schools. we have them also read thomas paine, jefferson, martin luther king, abraham lincoln. not that i believe everything in the liberal arts has to be at the base but i do believe the multiculturalism viewpoints and ideas are important things that are crucial. >> thank you everybody for being here.. there are so many amazing panels and a lot of them conflict with one another so i appreciate that folks chose to be here. as someone who's read all the books on this panel, i can tell you that the quality lives up to both the architecture and everything else in the room so you're not going to be disappointed. this panel is called history on the open sea. it features the works of eric j immediately to my left, revels appc, privateering and the american revolution while also discussing "the last slave ship the true story of how flotilla was found, her descendents and extraordinary reckoning. the third author whose speech on the panel, tom unfortunately can't be here today but i do hope that everybodydy will spend some time with his book to the uttermost ends ofc the earth te south's most feared ship and greatest battle of the civil war. in my experiences i've never spent time i am an author that wished they had less time to talk so we will let these gentlemen have that much extra time not to mention more opportunity for questions from the audience and i imagine there will be many so taken together all these books take seemingly familiar moments of u.s. history and force us as readers to sort of reinterpret some of those moments by orienting towards the water and the open seas. what i want to do is i will start by having each of the authors take a few minutes to describe their book in whatever they way they want. i have some questions and then we will open it up to the floor. thank you again everybody for being here. >> i guess that's me. the mic on? okay. thank you very much for coming and thanks to the mississippi book festival for inviting me. this is the second time i've been here. glad to be back. came in 2018 and talked about black flags and blue waters in pirated book but first let me start with the definition so everybody's on the same page. privateers are armed vessels owned by private individuals that are given government permission to attack enemy ships during times of war. that permission is in the form of ae, letter of mark which is a legal government document that gives the right to take belligerent vessels, bring them into port, have them out adjudicated and if it is deemed a debt valid prize or spoil of war,e then the owners and investors in the privateer get 50% of the profit or proceeds of selling the ship and its cargo and the men who fought on board of the privateer get the other 50%. now i want to tell you a story about b something i start off te book with.ee he was a privateer out of salem and his privateer was named the pickering and during the americand revolution he capturd numerous british o prizes, brout hundreds of cannons as many british prisoners, bu' there is one battle in particular that he is very well known for at the time, he is not well known for it now and we will getet to thaa little bit later. i had to do with a vessel called the achilles. he was off the port in spain in june of 1780 and the achilles stood in his way. the pickering was a small ship that only had 48 men on board. sixteen cannons. of the achilles was much larger and had 123 men on board and 43 cannons most of which were much larger than the pickering 6-pound cannons, so the british pairs and are on board turned to the jonathan nanda said you better get out of here this isn't going to be a fair fight and it wasn't going to be, but jonathan said to this man i shan't run from her and he didn't and the next morning when they actuallypl battled, a thousand people from the port had wandered to the beach to watch thee spectacle offshore this british and american ship fighting each other. the battle lasted for about two hours and then jonathan decided to have his men loaded the cannons bar shot which is basically two cannonballs connected by an iron bar and when it exits the canon it starts spinning wildly and can/sales if it hits directly so he chased it but it was a little too fast and got away. he spun around and recaptured the british privateert that he had captured earlier and all told on board, one man had been killed, his head had been sheared off by a cannonball and he had been seriously injured. now, his battle and his career was commemorated in 1909 by the sons of the american revolution. they put a plaque, large bronze plaque in salem massachusetts right o next door to my hometown of marblehead massachusetts just north of boston.th while i was working on the book i read about this plaque that has an image of the achilles into the pickering fighting so i hopped on my bike. this is during covid, went over to salem and i looked in the square where the book said the plaque was supposedly located. i found a lot of other historical plaqueses but not ths one so i went back home and called the local historian h ani said what's up with the plaque, where did it go and she starts laughing. i said what's going on.er she said you're not going to like where itve is. it's moved many years ago and nobody knows when and it's inside of a korean barbecue restaurant about two blocks away. so i got back on my bike and went to the korean barbecue restaurant, walked in and the woman wass so excited to see me because it's the height of covid and she had no customers and she thought i was there to buy some food. unfortunately, i probably should have bought some food but i didn't. i said i'm here to see what's behind your head and there was this plaque which was almost 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall and i think that is emblematic of how privateering is treated in american history. people either don't know anything about it or its shunted aside and privateers had a huge impact on the war. there were nearly 2,000 bsh.pa n privateers. nearly 40,000 men served on those ships. they captured almost 2,000 british ships. they made the british believed they played a role in bringing fans into the war and on the side of theca americans. they caused insurance rates to precipitously rise on the oceans of the british