Tara Roberts is surfacing human stories from the shipwrecks that killed enslaved Africans

National Geographic

28-02-2025

'It's the curvy map'
Roberts' 'middle' looked a lot like one leap of faith to the next, with affirmations that worked like guideposts to bring her to DWP.
As a media professional, Roberts has edited for CosmoGirl, Essence, Ebony and Heart & Soul magazines. She eventually started her own entrepreneurial endeavor, sharing stories of women changemakers around the world. She followed a job to D.C. in 2016, and visited the newly-inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture.
'That's how I saw the photograph that changed everything.'
Had she not moved to D.C., she says she may not have visited the museum. And had she visited as tourist and not a resident, she may not have meandered the museum's halls with such leisure, and she may not have taken notice of the details of one portrait in particular.
'I think all of those things were leading me to this moment. It's all connected, it's the curvy map,' says Roberts, who was awarded the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year in June of 2022.
The photo of a crew of Black women in wet suits aboard a boat was her first encounter with DWP. It beckoned her to follow. She phoned the co-founder, Kenneth Steward. She pledged to join them.
'The universe works in strange ways,' says Roberts, reflecting on how she grew up nowhere near an ocean, about how she had given up her D.C. apartment on a whim, about how her status as 'single and childless' left her questioning her life at times, about how she had 10 addresses in the last 15 years, and all the moves seemed to lead to this moment.
'I imagined the divers. And then I imagined myself as one of them. I didn't know it would lead anywhere, I just knew I wanted to know more.'
A way of honoring ancestors
While refining her underwater skills in Asia, Roberts was also actively looking for funding. She had quit her stable job. 'Within a few days, another email comes,' she describes in 'Written in the Waters'.
The March, 2022 issue of National Geographic magazine featured Roberts, making her the first Black woman Explorer to grace the cover of the publication.
Photograph by Wayne Lawrence
''Dear Tara Roberts, I regret to inform you…'' She had not received the Fulbright scholarship funding she hoped for. 'A broken fool. A broke, unemployed fool. A broke, unemployed, dreamy fool on a fool's errand,' she describes feeling. She contemplated turning back and going home, but didn't. Later, she lost the tip of her finger to a triggerfish in Sri Lanka during one of her early dives to meet her 30.
One month after completing her DWP training, with her savings nearly drained to zero, she received funding from the National Geographic Society to support her storytelling project.
Roberts' path is like this: the 'zig and the zag,' as she says. It shows a nuanced story as she ricochets from peaks and valleys toward a calling. It's the detail and complexity she aims for in the narratives she uncovers in her work.
'Think about the Clotilda … that's a story that no one would know if the Clotilda descendants hadn't been like 'oh, we have saved artifacts and the stories of our ancestors, we're not going to let anyone forget them.''
The Clotilda , Roberts reflects, represents a uniquely complete story. The ship itself is remarkably well-preserved in the muddy freshwater of Alabama's Mobile River, compared to other wrecks, which are often shattered on the sea floor, coalesced into the marine ecosystem, or dissolved over time. And the Clotilda's African survivors, who escaped the ship's burning as its owners attempted to hide evidence of the illegal transport of enslaved people, established the diaspora community of Africatown which continues to honor the stories from the nation's last known slave ship.
'That's often not what you get around stories that involve African Americans. The stories tend to sit in one part, and the part is one of pain,' Roberts reflects. 'And I get why, history is often played down, so there is an instinct to make sure people know what really happened.'
The painful legacy of the transatlantic slave trade made facing history difficult for Roberts. 'A lot of the last 400 years is hard for Black people to revisit,' she explains in the first installment of 'Into the Depths.'
At least 1.8 million African people perished at sea. Between 500 and 1,000 ships sank. An estimated 12.5 million people were forcibly transported on ships across the Atlantic, trafficked around from Europe to Africa, Africa to the Americas, and the Americas to Europe — the Middle Passage. Shackled together below deck, they were transported on journeys averaging 60 days. More than ten million people survived to disembark.
For 'Into the Depths,' Roberts interviewed 100 people about their unique relationships to this history. 'By the end of it, I realized that these weren't just stories of death, that these were stories of life, too,' Roberts recalls.
'It's a complicated history and that's the way history is supposed to be.'
The Christianus Quintus and Federicus Quartus wreck site were the first dive Roberts recalls leaving an impression on her, 'I felt more than anything a sense of agency and power,' she says.
In 1710 two Danish slave ships, the Christianus Quintus and Fredericus Quartus went down in the Atlantic. Some 40,000 Danish bricks signaled the wreckage to experts in the 1970s, despite their considerable decomposition. A cannon and large anchor are still laid out as artifacts on the seabed. After quashing a revolt, the two vessels veered off course, missing their St. Thomas destinations by over a thousand miles, the crews mutinied, freed approximately 650 captive people due to dwindling resources, and scuttled the vessels which now lie in the ocean sands of present-day Costa Rica.
As the site came into view for Roberts, 'I felt, 'I see you and I'm going to help bring this story back to human memory. We are going to help make sure you are honored, not forgotten.''