A woman's pursuit of history reveals the story of Africans rescued from slavery only to die in Key West waiting to be carried home.
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published December 26, 2003
KEY WEST - It started with blank spaces on a calendar. Twelve years later, it ended with the location of a handful of graves beneath a public beach.
In between was a detective story, a search that changed a woman's life as she spent thousands tracking the story of Africans buried 140 years ago and largely forgotten.
Their wretched odyssey ended in bitter irony: Captured and about to be forced into slavery, they had been freed, only to die while waiting to be carried back to Africa.
The woman who led to the discovery of their graves is Gail Swanson, 54, who says she had "absolutely no training in history."
Swanson, who moved to Marathon from New Orleans in 1980, worked at various jobs, including Home Depot cashier. But she considered herself "a naturalist - I would crawl through the woods, do shore studies, go tromping."
"I wanted to write a little book about the Key deer, the waterspouts, stuff like that, but I had never written anything except business letters. So I decided to knock out this nature calendar I had in mind: what plants bloomed when, the bird migrations, fish migrations. That started my first library research."
It was 1990. She hoped to fill each space in the calendar with a fact.
During her research, Swanson found Robert Marx' book Shipwrecks in Florida Waters and got sidetracked. She abandoned Key deer and blooming plants and focused on shipwrecks, Spain's history in the Keys, and the rumor that hundreds of Africans were buried on the beach of what many people presume to be the real Margaritaville.
From the University of Miami library to the Library of Congress, from America's National Archives to England's Public Records Office, she followed a paper trail that substantiated the African cemetery tale in woeful detail.
The paper trail
At first, she thought the 250 years of Spain's exploration and settlement in Florida would fill in the calendar, but then she turned toward the British Navy's many adventures. The slave trade held no interest.
But the Spanish, the British and slavery were soon to converge for her.
Swanson's early research led her to the Public Records Office, a massive repository of historic documents in London.
She contacted that agency and hired a researcher to get documentation on various British warships that had wrecked off Key Largo. One was the HMS Nimble. The researcher mailed Swanson photocopies of the log book "but I could hardly read it: There had been some sort of sea fight going on and they had scribbled in the log about this battle with a Spanish slave ship."
Swanson followed the trail to a library in New Orleans, where she found another book that referred to the HMS Nimble. That book listed documentation in England's Foreign Office, so Swanson sent her researcher there. Because the office had too many papers to copy, the researcher sat down and read them out loud into a tape recorder.
Swanson learned that the Nimble had chased the Spanish slaver Guerrero until it ran aground on a reef off Key Largo, with 561 slaves in the hold.
What had happened to them?
"I realized these people are absolutely forgotten. That stirred my interest."
Recorded but forgotten
Key West in 1860 was one of the largest towns in Florida, with a population of 2,832. That included a few former slaves. Owning slaves was legal in the United States, though it was not practiced in this prosperous shipping community.
While slavery itself was legal, trafficking in slaves had been against federal law since 1808. To try to halt the trade in humans, the U.S. Navy had patrolled the coast of Africa since 1839.
Swanson broadened her research beyond the British and went to the National Archives in Washington. There she found documents recounting that in 1859, four steam-powered Navy ships began patrolling off Cuba, which was importing tens of thousands of slaves to work in sugar cane fields.
That was the destination, Swanson learned, for three slave ships that separately left Africa in the early spring of 1860.
In late April, the USS Mohawk intercepted the slaver Wildfire, carrying 507 Africans, Swanson learned. Ship's records showed another 101 had died on the dreaded Middle Passage, the route between Africa and the New World slave buyers.
On April 30, the Mohawk escorted the Wildfire into Key West harbor. Swanson found naval documents relating that the Mohawk's commanding officer, Lt. Augustus Craven, informed the town's startled chief official, U.S. Marshal Fernando J. Moreno, that the Africans would be off-loaded there.
Moreno was instructed to see to their care until the federal government could arrange for their passage back to Africa.
Moreno had to spend his own money to care for the Africans, but he was a meticulous record-keeper and left many documents to his descendants, some of whom still live in Key West.
He also wrote of his work to the secretary of the interior. Swanson found these letters in Washington, as well as newspaper reports of the situation in Key West.
Swanson could not always take the time to analyze what she was researching as she came across it.
"I don't have a sugar daddy or any government grants. When I was in Washington there was a hotel bill running," said Swanson, who estimates she spent $3,000 to $4,000 tracking down the cemetery. "I would just slam the photocopies in my suitcase and fly home."
But her research would paint a picture of what was happening that spring:
Moreno organized work crews and found seamstresses - many of the Africans had no clothes. He had living quarters constructed, called barracoons, a corruption of the Spanish word for hut. He had food and drinking water brought through the thick woods that separated the Africans' area on the beach from the town.
Then, on May 13, the USS Wyandotte sailed into the harbor, accompanying the slaver William. Aboard it were 513 Africans; records showed that 118 others had died on the crossing, and six more were murdered by the William's crew lest they reveal the ship's true business as the Wyandotte approached.
Moreno had more of the town's carpenters put to work building more barracoons and a small hospital. The cruel nature of confinement during the crossing left uncounted numbers of the Africans suffering from dysentery, lung problems and other severe illnesses.
Moreno ordered that more shirts and dresses be made, more beef be bought and cooked, more medical services supplied.
On May 26, the USS Crusader sailed in with the Bogota. Another 420 Africans were brought ashore.
In less than four weeks, Key West's population had increased 50 percent. None of the newcomers could speak English, and because they had been seized in different regions of Africa, they probably could not converse well with one another.
Death on the beach
The federal government had contracted with the American Colonization Society to hire ships to take the Africans home.
