Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Shipwrecked: Diving with a Purpose with Dr. Sean Kinglsey

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon welcomes Marine Archeologist Dr. Sean Kinglsey. Learn about how marine archeology is carried out, what the divers look for when they dive and explore shipwrecks, and how the information is pieced together to fill in gaps of the history of human migration--specifically, the transatlantic slave trade, in which 12.5 million Africans were transported around the world against their will. Dr. Kingsley's latest book is Enslaved: The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Sean Kingsley Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome. Today I'm speaking with marine archaeologist Sean Kingsley, and we are talking about a new book that he was a part of, perhaps you recognize the accompanying TV show that had Samuel L. Jackson attached to it, called Enslaved. And this conversation is all about the incredibly fascinating field of diving on sunken slave ships and what that can tell us about the past. So let's literally dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I could not wait to get here this morning to record this podcast episode because this topic is so unbelievably fascinating. Thank you so much for being here today, Sean.

Oh, Sharon, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show. Mm. When I saw just like the cover of your new book, Enslaved, The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, all the little receptors in my brain were like, well, we need to read that. And I did, and it was absolutely fascinating because it had never really even, this concept of underwater archaeology, of things like exploring sunken slave ships had never even entered my mind as like something that anybody was doing or that we should do. So first of all, absolutely fascinating. Secondly, how did you get involved in doing this? Well, yes, we are a rare breed. There aren't too many of us marine archaeologists. Well, it goes back to childhood, really. I had a lovely

childhood. My parents were always dragging me to cultural things and to castles. And as a teenager, I can actually remember, I was pretty good at judo. And I was sort of second in the Southern England Championships. And I got into a final of a competition. And in between, we went up, my father took me up to an Iron Age hill fort. and on the top of this blustery hill fort i found a bit of iron sticking out of a hill and i thought that has to be excalibur sword right long story short i missed the final because i was busy trying to dig up excalibur sword so you know i was into history and a hopeless romantic as uh as a youngster and then a little bit later still as a teenager i I went out to Israel. And I wasn't really sure about it. Prayer and God, not really my favorite subjects.

But while I was there, I went to an ancient site and I saw pottery and marble columns and mosaics sticking out of a hill and the penny dropped. It was a real eureka moment for me. I realized that this is the face of the past and I wanted to make it my career. So from there, I went to underwater, helping a local museum. And the guy who ran that museum, a Dutchman called Kurt Rave, he said, yeah, we go dive and we go and dig tombs. And the Indiana Jones in me was really hooked. Yeah. Oh, I can see how it would be very, very exciting. But did you ever think to yourself, so you're fascinated by history, you become fascinated by artifacts that you see in both England and other countries. When did your fascination with diving enter the picture?

Was it that experience with the museum? Because you now have a YouTube channel about shipwrecks. You are a marine archaeologist. about shipwrecks. You are a marine archaeologist. And again, you have this book and you have an entire magazine, an entire periodical dedicated to this. Was that the genesis of diving for you? I knew that I loved the archaeology and I knew that I loved the past. I also knew that I was scared of the water. So I was the kid in the swimming pool. I was the kid even in the swimming pool who was sure the shark was going to eat my feet. And then I realized I had no choice because the sea is even in my name, S-E-A-N.

And yes, it was when I was out in Israel and I was working for a museum on opposite the Carmel Mountains, one of King Solomon's ancient ports. And I was there after my first degree, and there was an enormous storm, and it just blew. These thousands of seahorses blew the seabed, and there was wreck after wreck after wreck. There were 12 wrecks lying all in a row, like in a car park. And I figured I have to get off this.

I have to confront any fear, which is ridiculous, and get down there if you want to get to this. I have to confront any fear, which is ridiculous, and get down there if you want to get to it. There is this sense, as I was reading your book, you were describing some of the dives that groups have been on and the incredible sea conditions that they have to endure, where there's zero visibility and very strong currents and all kinds of dangers and perils to their own lives. So it seems like this type of archaeology also requires a tremendous amount of courage on the part of the people who are actually doing the exploration. I think that's true. But if it was a single person, you'd be a lot more worried. But

especially more for underwater work it's generally very much teamwork and the deeper you go the bigger and more professional the team has to be so how i ended up on the enslaved story was through simple jacob avicius the real visionary behind this project he was the director and initiator of the tv series with samuel l jackson and it so happened that i've been working with an American team called Odyssey Marine Exploration in the English Channel. And while you look for one specific wreck, the glory of that is you find dozens,

and in this case, 300 other shipwrecks. And one of them was a wreck which, at the entrance to the English Channel to the west, which was in 110 meters. Now, you can dive there, but it's incredibly dangerous and you can't when you work there. So we used a robot. And the robot could work in the harshest environment 24-7.

