even fewer properly documented. They also estimate that approximately 1.8 million Africans lost their lives in the crossing. Almost two million people. Tortured. Murdered. Drowned. Lost.

Disappeared into the depths.

(Explorer Tara Roberts took up diving to learn the human side of a tragic era) 

Some say that the Atlantic is one of the most turbulent oceans on the planet, that it churns with the spirits of Africans whose names we will never know—souls that have never been acknowledged or mourned. Dreamers, poets, farmers, scientists, griots, educators, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. Just gone.

My heart constricts. This history is exactly what I have always feared to face—I can’t take it all in. It’s too much. I need to walk away. I escape to the second floor aboveground, my steps slow and reluctant but determined to see this through. I enter a sparse space mainly empty of visitors, where the exhibit from below continues with a behind-the-scenes peek into the work of finding sunken slave ships.

And my heart soars.

I’m immediately drawn to a photograph of a Black gentleman with a gray mustache on a boat surrounded mainly by Black women. They are all in wet suits, different ages, sitting on the boat with broad smiles. The women lean into each other. Some with heads thrown back in laughter. Some looking straight into the camera. One woman has her arm cricked around the neck of another, who inclines into the hug, her head resting on the woman’s shoulder.

They remind me of sunshine and rustling trees on a lazy day, of the crunch of fat dill pickles, and the smell of barbecue chicken at a family picnic. They remind me of my mother, my aunts, my sister-friends around the world, who I don’t get to see often. A yearning that I don’t fully understand opens within me.

I read the accompanying text. These women and this gentleman are all a part of a group of predominantly Black scuba divers called Diving With a Purpose (DWP); they search for and document missing slave shipwrecks around the world. They helped with the discovery and documentation of the São José Paquete d’África shipwreck.

I google them right there in the museum, and discover that since 2003, DWP has been training ordinary people as underwater archaeology advocates to assist archaeologists and historians in finding the submerged history of the African diaspora around the world. People as young as 16 and as old as 90 participate in this work. The only requirement is an interest in scuba diving and a commitment to perfecting your diving skills.

As I read, the women on the boat transform in my mind. Instead of sitting, they now stand facing the bow of the ship with their hands balled into fists on their hips, huge capes around their shoulders, hair billowing in the wind. They become like superheroes to me, and I want to be standing right there beside them, wearing my own cape. Desperately. The yearning I feel hollows me out with its hunger.

It transports me back to a place of remembrance—back to the 1970s. To my childhood. To Wells Drive in Atlanta, Georgia. To the apartment on the top floor of a two-story walk-up where I lived with my mother—just the two of us in five rooms. How does the universe match parents and children? I don’t know. But I do know that my mother was the perfect parent for me. She was a reading teacher. I loved to read. And my mom had access to books. She used to bring home boxes and boxes of them from her reading conferences and conventions.

The joy I felt opening those boxes, pulling out the crisp packaged pages, smelling their woody scent, cracking open their spines, and disappearing into other worlds. I could spend all day with a book and all night long reading it under the covers with my flashlight.

I loved fantasy books the most. Magic. Quests. Dragons. Unicorns. Outer space. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series was one of my favorites. I yearned for Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which to tap outside my window and charge me with helping to save the universe. I so wanted to be Charles Wallace—not Meg, mind you—anointed with a big life purpose. Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain was another favorite; I would reread the entire series each year. I wanted to be Taran, discover that I had a hidden birthright and set out with a sword on a magical adventure. I would close my eyes and wish hard for the universe to name me as worthy and call on me to do something big to help the world. Back then, my imagination was big, broad, deep. No limits.

But as I grew up, I began to notice that Black girls were never at the heart of these stories. And the books that did have Black girls in them were often focused on tragedy and pain, based in the grimmest of realities. I came to understand that there was a prevailing narrative about Black people—a narrative created through a distorted lens that emphasized, to the exclusion of much else, our struggle, our pain, our trauma.

From my front window, I could see a big hill that curved upward between the buildings in my apartment complex. When my mom got home from work, I would ride my bike up and down that hill. I remember huffing up and then soaring down with my legs out to the side, hands off the handlebars, the beads at the end of my braids clacking in the wind.