freight. they bought valuable goods and money intoto american ports. they forced the british navy to convoy its merchant ships and to go out and seek and destroy american privateers. they also added it to the weariness on the part of british merchants in particular for continuing this protracted war, and perhaps most importantly but hardest to measure, they gave americanshu confidence because f the hundreds and perhaps thousands of articles written on privateering the 30 newspapers that were being published in the colonies at this time, positive articles about privateers acapturing british privates. they gave americans some confidence especially in the early most disastrous years of the war that we might actually win sosy it had a psychological impact. the last story i want to tell is about my daughterd and again i mentioned i wrote this book during covid and i wrote the book faster than any other book i've written because i had nothing to do other than write this book and i also had some new office mates. my wife started working from home in the kitchen. my son came home from college to do his schooling in the house and my daughter who is a literary agent in new york came back home for a year and a half. none of my kids have ever read any of my books with the exception of my daughter reading my pirate book. so, when i found a picture of a guy named elias davis, he was incredibly good-looking. if you've seen pictures of nathaniel hawthorne when he was young, he was better looking than nathaniel hawthorne which is saying a lot. so i saw this picture and had an idea. ir called my daughter who was single at the time and still is single to this day if anybody watching is listening in new york -- [laughter] i shouldn't haved said that. anyway. [laughter] but anyway, i called her into take a look and my heart went aflutter when i saw him. he's a good-looking guy. i said take a look at this guy, he's a privateer. she took a good hard look and said i could really get into privateering. so she hasn't read the book tot this day but i still have some hope. >> thank you. >> the last slave ship is sort of two stories, the story of how i found the flotilla which was the last ship to bring slaves into the african country and with people on it. so that's kind of what i want to set up a little bit. the reason i wrote about it and the reason people are still talking k about it is what we kw about the entire affair including the people who were on the ship. the ship came in in 1860 on the eve of the civil war. at that point in the united states itng had been illegal to bring africans into the country rsince 1808. most people don't realize it. slavery was still legal but you could no longer import africans. so because of that, when it arrived almost all the enslaved people there were very few people left who knew what life in africafr was like, who had experienced an african slave trade who'd t experienced the middle passage so these were alien things by the time this happens. so the peoplena get kidnapped ad then they come to america. they are brought here. the ship is burned of the night it arrives or three nights later to hide theme evidence of this crime because the federal agents were already in pursuit of the people behind by the time they'd returned from africa mainly yabecause the flamboyant steam boat captain who paid for sending the ship to africa bragged constantly about what he was doing which was a hanging crime at the time. as with these people are enslaved for five years into than a free at the end of the war. they wanted to get back to africa. there were 110 of them but they couldn't afford passage. they saved up their money and bought land from their former enslavers about five different plantations and build a new town in america still there in alabama today and because this was the last slave ship became sort of a celebrity in the country and was interviewed dozens of times before he died he became so famous that when he did die, "the new york times" about it anduary this is a lot for the steamboat captain from mobile alabama to end up in "the new york times." when all the reporters were coming here and there were publications around today like harbors or whatever they would interview timothy about what t he'd done and then they would go to africa town and sometimes try and interview the africans. they usually just wrote a post card off with the village looked like in their houses and things like that. but in those interviews we have this treasure trove of the story of what happened to people from their own mouths. perhaps thert most important happened at about 1914 a mobile woman whose father was a civil war hero, a confederate civil war hero and owned a funeral home. she had grown up knowing some of the africans because they were gravediggersrs for her father after they were freed. so she interviews ten of them while they are still alive in 1914. her book allowed him to come to mobile in 1927 and interview coupr joe lewis who was the lat survivor at that point and the book was published a few years ago and is incredible so from the stories, we have all those things i mentioned. we know what their lives were likeer and they were quite wonderful. kudrow talks about how he and his siblings would run through the forest hunting for food and things., we know how brutal the raid was where he was captured. we know that the nation that captured coup joe and the other people was one of the most brutal regimesum in history. kudrow was captured by the empire which was responsible according to most historical accounts of capturing about one third of the 12 million people who were enslaved. so we have the story of the raid, and we know this incredible detail from his own mouths and from the mouths of the others who were interviewed when they attacked. if you are not between about 12 and 30, they killed you so they killed everybody in the villages they attack and left no one behind alive. when weio talk about the 12 million people who were enslaved, we also need to think about the tens of millions who were probably killed back in africa to begin to understand. so the book is it deals with all those things and when i started it i was just looking for the ship as an investigative reporter to solve a mystery but i came to understand