And yeah, for that, you need a big team. And the joy of that is you're not diving. You're sitting there as a middle-aged person drinking your coffee, looking at all these screens and recording and trying to make sense of it. Who do these kinds of wrecks that you uncover, who do they belong to? And what kind of rules govern exploring them and potentially recovering artifacts from them? Well, that is a book on its own right there. It's a very important question and increasingly now today. We're actually at a tipping point right now in what I call the battle

for the deep. And the technology which started really in 1985 with the discovery of the Titanic over 3,000 meters deep, it's now so complex we can go virtually anywhere down to 8,000 meters. And before that, it wasn't a problem. It wasn't an ethical problem. It wasn't a legal problem because we could not get there. But the answer is, effectively, if it's a merchant vessel, and if that merchant vessel from any nation went down within 12 nautical miles within a nation's territorial waters, it belongs to that nation. it belongs to that nation. But if it went down outside 12 logical minds, well, that's where you get into that wonderful world of romance, treasure, and finders keepers. And that's why since the fifth century BC, there's been such a well-organized salvage industry who are willing to put life and

limb to go out there to return these goods to the stream of commerce. Now, all that changes, of course, if you're a warship. And if you're a warship of any age anywhere, it still belongs to the flagged nation, not through ancient or early modern terminology, through a modern one. So there's a modern rule, the Sovereign Immunities Act, which says that any spaceship, aeroplane, naval warship, and someone tacked in historical wooden ship anywhere in the world still belongs to the original state. The idea being that if an American warship went down in the China Sea, people adjoining that country couldn't interfere with any human remains or down nukes, for example. And it's bilateral and it works very well for everyone. The interesting

bit in that, of course, is that I'm not aware of any historical warships from the 18th, 17th century that have any black boxes on it or state secrets. So there's still an element of make it up as you go along in underwater archaeology. we say, they're being tied up by local laws and by something called the UNESCO Convention on Protection of the Underwater Heritage, which has basically got rid of treasure hunting, which depending on where you come from and who you speak to is a good or a bad thing. So there is a balancing act to be done with the past. I really enjoyed how your book alternates between discussing the history of the transatlantic slave trade and between people today who are sort of hunting for these underwater artifacts, particularly related to slave ships that were sunk and what can be garnered from looking

at these wrecks, from obtaining artifacts from these wrecks. And I really thought this phrase was especially poignant. You said, the transatlantic slave trade is not some irrelevant story that happened centuries ago of no consequence to our sophisticated 21st century ways. And I wonder in what ways do you think that the transatlantic slave trade is of consequence to us today? That's a complex question. When you talk about the transatlantic slave trade, the adjectives don't work. Oh, it's horrific. It's appalling. it's violent. What does that mean? It goes beyond that. We're talking about 12.5 million Africans trafficked across the Middle Passage from

West Africa to the sugar and coffee plantations in the Americas. And 13% of that, 1.7 million people died on the way. What does that look like? Those statistics don't make any sense to me. They're just an amorphous mass. And that's why I thought that this was such an important book to write. The hatches of the sunken past have been locked for too long. And the shipwrecks have this power. What we found with the divers in Costa Rica, for instance, there's an indigenous people called the Bribri. And the Bribri were always told you're of Mayan extraction. That's what your ancestry is. And they look in the mirror and they say, well, I don't think so. I look African. How can that be? And they've researched

down that a couple of Danish ships carrying something like 600 slaves actually went down in their waters in 1710. And they went diving there and found out that actually those slaves had been freed enslaved people they were not yet slaved those enslaved people have been freed and they went into the jungle and they were adopted by the bribery tide and that's how where their ancestry came from but by diving on these shipwrecks and being able to touch the artifacts and to really connect with the past, they had an emotional reaction. They have a visual reaction and they start asking the right questions. And for me, I think that's incredibly powerful and important in our own small way as

