Slave Ship Wrecks
On the way down I saw nothing. The water was a blur of teal fringed with rusty shadows, darkening, about twenty feet below, to a sickly emerald. I followed a rope strung between a buoy and a stake in the seabed, pausing occasionally to pinch my nose and adjust my sinuses to the pressure. Just beyond the thermocline, where the temperature abruptly drops, a hand emerged from the murk and grabbed me by the wrist, dragging me the last few inches to the bottom. The silt was as soft as tapioca pudding. It swallowed my hand, then my arm and shoulder; the deeper I pushed, the more I suspected that it might go on forever. Finally, I touched wood, feeling a chill colder than the water’s as I ran my fingertips over the grooves and splinters of submerged planks. This was the slave ship Camargo, which carried five hundred souls across the Atlantic before it burned.
