2022-03-12
18 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News today.
I'm Duarte Cedar Aldino.
Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
You know, they say that the Atlantic is one of the most turbulent oceans on the planet.
And some people say that that's because of all of those lost soul that haven't been put to rest.
During the transatlantic slave trade, more than 36,000 ships sailed from Africa to the Americas carrying enslaved people.
About 12.5 million men, women and children were on these ships.
Roughly a thousand of these vessels sank.
The majority of them have never been found.
So there's a whole lot of history that's just out there that hasn't been found yet, that's waiting for more people to discover it on the ocean floor and to bring it back into memory.
That's Tara Roberts.
She recently joined an organization called Diving with a Purpose.
This group trains primarily black Americans to become divers, to swim down to the ocean floor to document what remains of sunken slave ships.
So it feels like part of this work is about acknowledgement, honoring and.
And allowing those holes to rest finally.
Tara is a journalist by trade, but a few years ago, after she learned about Diving with a Purpose, she quit her job, gave up her apartment in Washington, D.C.
and joined the organization's training program.
She is now a National Geographic explorer.
Her article about the efforts by divers to document slave shipwrecks, it was recently the COVID story for Nat Geo.
Nobody will know exactly how many lives were lost, but the estimate is that 1.8 million Africans lost their lives in the Middle Passage.