marine archaeologists to kind of throw that stone into the water and create ripples and to try and turn on the next generation to the power of the past. How do you find slave ships that have gone down to even dive on? If we're talking about over a million people having perished in shipwrecks or from illness or a variety of causes in the Middle Passage itself, how do we even locate what it is that we want to study? Yep. That's the state of the art really, isn't it? And the answer is generally you don't. There are 3 million shipwrecks in the world's oceans. 1,020 slaver ships were lost in the world's oceans. And I would say we found less than 10 of them which makes them rarer to find than pirate ships so in the case of the english channel the odyssey team tripped over it they were using side

scan sonar which is basically bouncing sound waves off the seabed and they will reflect over anything which is elevated above the seabed and then you send down the robot to have a look and that's how they found that in other cases such as the loisden of surinam which was carrying 700 enslaved people from ghana that is an historically very important shipwreck because it saw the largest mass murder of african people during the whole trajectory of the slave trade. And it took the wrong turn, the ship, the Loisden, and sank within sight of shore. Now, the cargo and the ship were insured, and the captain and crew were concerned if they let these 700 enslaved people out, they could riot or they could sink the crew. So they bolted the hatches, and they sat on them until the ship

went down further enough so that they all drowned. So it was conscious murder, but they still managed to salvage the 23 kilograms of gold and give it back to the Dutch authorities and get their salvage award. So historically, a Dutch team, they knew that ship went down there and they knew it was of the utmost importance to the world and to the consciousness of Holland, which has generally not had a great relationship with confronting its enslaving past. So they've been throwing all kinds of technology out there, including magnetometers. So if you've got something which is hidden under the mud, you can't really use side scan sonar because it's not going to pick up on it. So if you assume that a ship had a cannon on it or had iron fittings or the shackles, all these

enslaved peoples were shackled or manila bracelets, you would expect them to be picked up in the magnetic signature. And so they've been looking at lots and lots of magnetic signatures, but unfortunately that ship is still stuck in the mud and it's still to be found and to bear witness to that horrific story. What are the biggest obstacles to finding these things? Is it just the depth? Is it lack of record keeping? Like not knowing where these things went down? What are the biggest obstacles you face? All kinds from environment to cost to sponsorship to perception. You can imagine that the largest tranche of money that's ever gone into looking for shipwrecks is for Spanish galleons because that's got shiny stuff

on it and that can yield returns. Then you have warships, which are historically important and governments want to find them. There really are very few bodies of people out there who are actively going around the world and hoovering up the seabed looking for slave ships. There is a team out in the Smithsonian that are trying to do that, and they've been working on wrecks off of South Africa. The dive group that we work with, Diving with a Purpose, they're not actively looking for slave ships, but they're raising consciousness and they're actually able to represent as well, being black divers as well, looking for these materials. So it's a really good question. And certainly, absolutely more work needs to be done.

There's this incredible database which actually lists every ship that was involved in all aspects of the slave trade. You can go through those and you can look nationally where there might be wrecks. And really that's a case for a local government. Unfortunately, we're at a point here that you can imagine you can't really manage underwater cultural heritage if you don't know what's there. But most countries don't have master historical logs of what they've got in their waters, But most countries don't have master historical logs of what they've got in their waters, which makes it quite difficult to do. But you kind of put your finger on it.

Sharon, we're still just very young as a discipline. Scuba was only invented in 1948, took about to the 50s, 60s for Jacques Cousteau to start developing underwater vacuum cleaners to suck up and show us how to dig. The kind of robots which are allowing us to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before have really only come in to the 1990s. So have patience with us. We'll get to the, we'll find more in the future, I hope. What does one do when you discover a shipwreck of historical significance of this nature and you're able to dive on it, perhaps you're able to recover something, artifacts from it, what happens to them?