Ten-year-old me felt free. Connected to sky. To wind. To the great cosmos. Undefined by others’ expectations or stereotypes of words like “girl,” like “Black girl.” I was just me, and I was everything. Big in spirit. Big in possibility. I was a creator, one with the universe, which held me and supported me and encouraged me forward. I could be anything I wanted. And I knew I loved stories.

Maybe I couldn’t go to other planets or dimensions with my own magical guide, but perhaps I could disappear into faraway lands right here on Earth. Perhaps I could wield the pen as my sword. Perhaps I could tell stories that helped to save the land. I knew then that I wanted to be an adventurer and a storyteller.

Now I sit down on a bench next to the exhibit and hold my head in my hands as I remember that dream. And I tell myself a hard truth. Not only am I a coward, afraid to look back at the past and to embrace my history, but I’m also a pretender.

I did start telling stories young: a little in high school. Then college. Then as a young graduate and professional. I wrote reviews, how-to stories and essays sometimes. But mainly, I worked as an editor—coaching, supporting, and helping others tell their stories rather than my writing my own. Never writing the big adventure stories I dreamed of as kid. I’ve spent my professional days living on the edge of my dreams. Mainly circling, never quite landing.

Maybe that’s why I’m single with no children. Maybe that’s why I’ve had 20 addresses in the last 30 years and only see my friends occasionally. I am not rooted. Not in my work. Not in myself. Not even in my own imagination. I feel like I don’t belong. Anywhere. Or at least I did.

I pick up my head from my hands and look back at the photo. My heart is beating wildly now. These women are beckoning to me. They are inviting me to take a leap and be that 10-year-old girl again, a character in my own story. I feel a resolve, an uncoiling inside, a desire to take the necessary steps to finally land squarely in my life. I save the DWP website to my phone.

(Exploring the stories of Africans forced to make the Middle Passage)

A leap of faith

February 24, 2017: Two days later. I hold the phone in my hand, pumping myself up to dial the number from the website. My heart is racing. I had felt so courageous in the museum. So ready. Now, I feel shy and a little ridiculous. A seed of doubt has begun to grow. How can I do what those women are doing? I love the water, but I don’t know anything about the ocean or scuba diving. What if it’s too hard? Doubt begins to spread, and I coil back up on the inside.

I rationalize that DWP probably needs financial support and resources. And the nonprofit I work for supports people with big visions for change. So maybe I can nominate someone from the organization as a fellow to help them get more funding. Even if I am not ready, maybe I can still be useful. Circling is such a deeply ingrained habit.

I dial. Ken Stewart, the man with the gray mustache in the picture and the co-founder of DWP, answers the phone. He is friendly and curious. “Ohhhhh, you saw my picture in the museum! That’s a handsome gentleman, eh?” he laughs.

Ken, who is 72, has a lilting, musical voice, like a jazz singer from the 1920s; his voice scats and croons and caresses the phone. The smokiness of his New York City hometown lives in its phrasing, the energy of 125th Street fills up the in-between spaces, and the southern charm of Nashville, Tennessee—his adopted town of 30 years—rounds out the mix.

I tell him that I want to nominate him for a fellowship with my nonprofit. “You want to give me money?” he asks, delighted. “Cause, man, we need money for these dives!” Ken loves to tell stories. And I love listening. We chat for an hour on that first call. And then another hour on our second call. I fall in love with the DWP mission even more. And I am sure my organization can help support Ken. I facilitate an introduction.

After a few calls with an officer from the organization, though, it doesn’t work out. But then again, maybe it was never supposed to, because on our last call, after the others hang up, Ken says, “Sister.” He has figured out I am Black. “You know you live in the epicenter of Black scuba diving, right?”

“No. Wait, what? Here in D.C.?” I sputter.

“Yes. That’s right. You are right there with all the main cats … Doctor Albert José Jones, for one. Doc founded the first Black scuba diving club in the United States—the Underwater Adventure Seekers or UAS—right there in D.C., almost 60 years ago. He also co-founded NABS, the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, with another legendary diver, Ric Powell. You know, NABS has over 3,000 divers around the country. You also got Kamau Sadiki there. A lot of the leaders from DWP, they are all right there in your city.

