How Clifton’s grave of slaves was finally found
Holy grail of maritime archaeology discovered in dusty pile of papers
THERE were a few raised eyebrows in the Cape Archives library when Jaco Boshoff looked up from his book and said: “What the f***!”
Boshoff had just discovered one of South Africa’s oldest shipwrecks — without even getting his toes wet.
“The archives is a quiet place, but I couldn’t help it,” Boshoff said this week. “I had just started reading this document, and I knew this was it — this was the thing we were looking for.”
Boshoff had found the captain’s log of a stricken slave ship, missing for more than 200 years — a “eureka” moment after years of searching.
Faded, grubby, buried deep inside an inconspicuous batch of documents, it was the holy grail of maritime archaeology.
It described the exact location of the São José-Paquete de Africa and what befell it on a stormy day in 1794 when it became jammed between two reefs “below Lion’s Head”.
More than 200 Mozambican slaves, many probably still in shackles, died in the shipwreck, their remains condemned to the seabed.
The log completed a remarkable picture: one of the most significant wrecks in Southern African history was lying just 100m off Clifton beach — within swimming distance of the tourist beach towels. It had been right under Boshoff’s archaeologist nose all this time, just as he had suspected.
“We had started looking in Camps Bay because that’s where some documents said the wreck was,” Boshoff said. “All we found were a lot of pipelines.”
But Boshoff believed the São José lay elsewhere, possibly at nearby Clifton, where local ICY TOMB: Divers work at the site of the São José slave shipwreck just 100m off Clifton beach in Cape Town divers had long been plundering a wreck thought to be the Dutch ship Schuylenburg.
“I had a hunch,” said Boshoff, who in 2010 started the Slave Wrecks Project with US anthropologist Stephen Lubkemann.
With the help of local dive groups, Boshoff and Lubkemann started investigating the Clifton site, which was in a tricky surf zone.
Copper nails, shackles, iron ballast, four cannons and — confirmed just two weeks ago — a big block of Mozambican hard wood confirmed archival evidence collected in Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique and Cape Town that the clumps of barnacle-coated “treasure” were the remains of the São José-Paquete de Africa, and not the Schuylenburg.
But for Boshoff the clincher was the captain’s log, which gave a blow-by-blow account of the sinking.
“It specified exactly what happened,” said Boshoff, who had trawled the archives for months before finding the document in early 2011 in a repository of Dutch East India files.
“It showed how they threw out the first anchor, how the rope dragged, how they sent a boat out — those kinds of details. It was awesome.”
The account helped Boshoff and his team in their search for other vital clues, which in turn attracted international attention.
The Slave Wrecks Project quickly grew into a multidisciplinary project spanning four countries and funded by several institutions, including South Africa’s Iziko Museums and the prestigious Smithsonian Museum in the US.
A Brazilian anthropologist tracked down Mozambican slave descendants living on the edge of the Amazon; a Mozambican historian analysed slave customs payments detailing slave cargo movements to the Americas.
Gradually the full, grim picture emerged: much of the Mozambican interior had been depopulated by slave traders who moved their cargo across a treacherous ocean to the New World. Thousands drowned along the way.
In the case of the São José, the slaves who survived the shipwreck were sold to the highest bidder in Cape Town.
“The story of slaves from Africa in the Cape has been underplayed,” said Paul Tichmann, curator of the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town.
“If you explore the songs and riddles of farm workers in the Cape, you could trace the heritage of so-called ‘Masbikers’ — believed to be people descended from Mozambican slaves.”
The project culminated this week in a report-back in Cape Town featuring several academic luminaries from South Africa, the US, Brazil and Mozambique. The group held a workshop to discuss their findings, and attended a solemn ceremony on Clifton beach to commemorate the drowned men and women.
Artefacts found to date will travel to the US to form part of a slave exhibition at a new museum. Meanwhile, the underwater search continues, at Clifton and beyond, with the team expected to shift focus to Mozambique’s wreck-encrusted coastline.
They will also investigate three other South African slave shipwrecks, two near Struisbaai and another in Table Bay.
“There is a global selective amnesia about slavery,” said Lubkemann. “The modern world was built around slavery and this is part of your story, whether you are black or white, American or African.”
There is a global selective amnesia about slavery. The modern world was built around slavery