it was this ghost that has been haunting these groups since the night it burned. the family that paid for it still live in mobile where they are among the largest wealthiest landowners in the area and they've never interacted with the people despite repeated requests to have some sort of reconciliation. they are so ashamed of what happened theypu want to speak publicly so they are being hauntedie by the ship. i interview people in africa town who'd grown up who were descendents of the people and had no idea until they were much older, 60, 70-years-old because their parents lied to them about it because they were ashamed of being associated with the last slaveen ship. then i went to modern day and found people there are still totally haunted by this story. when i mention all the people killed in africa, the scars are still there very present. the tribe is what they are called now as the largest ethnic group. everybody from a variety of different tribes were all. captured and you can tell what tribes the people are from by facialay clarifications and things.an so you can walk down the street and say that guy is from the tribe that captured my people or those are somee people who were captured and so they are very worried in that country today about a tribal resentment just like what happened in rwanda starting the civil war in the country so they still try to wrestle with thiss history toda. so that's what my book is about. >> thank you both. the first question i have both of you came at that from different ways so take what you will with this. i wonder how the taking the maritime aspect of your respective stories to do that work of forcing the interpretation of certain aspects of history that we felt pretty certain we knew about before reading them. >> one of the things that excited me about this book is i didn't learn anything about it high school or i was going to say college but i only went to one history course in college. i wish i had taken more. i was a biologist back then. but the fact that this story is so poorly known and not taught about is something that attracted me to it and now i totally spaced on the question. that's horrible. [laughter] >> essentially changing how we think about it.t. >> when people think about the american revolution, they think a lot about land-based battles and famous founders and like george washington, the great battle on land and not so much therg sea. george washington the first time he said our victory in the american revolution was a miracle and the reason it was a standing miracle is that there were very many elements that had to go just right if troops had shown up in a few days earlier or later it might have been a different outcome. my argument in the book is privateering played ae significant role. it's one of those things that had to go just right to have the revolution and the way that it did so by focusing on the maritime aspect of the war as well as the land-based aspects of the war you get a full picture and it's very easily argued that the revolution is a seminal event in american history right up there with the civil war and something we should have a better grasp on how it started and how it's fought and how we one because one of the tenuous battles up until the very end, the privateers who had been forgotten in history deserved to be heralded along with all the others, a difficult pantheon of people that we focused on in the american revolution and i think we will get into this a little bit later but part of the reason people had forgotten about privateers as people sort of assumed privateering was legalized privacy and something that isn't very about it. while in the earlier centuries many privateers like francis street and a lot of the privateers i talk about in my book actually were nothing but pirates. a great example of that in the late 1600s there were many, england was at war with france during king william's war and england sent out a lot of privateers to battle france in the american colonies the colonial governors gave out letters to ships to go out and battle with france. they charged people 300 pounds of pop to get the letters marked which isn't legal but the reason is because it was a racket. those privateers did not go out and battle the french. instead they went around the cape of good hope into the indian ocean. they attacked ships that were transiting between the indian subcontinent and the red seaports and thenn they brought back the treasure to the american colonies and to boot, the pirates, quote unquote privateers had to pay 100 pounds or pieces per person to the governor as a kickback to get permission to reenter the ports without being molested because piracy was a capital offense. so privateers were very often pirates but during the american revolution, they most definitely were not. i think that if we should look back on them more favorably and not relegate them to a slideshow in history, they were part of the main event. one other thing i point out in the book is the continental navy although it has the bright spot during the war, the american revolution was the navy's first hour. it wasn't its finest hour and while we may have preferred to have a powerful navy go toe to toe with the british navy, that wasn't going to be the case in a country that was barely functioning, couldn't levy taxes and had difficult enough times forwarding the army so into the void on the maritime side of the privateers.e they were our militia of the sea. they were our cost free navy. and i just loved writing about them and i learned a lot about the topic obviously. i feel the monuments to them should not be relegated to barbecue restaurants. [laughter] >> before you answer, just to givepl you another kind of exame from the book about the power of this type of analysis is that if you are talking about privateering you have to look at the economic aspects and how the sailors and ship captains are being paid and i think one of the powerful moments in the book is when eric is talking about this economic aspect of it and then he pushes pause and says we never even talk that much about all the other soldiers and all their economic motivations, so when you start asking questions about pirate tears it solved and leave raises these other areas that obviously i guess