“You are in the mix, Tara Roberts.” He likes to say my whole name. “UAS holds classes in the pool at Gallaudet University and in a bookstore close to Howard University.”

“Really?” I say, marveling that my apartment is only a couple blocks away from Howard, an HBCU (historically Black university or college).

“You should come dive with us,” he says. The world stills for me. “I’ll get you in their course right now if you want to do it,” he adds after a moment of silence.

Ken says the class will last three months and by the end, I will have my PADI scuba diving certification. After that, I will need 30 ocean dives under my belt to strengthen my underwater skills. And if I complete both, I can participate in the DWP training program next summer. I can’t speak.

“Are you still there?” Ken asks quietly after a few silent beats. “Do you want to do it?” It’s the invitation I needed to hear. My heart is pounding as I take a deep breath and say yes. A yes that will start a rolling, powerful wave and eventually wipe clean my life in D.C. This is the first heartfelt yes I’ve said in a very long time.

(This man helped open the ocean to Black divers)

Touching the souls of ancestors

June 11, 2017: About 40 of us have driven out to the man-made Millbrook Quarry in Northern Virginia. I am dressed in a wet suit and bent over slightly with an air tank on my back. I walk backward toward the edge of the dock to accommodate the fins on my feet. And I prepare to jump into freezing cold, murky water.

It’s my scuba certification day. The brown faces around me—instructors, volunteers, fellow classmates I’ve gotten to know over these past few months—cheer me on, telling me I can do it. I hear laughter and splashes. I have fallen in love with this group of divers who are bucking stereotypes and pushing back the boundaries of who Black folks can be in the world.

Shirikiana, a badass filmmaker who owns the bookshop and vegan café near Howard University where we held our classroom sessions every single week for three months, paddles in the water doling out instructions. She’s one of the women in the picture at the museum. She helped me practice my mask skills in our pool sessions.

Doc Albert José Jones, the legend, the grandfather of Black scuba diving in the United States, sits in a lawn chair under an umbrella beside the water. He led all the classroom sessions at Shirikiana’s bookstore with quiet, dry humor and jokes you had to listen carefully for. He winks at me and wishes me luck.

DWP instructor, pilot, and retired engineer Kamau Sadiki is already in the water, helping one of my classmates practice her rescue skills. My eight classmates. I have gotten to know them all these last few months. I turn to my dive buddy, Reggie, a math teacher from Maryland, and we give each other the thumbs-up. I wonder if my mask is on tight enough. Too late. Time to go.

I jump in and immediately pop back up to the surface. The water is cold. Reggie jumps in and drifts to me. One by one, my other classmates jump in. Two by two, we follow our instructor Kim to the submerged platform in the middle of the quarry to practice the skills we learned over these past three months. We take turns going down to a depth of about 30 feet and standing on a platform we can barely see, testing our compass reading skills, flooding our masks, removing and replacing our masks, and practicing emergency ascents without air.

We also go over tired buddy tows, snorkel to regulator exchanges, and emergency weight belt removal. We learn that people have died in the ocean, that scuba diving is serious work. And we give it our all. And then the testing is over.

We float back to the edges, hand over our fins, removing them one by one as we hang on to the sides. We drag ourselves up the steps and most of us flop down on the grass nervously. Did we do enough?

Yes. We all pass. We take a group picture as newly minted scuba divers holding a big UAS sign in front of us. As PADI-certified divers, we can now dive anywhere in the world. I have on my blue-and-white bandana and shorts over my bathing suit, and my smile is so wide for the camera that my cheeks hurt.

Afterward, we sit in the backs of cars, on blankets and folding chairs, replenishing our bodies with all kinds of burgers, and celebrating our accomplishment with cake and stories. Doc sits with us, reclined in his lawn chair, umbrella overhead. He clears his throat—although we are already a rapt audience hanging on his and each instructor’s every word—and tells us the story of the Henrietta Marie, a slave ship that made two voyages from England to West Africa to Jamaica in 1699 and 1700. The first slave shipwreck to be found in U.S. waters.

