Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.
However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that 12 million slaves were trafficked from Africa, of whom two million may have died en route. Details of how slaves were beaten, manacled and dehumanised, or stories of the institutionalised brutality of plantations and sugar factories in Suriname where a slave's life expectancy was about eight years, were hard to process for the 21st century mind. Jackson, who became a naturalised citizen of Gabon in 2019, took a helicopter trip to the Vallée des Esclaves (Valley of the Slaves), where slaves were assembled for transportation. From the idyllic coastal region of Iguela Lagoon, the captives were crammed into ships to ensure maximum profit and packed off to Europe, America or Brazil (the latter accounting for 46 per cent of all African slaves).
Jackson surveyed all this with an air of pained resignation, doubtless underpinned by simmering rage. Even when he was just saying “wow!” in a deep and sonorous voice, he made compulsive viewing. But if only the films had stuck with Jackson throughout, instead of veering off to join a team of divers called Diving With a Purpose (pictured above). DWP specialises in diving for wrecked slave ships and piecing together the history of the vessels and their occupants. But though they were fuelled with noble intentions, as if discovering an actual wreck of a slave ship would somehow make the history of slavery un-happen, the team came up short on results.
Their first target was a slaving vessel known as 35F, which sank 45 miles off the Cornish coast in the 1680s. Unfortunately their underwater search was frustratingly anticlimactic, padded out with dreary diving-nerd stuff about safety procedures, decompression stops and the difficulty of finding historical artefacts in 350 feet of water amid piles of silt. They belatedly exhumed an ivory tusk from the seabed (the slave ships would also carry ivory and other valuable commodities), which prompted some emotional outpourings from the crew.
In Suriname, they went in pursuit of the slave ship Leusden, in which 667 slaves drowned when the crew nailed down the hatches, but lead diver Kramer Wimberley couldn’t find anything in the murky water. Their subsequent search for the sunken Spanish slaver Guerrero turned up some circumstantial evidence, but nothing you’d call definitive proof. Hardly surprising, when even a vessel as huge as the Titanic took decades to locate.
Far more intriguing was the interview with a venerable British diver who’d explored the wreck of the Douro, a possibly illegal slave ship, off the Scilly Isles in the 1970s. Among other things, he’d recovered tons of the “manilla” tokens used as slaving currency, each denoting the value of a slave. It was the most convincing material here, but it was tossed away as a mere aside. You got the distinct feeling that this series hadn’t turned out quite the way it was supposed to.