you have more books to write. so which again comes back to this notion that we are not just adding water or if we are it's transformative of the larger narrative. go ahead. >> tsince we are talking a lot about pirates, the folks that sailed to africa were pirates the moment they left the dock. they were on an illegal -- intod the captain referred to it that way and the crew would meet four times during the trip. the first time when they figured out they unwittingly had become pirates. but in a larger sense, this story is about one of the most important maritime events in the history of the world which was the enslavement of 12 million people who were then transported from their homeland to other countries across the ocean. it is hard to escape the maritime aspect of the story of enslavement when you see those images of ships that were designed to carry people where you see them all spread around laying down on the deck santa things. this there were about 20,000 involved in the global slave trade over the 400 years and we've only found 13 of them. it's kind of a a fascinating thg we found so few and partly because they were wretched ships that at the end of their life a ship only lasted about 20 years if you were lucky because they were made with nails. there were no screws or anything so there was no way to refasten them so they would shake apart and leak. so to have found the flow c ~ as far as this maritime connection to this mass movement of people across the ocean, i think the way to understand the importance of it is first this is the only ship ever found that was in the american slave trade. there is a piece of a slave ship in the smithsonian african-american history museum in washington that's about this big about the size of a brick. it came from a south african ship that sank in brazil. so we have the first ever intact slave ship found and it may reveal incredible secrets when we finally get it excavated. the state of alabama has been dragging their feet and i will say that right here. i found the ship for four years ago. they did the first real archaeological examination to look at raising the ship a few monthshs ago. we've had the pandemic and all, but this ship should be on display. we think it should be on display in africa town, the town founded by the people transported and we want the ship and a giant museum there that willti be the nationl monument to the enslaved and tell the story of the people on as a proxy for the story of everyone whose ancestors arrived anywhere in the hold of the ship in bondage. that's what people whose relatives were enslaved are missing. they don't know their story. they don't know their history. these people in africa town who were descendents are some of the only people whose ancestors were enslaved who know anything about the life before they were on a plantation. it's a very rare thing and so when we tell the story of these people, we are telling the story of anyone whose ancestors were enslaved that way and so the maritime aspect of the story, the things that moved across the oceans we always hear about that. that they came from africa that all these different things, drumming and dancing and all these cultural things came from africa. because people were interviewed so many times and observed by modernee people, we are seeing t in real time. one of the best examples i can give you, there's a tv show called high on the hog that's on netflix and the first episode is about [inaudible] so the women after the people were freed they all set about working and the women raised vegetables and made food, they cooked food and took it to the various factories in the 1860s and 70s in mobile and would feed the food to the men. these african women were famous for their stews and people talked about the student was all over town and would want to get this dues. in benin where we get black-eyed peasge and okra, the word for oa is gumbo. these women were making gumbo. we are seeing it come from africa to the south and that is the importance of this story, this maritime connection. i just think that's so fascinating. soso that a tv show that i mentioned high on the hog makes the case cajun cuisine is the cuisine and i will tell you that food over there was fiery hot and anybody that likes cajun cuisine would enjoy every single meal they had. >> so in the last response ipo want you to have an opportunity to elucidate a a little more. i think in both of these books the question of legality is superot interesting that a lot f the actors are talking about walking a thin line between what's legal and not. eric very definitively in the book says the privateers are not the same as what we think of as pirates before and i would love to hear him kind of explained that because i think it's an interesting part of the book. meanwhile, as he mentioned in his opening remarks, he's kind of identified the situation where transporting is illegal and slavery itself was legal so it became this sort of open secret that once the africans were actually on land, then whatever evidence of the crime no longer existed in the slavery itself and so i would love to hear both of them kind of piece those out a little bit and talk more about the book. >> they are thehe enemies of all mankind. they went out there to attack anyly ship that potentially has booty on board. some people had written that pirates were robin hoods. they were t stealing from the rh to give to the poor. that may be true but the only poor people they wanted to give to was themselves. they were not fighting for a larger cause. they were not political philosophers. they were simply thieves and see. as i mentioned before a lot of privateers in early centuries goes back to the 1200s. a lot of privateers were in fact nothing more than pirates despite the fact they had a letter of mark. during the american revolution, theer privateers were fighting n behalf of their country to be. they were not attacking ships of any nation. they were attacking british ships or neutral ships that were carrying arms to the british navy or army. they operated under a code of conduct they couldn't treat prisoners poorly. they had to bring the ships into behe at adjudicated and determid whether or not it was a legitimate prize and if it was not able to be returned to