It was a big ship, he says, with several cargo decks outfitted to carry iron, beads, weapons, pewter … and captive Africans.

On the second voyage, the ship sailed from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to Jamaica with 274 captive African men, women, and children in its cargo hold. About 80 of the Africans died in the Atlantic, and the remaining 194 surviving souls were sold into slavery to the island’s sugar plantations. One morning in June 1700, Henrietta Marie’s crew loaded the ship with the spoils of their trade, ready to head home. Mission accomplished, they thought, and sailed the ship en route to London, traveling westerly around the Florida Keys.

But a big storm hit. The ship slammed up against a reef—one time, two times, three times. Thunder, lightning, rough waves. Wood bowing, then breaking. The Henrietta Marie shattering and sinking.

The ship lay at the bottom of the ocean for almost three centuries, until 1972, when salvagers found it. The salvaging team had been searching for another vessel with a reported treasure trove worth around $400 million when they found the Henrietta Marie by accident. It held no sparkling jewels or bars of gold; most of its treasure had already perished or been sold. But it did have evidence of human trafficking: The team found shackles, used to restrain the captives, as well as elephant teeth, tusks, and African trading beads—commodities used in the slave trade.

More diving on the wreck site eventually revealed the ship’s bell, which was inscribed with its name and the date of its initial voyage in 1699 and proved the ship’s identity conclusively.

The artifacts, scrubbed clean and preserved by the salvaging team, were shared at the first conference of NABS, the Black diving organization that Doc Jones co-founded. The artifacts broke down the divers, he says. The shackles, especially. Big, tough military guys were reduced to tears, particularly when they touched tiny shackles made for children.

It was clear to all of them that they had to do something. So they decided to place a plaque at the wreck site to honor those Africans who had been forced to journey on the ship—and to honor those who had lost their lives along the way.

Twelve NABS divers, including Doc Jones, helped to heave a 3,000-pound plaque to the site with pulleys and ropes, and they dove. Doc said it felt eerie, like diving on a grave site. The plaque settled on the ocean floor. The divers turned it so that its front would face due east and south, toward the continent of Africa. Lining up, they said prayers and touched it, one by one, mouthing its inscription as they swam past:

In memory and recognition of the courage, pain and suffering of enslaved African people. Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors.

This became the beginning, the seed of the idea for DWP. The realization that there were more wrecks out there. More stories to be told. And many more people whose names would likely never be known but who deserved to be remembered and honored … Names like Thambo. Kossola. Oluale. Adissa. Lahla. Abache. Shamba. Abile. Somee. Sakaru. Deza … Names waiting to be spirited home.

(The legendary community that fought for its freedom in Jamaica)

Under the sea

October 18, 2017: A line of us newly certified divers and our UAS instructors follow the light ahead in the dark. We are about 20 feet under the surface of the crystal waters of Cozumel, Mexico, outfitted in our scuba gear. This is our first ocean dive and our first night dive. It’s so dark I cannot see my hand in front of my eyes.

I swim directly behind Kamau, the retired engineer and DWP instructor who is my dive buddy. The light is strapped to his forehead. Others follow me in a single-file line. It feels spooky out here about 330 feet from shore. I know there are snakes in the water—a bright yellow one burrowing in the sand earlier in the day had me climbing over Kamau to get away. I don’t want to bump into it again by accident. But Kamau’s light never wavers. He doesn’t seem nervous at all. I take courage from him.

Then a glow in the distance gets closer and wider. Kamau’s light stops moving. I file in behind him as it draws closer. Suddenly, the glow surrounds us. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny fish glow in the dark and dart around me. I’m not scared, though. I’m in wonder surrounded by this light, feeling grateful to the universe.

Being out here, under the night sky, magic truly seeps into my soul and begets the seed of a plan. What if I follow these divers around the world and tell stories about them as they search for slave shipwrecks? What if I travel with them to all the places with active DWP missions—Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal, Costa Rica, St. Croix?

