They find the last ship that brought slaves to the United States

American archaeologists found in the state of Alabama remained of a ship believed to be the last transported slaves from Africa to the United States in 1860, reported yesterday. members of the research team.

More than a century after its sinking, the remains of what is considered to be the last ship that transported slaves from Africa to the United States were found in Alabama, the agency said. Spanish press EFE.

Last week, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that it had found in the Mobile River what they believed to be the remains of Clotilda, "the ship that in 1860 was carrying 110 Africans to the United States, a half century after the importation of slaves and burned on the orders of their captain, William Foster. "

"The physical and medico-legal evidence strongly suggests that it is the Clotilda," said James Delgado, a marine archaeologist who participated in the investigation.

The investigating team said after testing that it was about this ship that, according to the historical records, after four months of sailing in the Atlantic, it was burned to hide the evidence of the crime.

"One of the darkest"

The announcement last Wednesday regarding Clotilda was greeted with joy by the descendants of the victims of this unfortunate journey, a journey that reflects "one of the darkest eras of modern history", as he described the executive director of the commission in Alabama Lisa Jones Demetropoulos.

El Clotilda was the last reference ship that transported slaves from Africa to the United States, a country that banned imports in 1808.

"The descendants of the Clotilda survivors have been dreaming of this discovery for generations," said Demetropoulos Jones at a conference organized on the occasion of the announcement.

The Africans transferred as slaves and who survived the ship's fire and sinking raised a community in Mobile, Alabama, called Africatown.

One of the last survivors of Clotilda was Cudjo Lewis, interviewed in 1927 by the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, to whom he recounted the horrors he had experienced during his fatal journey and which the researcher later included in his book "Barracoon".

Right now in Alabama is the Tribute to Peace and Justice National Museum, which shows what slavery was like and over four thousand lynchings suffered by African Americans during one of the most in the history of the United States.