In 1852, Nathaniel Gordon sailed the Camargo to Brazil, illegally sold 500 enslaved Africans, and burned and sank the ship. Now divers think they’ve found it.
ANGRA DOS REIS, Brazil — Gilson Rambelli motored out into the dark waters, thinking of the crime that had haunted him for years. The evidence of it was down there, in the bay’s depths. That was where the researcher believed he’d find the Camargo, the long-lost slave ship of Nathaniel Gordon, the only person ever executed in the United States for the crime of trafficking enslaved Africans.
In the first half of the 19th century, after much of the world had banned the transatlantic slave trade but before the end of slavery, a highly lucrative contraband trade continued to supply Brazil with enslaved Africans. Some of its most important players, according to historians and a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of records, were American merchants and sailors.
Hunting in December for one of the most notorious of those vessels, Rambelli and colleague Luís Felipe Santos pulled on their wet suits. This expedition, The men fastened on their oxygen tanks. They pulled down their goggles. Jumping overboard, they vanished beneath the water.How U.S. nationals became “leaders in fomenting the illicit slave trade” and “permanently transformed Brazil for all time,”The first was a diplomatic dispute. In the early 1800s, Great Britain led an international campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade.
An early test of that commitment came in late 1852, when the Camargo neared the Rio de Janeiro coastline. With authorities in pursuit, Gordon dropped anchor at the mouth of the Bracuí River. His human cargo was brought ashore to the farm of Santa Rita do Bracuí.“He escaped in woman’s clothes,” a U.S. diplomat at the time reported, “hastily put on in the cabin.”
After the ship burned, Brazilian police launched an operation to rescue the Africans sold by Gordon and searched the region’s coffee plantations. The action was seen as a direct challenge to Brazil’s powerful slaveholding elite and helped establish a new precedent in a country that had allowed enslavers to do as they pleased.
“They were brought into the mountains beyond and put to work up there,” said Flavia da Silva Adriana, who’d heard the tale from her grandmother. “But first, they were brought here.”
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