In this case, "home" meant Liberia, founded on the west coast of Africa by former slaves with the help of the U.S. government. None of the recently freed Africans had come from Liberia, but that was of little concern on this side of the Atlantic.
The ships chartered for that journey did not load until 80 days after the arrival in Key West of the first captured slaver.
Eighty days in the summer heat of the Keys, eating strange food, with only the Atlantic's saltwater to wash themselves. With all this stress and the illnesses that so many suffered during the Middle Passage, it wasn't surprising that the Africans began to die.
Swanson's research found Moreno's records noting that 294 of the Africans died before the survivors sailed for "home."
Key West had a couple of dozen carpenters in 1860, men who usually worked repairing or building ships. But they knew how to make coffins, too.
Moreno hired Daniel Davis to make them as needed for the Africans, and then to bury them. Davis was to be paid $5.50 per body. He would become relatively wealthy that summer, collecting $1,617.
In 1992, two years after she began her work on the nature calendar, Swanson found Moreno's statement noting the payment total to Davis. She was going through uncataloged items donated by a woman who had done research on Keys lighthouses and came across a photocopy of Moreno's document, provided by one his living relatives.
That slip of paper assured her a graveyard for Africans had been dug in the summer of 1860. But where?
The final clue
In 1994, another historian sent Swanson a copy of an 1861 surveyor's map of Key West.
"All of a sudden, I had it," recalled Swanson. "I knew where they were buried."
Visitors to the Mel Fisher Museum in Key West can see a full-sized copy of that map, part of its exhibit on the slave trade and sunken ships. The map has a grid of streets with names that are still on city signposts. On the map, along a piece of beach on the southeast edge of the island, are nine X's and the words "African Cemetery."
But the creation of the map had also brought about the loss of the graveyard. A U.S. Army surveyor drew the map so that Key West could be reinforced for Union ships as the nation entered the Civil War. Two brick fortifications known as martellos were to be constructed on the shore, using that map to guide the engineers.
Against the recommendation of an Army captain, the West Martello was built atop the African cemetery.
Swanson found a 1912 history that devoted two pages to the existence of a cemetery and the "disturbance of remains due to public works" construction. She presumes that at least some of the graves were moved during the Martello construction.
Two elderly Key West natives had recently added a piece to the puzzle when they separately told the same story: In the 1940s, construction of a road and sewer system supposedly uncovered a large number of human bones, just a couple of blocks from the Martello and beach area.
"In 1997," Swanson recalls, "I had most of the story, and I wrote a letter to the editor of the Key West Citizen, suggesting that instead of naming a local street for Dr. Martin Luther King - we've got hundreds of those - the city should honor those Africans by marking their cemetery."
Swanson was later interviewed by the Miami Herald, which published an article on the cemetery during Black History Month in 1998.
"Nothing happened, absolutely nothing," said Swanson. "Key West ignored these people in life and death."
Underground images
But someone was paying attention. Corey Malcolm is director of archaeology of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society and its tourist attraction, the Maritime Museum. Malcolm spends most of his time tracking down the long-vanished.
The Maritime Museum had for a number of years been displaying items recovered from the wreck of an empty slave ship, the Henrietta Marie.
He invited Swanson to speak at a maritime historians conference in 2000. After her speech about the existence of the undiscovered cemetery was reported in the Key West Citizen, Malcolm helped found the Key West Africans Memorial Committee that November.
Swanson meanwhile had contacted the state Historical Preservation Office. The deputy secretary there replied that before any official marker could be erected or the cemetery could be considered for the National Register of Historic Places, it had to be accurately located, perhaps by using ground-penetrating radar, successful in locating other lost graveyards.
The cost of the radar survey was estimated at $15,000 to $16,000, the official wrote, and matching funds from the state might be available if Swanson could get local agencies to pay some of the costs.
Swanson sent the letter to Malcolm.
In mid June 2002, he asked anthropology professor Lawrence Conyers to fly in from the University of Denver with his radar equipment. He and Malcolm studied the 1861 map, overlaid with an 1865 map showing the Martello, and a current map of Key West. Then Conyers and an assistant marked off the likely graveyard.
Down through this ground, Conyers began transmitting pulses of energy capable of identifying objects with different densities, chemical compositions, sediment structure or moisture content. The soil was mainly limestone or sand, quite conducive to the energy reflections.
Malcolm and Conyers found what they think are 9 to 16 graves, closely spaced, in an area of roughly 640 square feet. The adjacent sidewalk prevented an accurate reading there. Malcolm believes other graves were washed away by wave erosion over the years.
A simple marker
In September 2002, Monroe County erected a fence around this part of the beach. The Memorial Committee had two local men offer prayers over the site. One was William McKinzie, a minister who recalled the excavations of the 1940s.
The other was Adegbolu Adefunmi, a prince in the Yoruba culture of West Africa.
Thus, America's only graveyard for Africans was sanctified by ministers from their first world and their last one.
What makes this place unique in America is that all the people buried here were neither slaves nor freed slaves but rather Africans rescued from being made slaves.
In New Haven, Conn., the city cemetery includes the bodies of six Africans who took part in the mutiny aboard the infamous slaver Amistad in 1839. They had died while standing trial in New Haven for the murder of two ship's officers. All of the Africans aboard the Amistad were acquitted and the survivors returned to Africa.
The Key West Memorial Committee would like to hold a competition for the design of a tangible memorial at the cemetery, perhaps a garden.
Meanwhile, the 143-year-old cemetery has only a marker from the state. Otherwise, as Gail Swanson says sadly, it is only a "chain-link fence held up by rebar. I'm so disappointed."
