Spirit Dive: An African American’s Journey to Uncover a Sunken Slave Ship’s Past

When prize-winning journalist and avid scuba diver Michael Cottman participated in an underwater expedition to survey the sunken wreck of a slave ship off the coast of Florida he was overwhelmed by powerful feelings of kinship and oneness with his African ancestors. As he held in his hands the very shackles that had bound hundreds of men women and children in their tortured passage from their African homeland to America Michael Cottman became determined to tell their stories and the story behind the ship that had carried them away from all they knew and loved. Spirit Dive takes readers back three centuries and to three continents in order to trace the complex and moving story of the slaves and the slavers. We travel to England on the trail of the shipbuilders and the captain and his crew; to Goree Island located off the westernmost extension of the African continent near Dakar where the ship almost certainly docked and from which its enslaved passengers would have gotten their last view of their homeland; and to the Caribbean where the Henrietta Marie sank without a trace–until its recent rediscovery gave us a tangible key to one of historys most terrible episodes. Spirit Dive is a powerful and compelling testament of one mans attempt to make sense of the history of his ancestors chronicling his journey while confronting questions with no answers and striving for reconciliation with his homelands past and his own countrys future.