![]() Once the Wanderermade it back to the U.S. “They didn’t want any infection to occur in the rest of the crew or the cargo-the slaves-so, they would dispose of anybody who appeared to be ill, which was pretty savage behavior.” “In those days, if anyone fell ill, they didn’t know what seasickness was,” Newell says. Mark Newell, who studied pottery that was found to be created by survivors of the Wanderer. While they were likely not tortured aboard the ship, as they were regarded as valuable cargo, any slave who fell ill posed a risk to the remainder of the passengers and crew, according to archaeologist Dr. When many of them arrived in the U.S., they suffered from various physical ailments, including intestinal infections and skin diseases, mostly resulting from being on the ship for six weeks, according to a 1908 article published in the American Anthropologist. Not all of the Wanderer’s captives survived more than 70 slaves perished on the journey. “Sometimes, it was entire families.” Historians have said that the Wanderer’s crew opted for the cruel method of “tight packing” slaves on the ship-cramming the captives together in a spoon-like fashion on the planks beneath the ship’s deck. ![]() “Some of them were 7 or 8 years old, many of them separated from families,” Bagwell says. It was reported that many captives were teenage boys and young children. Two southerners-William Corrie, a member of the New York Yacht Club, and Charles Lamar, who hailed from a prominent family in the South- conspired to purchase the ship and stealthily convert it into a vessel intended to smuggle human cargo. Bagwell recently filmed a documentary titled TheWanderer. Bagwell, associate professor of communication at the College of Coastal Georgia, says that he believes most people don’t understand what happened. and the trial, but not much was known about the survivors, who they were, and their experiences,” says Jekyll Island Museum curator Andrea Marroquin. “A lot was known about the ship, its voyage, the conspiracies behind making this illegal trip to import enslaved Africans into the U.S. soil, and the story of its survivors has been largely underreported despite its important mark on American history. The ship was one of the last ever to import slaves onto U.S. When it returned nearly five months later from West Africa to Jekyll Island, Georgia, the prestigious Wanderer carried 487 new passengers on board-each taken against his will to be sold illegally into slave trade, decades after the practice became punishable by death in the United States. ON INDEPENDENCE DAY OF 1858, a luxury racing yacht considered one of the finest vessels of the New York Yacht Club set sail from Charleston, South Carolina, on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.
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