Who Gets to Tell the Story Matters
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN, Tara Roberts writes, is full of “souls who have never been acknowledged or mourned. Dreamers, poets, artists, thinkers, scientists, farmers.” And so begins a powerful essay of discovery: this issue’s cover story and a special six-part Nat Geo podcast called Into the Depths. Roberts, a National Geographic Explorer, has traveled coastal waters from the United States to South Africa to Costa Rica, searching for what remains of the ships that an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto during four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. Roberts seeks signs not just of those captives who arrived on the Americas’ shores—but also of the 1.8 million people who perished along the way from inhumane conditions in cargo holds or by drowning in shipwrecks. Roberts participates in these searches with a group…