Slave ship secrets to go on show

Artefacts from the first slave ship salvaged from the seas will go on display in Washington next month as part of a new permanent exhibition on the slave trade.

Fixtures from the Sao Jose, a Portuguese vessel carrying 512 slaves from Mozambique to Brazil when it sank off the coast of Cape Town in 1794, will be exhibited in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens on September 24.

The items will include iron ballast blocks used to weigh the ship down, a wooden pulley from the rigging and a piece of timber from the hull where more than 200 people drowned in chains.

‘‘We want to open up some of those voyages one by one ‘‘ said Paul Gardullo, curator of the new museum. ‘‘They provide a human face for this massive global story.’’

More than 1,000 wrecks from 400 years of slave trading are believed to lie at the bottom of the world’s oceans.

The Smithsonian is also providing funds for archaeologists hunting for vessels off the coast of west Africa.

Stephen Lubkemann, co- director of the Slave Wrecks Project, said: ‘‘There’s probably no maritime history that has been more important in the formation of the modern world than the slave trade’’.

Ibrahima Thiaw, a Senegalese archaeologist, is hoping to locate a collection of slave ship wrecks off the coast.

He hopes to discover two French vessels, the Nanette and the Bonne Amitie, which sank in 1774 and 1790, as well as a British sloop called Racehorse that vanished in November 1780.