the owners and that did happen in certain cases. so those that operated in the revolution were not pirates. and even if you think they are pirates, it still doesn't diminish what privateerser actually did during the american revolution. and the english had a problem. think about it. we had all these maritime american privateers. the english navyot was capturina lot of these ships imprisoning a lot of american privateers. what are they going to do with them if they treat them as prisoners of war, that is inclusively and explicitly under international laws recognizing the colonies while parliament and the crown didn't want to do that. if they treated the privateers men as british citizens than they could fall into the british constitution, the unwritten and would have been given the right of habeas corpus. if you brought forth a judge and then either proven guilty or set free. england didn't want to do eithee of those things. they didn't want to recognize the americans as a sovereign nation and they didn't want to cloud the courts with all these cases, which would result either in americans being found guilty and then hang it, which might cause retaliation in the colonies, or worse from their perspective found not guilty and set free so what the british did is passed the law that said anybody guilty of high treason in north america or on the open ocean in other words piracy on the open ocean could be held for an indeterminate amount of time in jail without going before a judge. so in defending this law which a lot of people didn't like because it would give basically it would throw habeas corpus of the constitution to the curb, they said don't worry this war is going to be over in a year or two. no problem. well, he was wrong and what happenedem is the prison ships n new york and england overflowed, but they never went to the point even though the british officially viewed american privateers men as pirates they never hanged any of them. but many of them suffered a fate that was far worse than hanging ending up on the prison ships in new york, the worst of which was jersey to give you ane idea of magnitude and another reason why privateering is so important that we should remember it is that on the jersey alone, it held more than 10,000, probably close to 15,000 men during the course of the war. 90% of them were privateers men and the number of people that died on the jersey is estimated to have been 11,500 men every day on the jersey six to 12 men would die and the guards would call down from the upper deck rebels bring back your dad so to put that in perspective during the entire revolution, only somewhere between 441600 men died at the direct line of battle on land. so even though they were not treated and viewed as pirates which would condemn them to be hanged many of them are treated in these prison ships and i have to tell you that chapter was the most difficult chapter for me to write because the conditions on these ships, jersey for example, 64 gone former ship on the line had between 800 to 1200 men on it on any single day below deck for 23 hours a day with not a bench to sit,sl nothing to sleep on. they had to defecate down there in the morning not too gross about too much but they would have descriptions around the stairs leading up to the main deck there used to be feces a foot or two thick 10 feet around that and they had to shovel it out every day and throw it over the side of the ship and to make matters worse, the rotten meat they had to eat was boiled in iron kettles that were filled with the very same saltwater siphoned up from right next to the ship where they had been dumping all that stuff. it's just horrific what humans can do to other humans not just during times of war. anyway. a long answer to that question. >> thank you. go ahead. >> so, you know, the entire expedition was illegal. i'm going to talk a little bit about how it began which is one of the most infamous parts of the story. the story begins with a bet and it's the steamboat captain, timothy mayer. he had moved from maine to alabama in 1835, a very young man and he got a job as a deck handler on the steamboat. he owned boats with his brother's data plantations one for each brother and enslavedon about 50 people. they were among the richest men in alabama by this point with their nine steamboats essentially the only way to move cotton down through the state. when timothy makes this bet and mobile is the third largest in the country after new york and new orleans, very cosmopolitan and wealthy so he is on his steamboat and you have to think antibellem, very gone with the wind. there are newspaper ads you can read about the luxury accommodations on board the boat. after dinner he would go out on these upper deck with the male passengers andul they would drik whiskey and smoke cigars. so they were doing this and talking about the news of the day. the news of the day at this point was about a ship called the wanderer which was another illegal slave ship that had come in in georgia with 378 enslaved people on board who were spread around the south and we know because "the new york times" reporter in montgomery alabama and countered them on the train and wrote another strange dialect and everything so the man behind the story was the fabulously named charles augustus lafayette lamar and he wasted his parents money all he ever did was lose money so he came up with the idea of going to africa and smuggling people in. for him it was a moneymaking deal you could buy a person for about $60 at the time. in today's money multiply that times 30 and you could sell the person for about $2,000 back in america so that was his reason for doing it. so he gets caught and he is onin trial and they are talking about the trial on timothy mayer's boat and it was quite a spectacular trial. charles hadge challenged the editors of "the new york times" and tribune to duels and challenged the commodore in court to a duel and they went out on the street and shot each other and both missed. so they are talking about the case on the boat and one of the passengers is from new york and one is from rhode island and they say one of them says i think they t should hang the lot of them. that will scare anybody else from doing this that means bringing in captains. a