The idea takes root in a precious and quiet way. My inner adventurer, which has been gathering courage these past few months, and my inner storyteller, which has been waiting quietly, finally meet and bow to each other. The meeting feels warm and delicious.

(Memorials to those forced from their homes into the global slave trade)

A new adventure

February 11, 2018: Another birthday has passed. I’ve been back from Mexico for four months now. I have eight ocean dives under my belt from that trip. Only 22 more to participate in the DWP training. In the meantime, I have things to do.

First, I call Ken to get his blessing. “You know, the stories that have been told about Africans and slavery, they’ve been told by White people,” he says. “People who have their academic credentials.”

He pauses. “I don’t want to take anything away from them, ’cause I don’t have any academic credentials, right? And I admire them. But they can’t tell it from our perspective. From the African folks that lived it. We have to start telling our own story.” He adds, “We need you to help tell this story, Tara Roberts.”

I tell Ken that I’m planning to quit my job. “Oh! Wait a minute now!” he exclaims. “Nobody said nothing about you quitting your job! Our organization can’t take responsibility for something like that. Oh no!” I laugh and tell him that I’m doing this no matter what, and that I will take all the responsibility. I tell him he doesn’t have to worry.

Next, I walk into my boss’s office and quit. It’s not as hard as I thought it would be. I’m ready to not be the only one.

The DWP training is in June, which gives me four months to get myself together. And I have a plan. A friend invited me to his wedding in India at the end of the month. I had planned to go using frequent-flier miles, and then head back to the States. But now, I decide I will stay and finish my 22 remaining dives in Southeast Asia.

Something calls me to Sri Lanka. They call it the teardrop of India because it looks like a small tear hanging off the side of the larger country. There is some sadness to the idea, but it also gives gravitas to the place and implies the people have gone through some things. Plus, the country is 70 percent Buddhist and known to be a friendly and welcoming place. Some travel books call it the nation of smiling people. It will be my first stop. I can’t explain it fully. Just something about a country full of smiling brown Buddhists who kinda look like me sparks my imagination. And I’ve never been to Thailand, but I hear it’s a beautiful place to dive. It will be my last stop.

I don’t have an assignment. I don’t have funding. I don’t know how I’m going to get this story out in the world. I don’t even know what the story is, exactly. Relax, I think. One step at a time.

I book a one-way ticket to Kerala, in southern India. I’ll get the other tickets once I’m there. I buy an iPad Pro so I can keep a digital journal along the way, and a big backpack. I decide to keep my apartment in D.C. till I’m back in June. A safety net. I will figure out the rest as I go. One bag. One Black magic girl. I’m ready.

But I need to do one more thing.

Diving deep

February 24, 2018: I leave for Kerala in less than 48 hours. After cleaning out the last of my office, I step out on the street in Rosslyn and walk slowly over the bridge connecting Virginia to D.C. The setting sun warms my face. Birds dance across the surface of the Potomac River, and I feel a tingling on my skin.

I arrive at Slim’s barbershop on 14th and K Streets. It’s posh, with posh prices, but Slim charges me the hood rate, so I sit in his chair. He puts a towel around my neck and a cape around the towel. He spins me around to the mirror and stands behind me, running his hand over my hair, which is styled in an overgrown Afro. “OK, what are we doing today?” he asks. “You want me to shape up the sides?”

I take a deep breath. “No,” I say, looking at myself in the mirror. “I want you to cut it all off.” He frowns, “You want a Caesar? How low do you want me to go?”

“All the way,” I say, smiling. “I want you to shave it all. I don’t want a single hair left on top of my head.”

“Ohhhh, word, you want to go bald???” I nod.

“Dope! You’re going to look soooo good!” he says, leaning close while looking at me in the mirror and winking. “I just love it when women go bald.” He pulls out the clippers and makes the first pass from front to back. Twenty minutes later I walk up 14th Street in the dusky evening. I feel the air caressing my scalp. I hold out my arms, twirl once and laugh out loud.

I feel delicious, the magic in me stirring. My 10-year-old self is wide awake, head up, eyes a bit wary, though, wondering if she can truly trust me this time. I take a deep breath and promise that I won’t let her down.

I’m diving deep this time.