KEY WEST, Fla. — Ruthie Browning dove into the calm, blue water off Key West, Fla., expecting to see “a big, old rock with stuff growing all over it.”
She was on a pilgrimage with other Black divers and community members, visiting sacred sites including one where a British slave ship — the Henrietta Marie — sank 326 years ago.
The vessel had delivered 200 enslaved people from West Africa to Jamaica and was heading back to Britain in 1700 — near the peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade — when it was swallowed up in the churning waters of New Ground Reef where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Gulf of Mexico.
A concrete marker at the site memorializes the people on that ship.
As Browning and her group prepared to dive in early May, the water was calm. The marker, 20 feet below, was visible from the glassy surface. “I thought I’d look at it, pay my respects and that’ll be that,” she said.
But something unexpected happened. Tears filled her eyes. She gently told herself: If you can be quiet, maybe they will speak.
Staring at the monument, which is now a small living reef covered in corals and sponges, she felt her ancestors’ words: “My daughter, we’re so glad you’re here.”
Overwhelmed, Browning lingered by the marker bearing the words: “Henrietta Marie. In memory and recognition of the courage, pain and suffering on enslaved African people. Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors.”
She felt submerged in gratitude.
“Without their stamina, their spirit and survival, I wouldn’t be here today. None of us would be here today,” she said.
Pilgrimages aren’t meant to be easy
For the pilgrims in Key West, the gathering was an act of devotion, a quest for connection with their roots and for spiritually nourishing generations to come. They had tried to dive to the marker last summer, but the water was too choppy.
“The ancestors were not smiling down on us then,” said Jay Haigler, master diving instructor with Underwater Adventure Seekers, the world’s oldest Black scuba diving club. “This year was different.”
Such a pilgrimage was never meant to be easy, said Michael Cottman, who has written two books about the Henrietta Marie and was part of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers that installed the marker in 1992.
Cottman believes the site contains “spiritual turbulence.”
“Even if it wasn’t carrying enslaved people, it embodies the oppression of our people,” he said.
The group organized an annual pilgrimage in the 1990s, but it didn’t continue. The latest trip was spurred by an underwater interview project proposed by Stanford University anthropologist Ayana Omilade Flewellen, who serves on the board of Diving With a Purpose, a Black scuba diving nonprofit dedicated to documenting slave shipwrecks.
The submerged interviews also helped her connect as a pilgrim, Flewellen said. “I felt a kind of tenderness in my heart.”
The spiritual experience helped her process a traumatic history rooted in death and suffering.
“It’s hard to attach your life with this history,” she said. “The only way I could do that was turn toward what the divers were experiencing on this pilgrimage. That’s where it all bloomed and blossomed.”
Ancient ritual at African refugee cemetery
The pilgrims also gathered on land. At Higgs Beach on the south side of Key West, they visited a memorial and burial ground for 297 African refugees who died in 1860 after being rescued by the U.S. Navy from three slave ships — Wildfire, William and Bogota. Over 1,400 refugees were housed by the government in a compound and provided food and medical care, said Corey Malcom, the Florida Keys History Center’s lead historian.
While many were sent back to Africa, hundreds died due to the horrific conditions on the ships, he said.
Largely forgotten for decades, the grave site was discovered by historians and geologists using ground-penetrating radar. In 2010, a large pit containing 100 more bodies was located at a community dog park across the street. The area is now fenced off, Malcom said.
On Saturday, pilgrims met at the cemetery and held an emotional libation ceremony, a sacred, ancient ritual rooted in Afro-Caribbean spiritual tradition. One by one, group members tearfully thanked their ancestors and poured white rum on the beach. The clear spirit is believed to act as a messenger, inviting ancestral souls for their blessings.
“To honor your ancestors and the road they’ve traveled is very, very important because we’re all connected,” said Addeliar Guy, one of the elders and an avid diver.
Underwater monument represents a living history
Joel Johnson trained for weeks for his first open-water dive at the Henrietta Marie site. Johnson, the president and CEO of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, said what surprised him as he approached the monument was the vibrancy surrounding it. Fish darted among the corals that swayed with the currents; shells rested on the sandy bottom.
Conservation and protecting these habitats also preserve the history below the waves, Johnson said.
“This was not a place of death, but a place of life,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I was grieving for my ancestors. I felt like I was in the stream of history, recognizing that I’m a part of that. It made me happy.”
While underwater, Michael Philip Davenport, president of Underwater Adventure Seekers, was inspired to create art showing ancestors emerging from the monument.
“Their spirituality is still in that space,” he said. “I was feeling their lives and their tragedy.”
Dr. Melody Garrett, an anesthesiologist, started training with Diving With a Purpose in 2011 and has gone on missions to find the Guerrero, a Spanish pirate ship that wrecked in 1827 while carrying 561 enslaved Africans.
“A pilgrimage like this is so important now more than ever because there is an effort to cover up, rewrite and change history,” she said. She cited the Trump administration’s moves to remove references to slavery and Black history at National Park Service sites and federal museums, labeling it as divisive “anti-American propaganda.”
For Garrett, seeing these pieces of history gives her a strong sense of identity as an American, as the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday.
“Black people have been here since before this country’s inception, longer than many other people have,” she said. “This is our country.”
Exhibit displays shackles used in slave trade
Remnants of the Henrietta Marie’s wooden hull are embedded at the site under layers of sand. The shipwreck was discovered in 1972 by treasure hunter Mel Fisher, but it wasn’t until 1983 that hundreds of intact items were recovered. Only a few slave ships were found out of the 35,000 used to transport over 12 million enslaved Africans; most vessels were intentionally destroyed to hide the illicit trade.
The artifacts, which occupy an entire floor of the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, include over 80 sets of iron shackles, many of them child-size.
When Kory Lamberts first walked over wooden planks in the exhibit, they unexpectedly creaked.
“It was visceral,” he said. “It took me to a place. It also tells me that these were young people — children. These are baby shackles. There’s no sugarcoating it. The truth really hits you.”
While in Key West, Lamberts — who runs a nonprofit to make aquatics more equitable — said he brought back fish from the Henrietta Marie site, which he imagines would have absorbed the DNA of the ancestors. The group ate that fish for dinner the night after the dives — like a sacrament.
“I don’t practice a faith, but isn’t this what people are doing every Sunday at church?” he asked. “I wasn’t just bonded with this site through the experience of being there, but at this molecular level with a full circle moment of connection with myself and my history.”
Bharath writes for the Associated Press.