timothy mayers as nonsense. they will hang nobody. i can do it myself and he makes a bet he bets a thousand dollars which is 30,000 in today's money but it wasn't about the money. he was rich. he makes the bet he wants to thumb his nose at the federal government. he was confident making his bet because of what had happened with everybody involved in the illegal slaving over the last since 1808. every single u.s. president starting with thomas jefferson pardoned, convicted, caught red handed bringing captives into the country and ships.to abraham lincoln was the first person to actually execute to someone and the man he executed was a captain who arrived with a bunch of slaves into the country three weeks before returning while he was in route. so timothy mayer and his what shall we call them, his brothers very nearly would have met the news. so this is a dirty open american secret, these ships coming in and you know, like jim bowie was involved in illegal slaving. to feed the pirate that's how he generated most of his money coming in. so there's this interesting -- there was nothing about breaking the law. it was about making a point and that's why he bragged about it so much andip got arrested a wek after the ship returned but they were unable to find the ship because they had burned at the night that it came into the country and it remained hidden for 160 years. federal troops started looking for it thear day after it arriv. it was in newspapers around the country two days after the ship returned. it started and mobile. they wrote it returned with the cargo of slaves and then that story was all over the country and people were cheering for it in the south. >> thank you, both. so, this will be my final question. i'm going to push both of you to talk about parts of the book that haven't come up yet then we will open up to the audience and go from there. so, i am interested in the memory of this event but also how it's been commemorated were ornot in both cases. so, for eric, you talk about the privateer example from the american revolution and how that played into debates about the naval power and maritime history during the war of 1812 and of the civil war so i would be really curious to see how people who lived through the revolution how they interpreted what had occurred as they were trying to make decisions later. then i think one of the really powerful parts of your book are those chapters after abolition of slavery and before you start doing your own search for it and what happens in africa town in the 19th and early 20th century. >> during the war, ben franklin, who seems to be everywhere all the time came out strongly against privateering which is a surprise to many because during the war he was an active promoter of privateering and played a major role bringing france over but he made the same argument that it's just thievery on the sea and brings out the worstt in people. when theyd get home they are divulged and spend ally their money and we should be a more civilized country so he tried to work with his friends overseas in england to have privateering abolished in the treaty. he was unsuccessful and never gotoa to see the goal realized because when the american constitution was put together, article one, section eight allows for the issuance of the letters of mark by congress. so immortalized in the constitution. after that, let me back up a second. franklin tried one more time to get thomas jefferson to outlaw when he was negotiating the end of a treaty with prussia and he was successful that there is an abolition of privateering. so around roles the war of 1812, strange war a lot of people don't know much about and what does america do it again? they have a stronger navy but it's still not a very powerful. they are still up against the british navy which is the most powerful inde the world so they decide to provide once again on the privateers. and there are 530 some odd letters issued during the war of even though the continental navy had a better record during the war of 1812, it was privateers once again that captured more prizes and had an impact on the end of the war. after 1812, other presidents in american officials argued that we should outlaw privateering but when the opportunity came to do that in 1856, after the crimean war, there was international maritime treaties signed by 55 nations, but the united states demiurge. they decided not to sign it because they still wanted to have that in their back pocket if the need arose because they still didn't have a particularly powerful navy. what happened is they got a part of the united states in the behind during theca civil war because not 100 days after fort sumter is fired on, jefferson davis using the same arguments that the americans used during the revolution started issuing letters. almost 100 confederate privateers that operated during the civil war capturing the unionte merchant. this created a various problem for abraham lincoln because one of the first confederate privateers captured called the savanna. they brought the prisoners into new york and paraded them down broadway. people were cheering at them, they were thrown into prison in new york and abraham lincoln threatened to hang these confederate privateers because he viewed them as nothing more than pirates so jefferson davis said hold on. he didn't say that, it was a very formal letter. he said if you start hanging confederate p privateers meant e are going to hang one for one union soldiers. so abraham lincoln never went through the threat and actually the congress of the north passed a resolution that allowed abraham lincoln to issue letters of mark of the congress. they neveraf went through with t and after about a year and a half the confederacy stopped issuing letters because it wasn't having much of an impact on the war and the others were doing a much better job. sovi after the american civil wr we still had privateering on the books and although they don't talk about it in the book, there is a small debate underway today and there was a bill issued what's the word, presented, introduced in congress a coupleo of months ago that wanted to revise american privateering and issue letters of mark once again primarily to battle against pirates from the somali coast soand the