In 1700, the English merchant slave ship Henrietta Marie sank 35 miles west of Key West, shortly after offloading 190 captured Africans in Jamaica. Nearly 325 years later, using the shipwreck and artifacts recovered from it as a focal point, Key West’s Mel Fisher Maritime Museum has developed and unveiled a comprehensive exhibit that examines the transatlantic slave trade in the context of its time.
The new permanent exhibit, “Spirits of the Passage,” documents the slave trade, its legacy and its Florida Keys heritage — including Key West’s role in the U.S. Navy’s early anti-slavery effort — through educational panels, large-scale graphics, sound recordings and artifacts such as shackles used to restrain Africans during the sea voyage that carried them into slavery. The shackles were recovered from the sea floor during the underwater archaeology and excavation efforts on the Henrietta Marie.
“Physical evidence of the voyage between Africa and the Americas, known as the Middle Passage, is rare worldwide and this collection is unique in the Americas,” said Madeleine Burnside, the museum’s chief curator and an authority on the maritime slave trade.
Discovered in 1973 by a dive crew working for treasure hunter Mel Fisher, the Henrietta Marie is believed to be the world’s biggest source of tangible objects from the early years of the slave trade.
The ship was not the treasure-laden galleon the initial dive team was seeking – the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha. But the Henrietta Marie was a historical gold mine of information about the tragic, pivotal period of African American history. It yielded countless artifacts that were recovered and subsequently conserved.
The Key West exhibit informs visitors about the maritime slave trade from the early 1600s to the Civil War. Exhibit modules re-create portions of the Henrietta Marie and depict aspects that range from captured Africans’ homeland to a Jamaican plantation experience.
Artifacts include the Henrietta Marie’s bell, trade goods such as glass beads and iron bars that were bartered for human lives in Africa, weapons and ship fittings, and the shackles that evoke images of struggle and misery. The museum also has on display a giant cauldron that served the enslaved Africans on board the Henrietta Marie as little as possible as cheaply as possible during their tortuous and confined voyage across the ocean.
Sound recordings tell the stories of people, including Olaudah Equiano of Nigeria, who was sold into slavery as a boy, eventually earned enough to buy his freedom and became an influential abolitionist; and Elizabeth Keckley, who was born into slavery, became such a talented seamstress that she was able to purchase her freedom, and eventually was dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln.
Also chronicled is Key West’s role as a base for the Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and as a sanctuary for more than 1,400 Africans rescued by the squadron in 1860 from three slave ships captured in Cuban waters after the trade was outlawed.
The exhibit spotlights the Cuban slave shipwreck Guerrero, discovered in waters off Key Largo, and excavated by marine archaeologists from the museum.
In addition, the exhibit spotlights Key West’s African Cemetery, containing the graves of those who didn’t survive the brutal ocean crossing or died after their rescue.
While the Henrietta Marie was previously featured in a smaller exhibit that toured museums in the U.S. and Caribbean, “Spirits of the Passage” is the first to examine the maritime slave trade’s 250-year history and complexity against the background of its time.
The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, 200 Greene St., opens at 10 a.m. daily and the last visitors are admitted at 4 p.m. Guided behind-the-scenes tours of the facility’s artifact conservation lab can be booked at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays.
More information is at melfisher.org.