Again, that's a good question, but it depends on who's given you a license to go and dive that site. So if it's in the English Channel, outside territorial waters, and you land that material in England, then you declare it for what's called the Receiver of Wreck. And the Receiver of Wreck is an ancient institution that goes back beyond the 16th century into the medieval period. Now, if the state thinks that that's such historical importance, then it can put a block on any export license and try and keep it for a national museum. And it's an interesting question and also brings us onto the case of restorative payments in the modern era for what's going on. Harvard has put a $100 million pay chest on the side to try and right some of the wrongs of the college of what happened previously within its doors with the slave trade. Glasgow University in the UK has put 20 million on the side. And I think it's really good if that can go into education and giving scholarships. And there's all various things

to be done with those kind of treasure chests, shall we say. But actually, what I would like to see, there is an awful lot of material that's out there. And there's a lot of great media and imagery. I would like to see some of those universities, the church, banking institutions who may feel that they're culpable. And I'm not saying they're culpable. But why not put your hand in your pocket and let's have a museum, international museum of the transatlantic slave trade on every continent as a legacy for future kids to learn about. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio!

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on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Let's say you dive on a wreck and you come up with things like elephant tusks, copper bracelets, things that you know were involved in the transatlantic slave trade, things that are, you know, important artifacts. And you also mentioned in the book about how in some cases there are actual human remains of some kind. What would happen to those kinds of things? Are those left down there undisturbed? Are those excavated? I mean, it sounds like because it's such a new field, that there is perhaps not a, maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong here, perhaps not a protocol of like, here's what we do if we discover human remains on a ship. Well, yeah, there is. And that will depend on a national body. I mean, I'm not aware of any human remains that are found on any slave or shipwreck.

I think if they did discover the loyston of Suriname, that Dutch slave, yeah, there's a really good chance of finding human remains because of the muddy environment. And the mud is very good for preserving organics. Then they've got an ethical debate. Do you recover those human remains? Or do you let the ancestors sleep? or do the ancestors want to sleep there should they be repatriated to their country of origin ghana the gold coast should they be repatriated there these are really difficult decisions and that would become a political hot potato between a suriname government and a ghana government, you wouldn't be allowed just to, once you found the lawyers, then you couldn't just dive in and go, here we go, let's start sucking sand.

You would have to write a project design about what you want to do, how you want to do it, why you want to do it, how it's being sponsored and paid for, how you're going to conserve the material. And these days also you're required to give a sense of what will happen with the material, what will be the repository, who's your partner museum. And one of the things that I read with interest in the book too was about how Portugal was involved in trafficking roughly half of the enslaved Africans that were brought to the quote unquote new world, brought to the Americas, brought to the Caribbean. Is there any sense from any of the countries who were involved in the slave trade from Portugal or from any of the other European countries, is there any sense in the sort of archaeology community that they should do something about this issue, that they should pay to have these things recovered, that there is a responsibility on the part of the government to engage in any kind of exploration for history purposes or for science

purposes. What is that kind of climate like? That's a really good and tough question, Sharon. And it sort of goes back to one of your earlier questions about why we do what we do. I call what you've just discussed, I put it under the category of collective amnesia. And it is interesting because as much as there is trying to make sense of who these ancestors were, who these Edward Colstons were, who were working for the Royal African Company and doing these despicable things, As much as there is that readjustment, which has to be done, practically what is actually happening underwater is a zero, quite frankly. There is a great interest in wrecks and slaver wrecks. National Geographic, for instance,

did a special with Tara Roberts, going around and trying to look at all these wrecks. But that's all reactive. These things have been found. Most of them have been found by chance. There's very little proactive going on. We are breaking a story in the next two weeks on this very subject, which is going to be quite hot. But Portugal is involved in that. Portugal is a very interesting case because the Vatican, America, England, France, even including Ghana and a lot of African countries, they have apologized for their role in

the transatlantic slave trade. Spain and Portugal have not apologized for their part in the transatlantic slave trade. And as said they you know they did some very serious heavy lifting amongst them and time kind of makes you want to scratch your head a little bit because if you go to these countries full of wonderful people and culture um they're full of statues of explorers and conquistadors but you know we cover it in the book and also in simple jakovic's film lagos in Portugal, that is ground zero, the birth of the transatlantic slave trade in 1420. And it's where Henry the Navigator brought in all these slaves to work in the plantations. And that put a seed of an idea in people's minds,