terrorist groups and some people have even argued we should allow privateers to attack chinese commerce who are viewed as a threat to america. i make no comments on that in the book. i love our navy. we have a powerful navy. i don't think there's any reason to go back to privateering, but the art of the story continues and who knows what will happen in the future, but i doubt we are ever going to have privateers, american privateers on the open ocean again. >> and this is a good time to plug our absent colleagues book, tom couldn't be here, but his book addresses directly those questions of privateering during the civil war. so, go ahead. >> you talk about africa town a little bit, so africa town as they mentioned began when lewis went to timothy mayer who had enslaved him and he was working for mayor at this point in the shingle factory, and this was just perhaps two weeks after the end of the civil war. and on behalf of all the africans he asked him to give them land and timothy mayor said no.. he said i treated you good as slaves so i don't owe you anything. so kudrow andde the others decid to save up their own money and buy the land and they bought the first piece from timothy mayor and in his words, he didn't give us one nickel off the price. so they bought five or six properties to start. they were all about two to 3 acres. they bought more quickly, because by this point it was three or four years after the war had ended and a lot of them had kids and they needed to, they had been renting houses and stuff so they bought this land and they did something they did throughout their time in captivity when they were enslaved. they stuck together and took turns building each other's houses. one thing that's a very unusuall about these people is that they were mostly from the same small village, many of them were. let's say half of them were. and then they had all marched into captivity they'd been in thes perricone for about a monh and they were on the ship for two months. by the time they arrived in america they do become a very tight knit group. usually with enslavedld people they were sold at markets but because of these people obviously african, timothy couldn't take them to the slave market to sell. .. night outback. we have several stores and i just tell you one. shortly after the africans write summer working on african woman because they were working fast enough. all thep african men and women attacked the men took the whip and beat him with it until other overseers were able to come rescue the guy. that's what he say by. that leads into africa town and how it grew. so right after the war we have the africans buying this land, building to their b houses for e build a church first was a brush arbor thing for vines to grow over outside. and they built a school for their kids because the white folks would not give them one. by the time we get to 1900, africa town is the fourth largest community in the united states governed by african-americans. it has grown explosively. the reason it grew so fast is because other african-americans, american-born blacks who had been enslaved see these people running their own town. the moment they were freed, they pointed one person to be their chief. they all agreed to a set of rules. they started this community based on their african customs for how you would run the communityer. when it really. and they've never been freedom to these people who have only been captive for five years looking for market towns whose family had businesses, who reads to owning land owning money and all that stuff. africa town grows and grows. byer the 1950s there's about 12000 people living there from that 30 of the africans who originally bought the lands. they have a few theaters, restaurants, grocery stores, doctors, pharmacists, everything iyou would expect in a town of 12000 people to about 3 miles from downtown mobile. flash forward to today there's not a single business in africa town. so what happened? well, alabama the state in mobile cities systematically destroy africa town. it's a classic case of environmental racism. you can grow big american cities all around the country and see areas where industry has been piled onto african-american neighborhoods as it has in africa town. the mayor family leaves lease family land to the largest paper mill in the world. in fact he became the world headquarters. and the at least lantern a gigantic paper mill next door. the pollution in africa town was so intense up until the mills finally shut down in 2000, if you look at the epa t statistics the toxic release inventory, mobile and the '90s ranked as one of the five most polluted counties in america in terms of air and water pollution. take those numbers and break them down, you will find the little zip code for africa tax cover six square miles is actually were almost all of the pollution happened. africa town, six square miles was ranked against the four most polluted counties in the country for the amount of pollution dumped on thisop people. then the city and the state decided to build a new hazardous waste route in 1992 to get waste off of i-10 before a future micro site 10 you under the river in mobile. so they built a giganticwn highway, a six lane bridge right to the heart of africa town. they destroyed the house is the founders built for each other 1870. great-great-grandson was still living in his house in 1992. this road bisected the community, cut it in half, kicked out most of the descendents of the originalit founders. the symmetry was separated by hollywood no traffic t light.fu people from the church could not get across the street to go to a funeral. after about a decade that prevailed on the city tey of moe to get a traffic light to get over to the funerals. part of a plan of the museum i was talking about was to rebuild africa town commercial district is an abandoned site which is 4. they tour the building sound a few years ago. we want to put thisgh museum the but there's enough area to re-create the african villages, the houses the africans a builtn re-create a commercial district for africa town. try and restore this town. well, that's what's happened africa town. quick thank you. we have a very short period of time left. what i'm going to suggest is we will take a couple of very concise questions we will just let people get a couple out that will give each author about two minutes to respond to those. i see very eager person in the front room the question so you can go first. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] probably not able to hear her. she said she read the book and watch the documentary. she asked how i look forward from the ship. the documentary referring to the national geographic documentary. interestingly i am not with named in her even though i give the court as to the ship for the first time national geographic archaeologist touch pizzas they were sitting on my boat. holding the pieces of the ship. they publish the big blockbuster story announcing it had been found and did not mention me. and so when i complained they put me in as the guy who found the wrong ship because i actually found two ships. t sue and who had to threaten to sue national geographic to get included in the article. which i will say about that i did cancel myio subscription. [laughter] so looking for the ship started with a phone call but i've been investigative report in mobile for 20 years, never once thought of looking for it. i didn't realize it was missing. i knew the last slave ship came into mobile. that's the story ended foror me. as a painting of it in town you see. i did not understand the ship had been burned and disappeared and all that stuff. a friend called and told me i should look for it. i said that's crazy, that's like looking for pirate treasure. it's been missing 160 years. he said well, i think you might be the guy to find it. he was saying that because the ship was burned and i gigantic swap in mobile truths one must largest wetland complexes united states 2000 acres of swamp. all kinds of rumors going through bribed the environment report of the paper for 20 years and made my business exploring that small. i actually made a documentary about it and wrote a book called saving america's amazon. from a charter captain's will and i take people my boat in the swamp. he is telling me too look for it. i said that's great they hung up the phone and immediately typed into google. but all the books that were available all the history books and a everything started plottig how is going to find this thing. then i that work led me to the library of say this for the librarians out there, i didn't find it in a wetsuit on the bottom of the river. i really found in the library. i found in the historical adocuments. in particular mention all the stuff about the africans in their perspective. we had another iv perspective of this but have the of the white slavers. because the captain of the ship who sailed to africa william foster kept a very detailed journal which ended up in the mobile library. t in the journal he tells you he burned the ship at a specific spot in the delta no one had ever looked there because timothy mayor had given up information to be burned it or buy it, it's all the people who had looked for places where he said he burned the ship. that it could that be in this place is there is more than one. you knew he was lying. this famous historian in mobile wrote a book about the battle of mobile bay which is dan the torpedoes a battle he spent tens of thousands of dollars to moderate surveys of all the places that timothy mayor said he burned the ship but never found it and he died. i had his research papers history museum. i knew he had looked inept on the ship. that thing in the journal he says 12-milele islands. and i figured out no one who ever looked there but i waited to lead a very, very low tide during the winter, big north wind debate in the river system are 4 feet below normal. i went out is generally second, 2018. i went looking just to see if i saw ship poking out of the mud and i found one. it was a schooner from the 1850s that brought marine archaeologists and stuff to come see it they all confirmed to run an article the headline of which was wrecked on by reporter may be the trend to pray/find a couple months the story went viral internationally for a couple months later a team of archaeologists international group enslaved rags a project to the national park service, divers with a purpose, they'll come to check out the ship and they figure out is not clotilda it's about 50 feet too long that part was buried in the mud. so they all left town. before they left town had a big press conference he announced it was not the ship. it was in africa town there about three to people there. the people start crying some of them and they say it's not the shipper there were insured since they are ship has come in it was such a big deal for africa town for the clotilda to be found proving their story true. so they say it is not the shipper i walk out of the meeting and i think alright i'm going to go home and drink whiskey i'm not going to look for ships anymore. [laughter] i'd been internationally, humiliated. there is to resent npr remember that guy who found the clotilda? remember this one host does a show on the media remember her saying not so much. right after she played a clip of me saying i just knew it was the clotilda. i walked out of the meeting a descendent, a woman comes up to me and giveses me a big hug and sings a gospel song in my ear. it's this bright sides over the looks of this a bright side so mark don't stop until you find it. she sang it to me and then she pushed me back and said keep looking for, don't give up. no one else is looking for it you're going to find it. i turned and walked away from her into marine archaeologists came up to me they told me they'd been hired by the state of alabama to find two confederate ironclads have been intentionally sunk on the mobile river because alabama wanted to put these confederate ships upon display. so they said they found a book the first date right where they're supposed to be. that five days of shit timee decided to look for the clotilda. with its everywhere between the port of mobile on the southern tip of 12-mile islands. i knew right then people up north and south of 12-mile islands. so i i focused my server though the university of southern mississippi came over and help me find the ship. we founded about nine days after the me of the archaeologists and doubts the first one was not the clotilda.