The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

by Hannah Durkin

To Foster, the snakes were merely ‘repulsive things’, their sacred significance lost on him.17 Tellingly, it was his only admission of disgust at what he saw in Ouidah.

Even in the decades after the Africans’ emancipation, the clandestine nature of the Clotilda’s voyage and its status as an enduring secret meant that many of them never learned the full details of their journey. The mysteries of their kidnapping added to their experience of transatlantic dislocation as an incomprehensible trauma.