which grew and grew and mushroomed. Well, a few years ago, when the archaeologists were called in because developers were making a new car park, they found 158 skeletons. They did DNA, and based on the finds that they were locating around those skeletons, it turned out that these were West African people who had just arrived on the ship and through illness or disease died soon after and they were not buried because they were heathens and non-christians they weren't buried within the city limits they were thrown basically in a dump with the lepers outside the city and rather than putting a monument there or trying to create some kind of archaeological museum or spectacle around it to bear witness. What did the Portuguese do? They literally built a mini golf course on top of it. And you would like to think in the modern day that that sort

of thing wouldn't be done. And the Portuguese and the Spanish sort of attitude as well, we weren't the only one who did it. And people were doing slave trading down to biblical times. So yeah, there's definitely a problem. And as a selfish marine archaeologist, yeah, I'd like to see governments stumping up more money to proactively go and illuminate this issue. So interesting. One of the things I'm also curious about

as a lover of the ocean and of marine life, I am always very curious about what is it actually like as a diver? See, here's the thing. It could never be me because I get motion sickness from snorkeling in mouth. Oh, really? Okay. So I'm very curious. What is it like when you are diving on a shipwreck? So much of our sort of the paradigm we have about things like scuba diving is like, and then you can see the incredible coral and you can visit the angelfish and you can see the sea turtles. People do it as

a hobby. They do it recreationally. They do it for fun. But when you are talking about marine archaeology, it can't just be that. It can't just be like, well, look, there it is. That was fun. What is it actually like to dive on a wreck? If you're just going on a recreational dive and you're going down there and it's 45 minutes and then you're going to have coffee and chocolate, yay, all good. It's wonderful. If it's a career and profession, you can have years of preparation to go into a project. The discovery of the endurance of Ernest Shackleton up in Antarctica, 10 years, 10 years of preparation into that. And it doesn't matter whether it's 2000 meters deep or two meters

deep. So much can go wrong from equipment to environment that you're out of control. So I think, you know, it's interesting. I went from being that hopeless romantic kid to becoming a hyper-realist. And I think, you know, part of that is managing expectations about what you can do on shipwrecks. I mean, I remember being out in Israel and we'd found a 6th century AD early Christian Byzantine shipwreck with Holy Land wine on it. What's better for promoting and selling wine than something that was grown on soils where jesus and the apostles walked you know it was a perfect unique selling point and it had these wine jars on it and we'd expose the ship right we got a license from the government and even in three meters of water these shipwrecks where you have the opposite problem because

actually in 20 meters it'd be easier because you've got the waves coming in you're in the breaker zone so you've got you're nauseous all the time. And then you know that a storm is coming in and you've just exposed all the hull. So you literally have half a day to record the wood. You know, you can have motorboats coming overhead. So, you know, it is a thing of beauty. Generally, if you're doing survey work, you're just diving on a wreck rather than doing a project, which is time sensitive with money issues. It really is a thing of beauty. And, you know, there's nothing better in the world.

If you're stressed, you know, I've always had times that, OK, I'm going to have to put on classic FM now and chill out. What I would really love to do is put on some scuba and go down to 30 meters and just not talk to anyone and blow bubbles thank you very much goodbye world but you know even when you're doing robotic work i can remember when we were in the english channel and we were working on a corsair pirate ship french pirate ship and the weather was awful there was literally horizontal plumes probably produced by global warming of this stuff that shouldn't be there and we sat this really expensive multi-million dollar robot on the seabed which was the eyes and the hands of the archaeologists and waited and waited and waited and while we're waiting suddenly on the comms from the captain he says you hear

incoming plane in attack formation so you're bad weather and you got fear factor as well. So, so yeah, expect the unexpected. If you want to have a career in sunken ruins. What kind of training is required? You mentioned a group that you is also in the book, diving with the purpose and how people can get trained to dive on wrecks of historical significance or on sites of historical significance.

What kind of training is required? So it's different. On land, you can sign up for a dig for a day and get that experience and have the t-shirt and walk away. Underwater is a bit of a different situation generally because you're working with such sensitive material. You just have to have your fin at the wrong place on a piece of a different situation generally because you're working with such sensitive material. You just have to have your fin at the wrong place on a piece of wood that's several hundred years old and it's gone. So marine archaeology, really you need to get an MA as a basic standard.

