Shipwreck may hold key to Turks and Caicos' lineage

A pair of glass-eyed idols led marine archaeologists to the wreck of a Spanish ship that once carried an illegal cargo of African slaves believed to be the ancestors of many of today's inhabitants of the British colony of Turks and Caicos.

The US-funded archaeologists said they are confident the oaken timbers submerged under three metres of water off East Caicos island are the remains of the Spanish slave ship Trouvadore, which sank in the Atlantic archipelago south of the Bahamas in 1841.

"We have compelling circumstantial evidence that this is the Trouvadore," Donald Keith, president of the Ships of Discovery marine archaeology institute, told journalists in a conference call sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Trouvadore carried 93 African captives and was headed to Cuba where they were to be enslaved in the sugar cane fields, historical documents indicated. It went down after hitting a reef and those aboard managed to wade ashore.

The crew shot and killed one African woman but the other 92 survived and were freed in the Turks and Caicos, where Britain had abolished slavery eight years earlier.

The incident was largely forgotten until 1993, when Grethe Seim, the late founder of the Turks and Caicos National Museum, visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington with Keith.

They were surprised to find a letter written by an artifact salesman on Grand Turk Island in 1878, describing the sale of two African wooden idols with glass eyes. His letter said the dolls came from a Spanish slave ship that sank in 1841, and gave details about the shipwreck and the African passengers.

Researchers scoured historical archives in Britain, Cuba, the Bahamas and elsewhere to piece together the story.

"It really is a mystery. It's a detective story," said Toni Carral, vice president of Ships of Discovery.

When the Trouvadore sank, the importation of slaves had been internationally banned but still flourished via pirate ships and illegal slavers that eluded British and US naval forces in the region. The ship's 20 crewmen were arrested and sent in chains to Cuba for trial on what was a hanging offence, though their fate is not known.

About 20 of the African passengers were resettled in Nassau in the Bahamas. The rest were apprenticed to work in the salt ponds in the Turks and Caicos for a year in order to pay for their rescue, and then freed.

The artifact salesman noted in his letter nearly four decades after the shipwreck that "their descendants form... the pith of our present labouring population."