And there are various universities at Southampton, Texas A&M, Haifa University. We can get those sort of qualifications and then if you want to do sort of the academic side and really run projects you have to get those phd letters um after your name but then there's a more sensible approach which we have in the uk which is the adopt a rec if you find a rec your local dive club work with english heritage historic england or with a heritage body and become the custodian of that. And, you know, I've got some colleagues who are very, very hardcore divers in the North Sea, which is the worst conditions you can imagine of Eastern England. And they

weren't professional marine archaeologists, but they found the Gloucester, which was an English warship from 1682, which had James Duke of York, the future king of England on it and his wine bottles and his medicine box and he left that ship in his night tails he left everything behind so the most important wreck over here since what we call the Mary Rose and they went and did a course with a group called the Nautical Archaeology Society which creates a basic standard for learning how to record shipwrecks so there there are different models, but you're not as a recreational diver just going to be able to go out there and start being able to read a shipwreck. What do you wish that people knew?

What do you wish that people knew about diving on things like a slave ship or about marine archaeology in general? Well, planet Earth is 71% water. There is water inside human beings. It consumes, it surrounds us, it defined us. It's been the basis of power and dispatches and creativity and ideas for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I would like, from an educational point of view, that's part of what we do is sort

of spreading the gospels. But there's an awful lot of politics, Sharon, in what we do today. And the reason that I started Wreck Watch magazine was to kind of rewind the clock to the time of Jacques Cousteau and the sunken sea and the beauty of the oceans and the fish, which quite frankly, they're just not there anymore. You know, so many species are being wiped out and we've got overfishing. But I really would like people just to be aware that there is just so much in the oceans. You know, it's said that we know more about the moon than we do about the bottom of the sea.

How can that be? Why are we spending multi-billions to go up to space? And what are we going to do if we find a little green man and shake his hand? Do you think he's going to invite us for a cup of tea and some scones? I'm not really sure. They might not like us. I don't think it's an either or situation when it comes to the ocean or space. I'm being a bit facetious, but I would surely like marine archaeology sits at the very bottom of the ocean food chain. And I'd like that to change. I'd like that to change for many reasons. I think it's fun to dive. I think there's a lot of beauty down there. But I'm kind of

reminded that who are we? Sigmund Freud used to say that to understand the adult, you must examine the child. And I would add to that, if we want to understand who we are today and where we've come from, we have to explore the infancy of humanity. If you think about the great art in the world, the Riachi warriors, all the bronze statues and marbles, the greatest of those have been found in the ocean, for instance, because of what we said at the beginning of the show, the preservation is so good. But again, we're just scratching the surface. There is so much down there, three million wrecks in the world's oceans.

You can expand that from playing around with rotten pieces of wood that inside the bilges of these decayed ships down there, there's ancient microbes. And it is believed that those microbes, the majority are unknown. They're new species and it's believed that they hold the answers to so many medical cures, including, it has suggested, types of cancers. So actually, I think we really have to study and explore that material, the majority of which is just, it's unknown. Right now, there is a group sponsored by Japan, the Nippon Foundation, and their plan is to map the entire world's sea bottoms by the year 2030 with something called multi-beam. And that shows a kind of color-coded bathymetry of the seabeds. But the resolution is

no good for finding shipwrecks. So again, it doesn't help us at all to fill in the holes of those 3 million wrecks. Fascinating. I bet some people listening to this are going to be like, leave the microbes down there. We don't know what they are. Bad things can happen. Especially speaking at the tail end of, you know, a global pandemic. No, no, thank you. No new microbes. I take your point though, of course, that knowing what these are actually, you know, until we know what they are, we can't know if they will be useful to medical science or not. Fascinating. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I absolutely loved learning more about this. I loved reading your book. And I

just can't wait to continue to follow your work and continue to see what new discoveries await us. Well, thank you so much, Sharon. It's been such a pleasure for having us. And as we say in my world, deep down we care. What an emerging field. There's so much to learn. I could not believe that we have only found around 10 sunken slave ships and that there are so many rules about things that have yet to even be developed. You can find Sean Kingsley at his free magazine, Wreck Watch. They have a YouTube channel. And you can check out the book, Enslaved, The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that Sean Kingsley wrote with co-author Simca Iacobovici.

Absolutely fascinating. If you want to learn more about the history of the transatlantic slave trade, or you're interested in marine archaeology, this book is for you. Thanks so much for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.