[SAM] More than two million Africans were lost at sea, when they were trafficked to the "New World".

[boat rocking] Over four hundred years, some twelve million were enslaved and abused.

None of that would have happened if it didn't generate money - lots of it.

♪ [LEO] This place was all slave plantations.

People were treated like garbage.

Like a way of making a profit.

Every mistake you make, the whip comes out.

[SIMCHA] Right here, people made deals that affected slavery?

It's a centre of business concerned with the slave trade.

♪ This is ground zero for sugar in the Americas - plantations just like this one where we're standing.

♪ 600,000 people were bought into slavery by Bristol merchants, on Bristol ships.

Who profited?

Who are the people the profited the most?

[screaming] I'm sensing the souls of six hundred and I want to find them.

Afua, if we were standing here two hundred years ago, we would have been deemed fit for market.

♪ Much of the world we live in today was built on the backs of enslaved Africans.

To find out how this happened - Follow the money... That's what we need to do.

[metal chain clicking] ♪ ♪ [ALLANAH] We've made it to the Capital of Suriname.

A small country in South America.

350 years ago, it was a Dutch slave colony that existed for the sole purpose of enriching the Netherlands.

♪ [KRAMER] We're here to investigate one of the most horrific crimes of the transatlantic slave trade.

[KINGA] Oh my gosh, you guys.

[KRAMER] It had practically been forgotten for nearly three hundred years.

♪ You must be Leo, I'm Kinga.

Doctor Leo Balai has invited us to this old Dutch fort to help solve the mystery of a sunken slave ship called "The Leusden".

♪ I want to tell you a story.

I think nobody wanted to tell, but a story I need to tell because it is so important.

It's a story about the biggest mass murder in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

They had a smooth trip.

Only forty-four days.

Then the ship got stuck.

[waves crash] It hit the sandbank, and that was the beginning of the end.

[screams] Here, right here in front of us was where The Leusden was supposed to enter the Suriname river to sell the "cargo".

♪ Imagine, that two to three hundred years ago, this place was all slave plantations.

More than six hundred slave plantations with tens of thousands of slaves to make a profit for people who wanted to get rich.

It was here where everything happened, where people were treated like cargo, like a way of making a profit.

♪ [SIMCHA] Transporting millions of slaves across the Atlantic required a tremendous amount of resources and money.

♪ How did this make financial sense for Europeans?

♪ I've come to London, once the centre of the slave trade, to look for some answers.

♪ [JAMES] As you can see, we are in the heart of the financial sector of the city of London.

And where I am going to take you is a very surprising place that actually is the very heartbeat of the Atlantic slaving system.

♪ This is the site of the "Jamaica Coffee House".

[customers chatting] You can't really understand what happens to the world of slavery and the slave trade unless you think of coffee.

-Thank you.

-Thank you very much indeed.

Why coffee and what does it have to do with slavery?

Well, in the 17th-century coffee takes off in England.

Merchants bring it here and they mix it with sugar.

It's a very bitter drink, as was tea as was chocolate.

And all three drinks are mixed with sugar.

Sugar, coffee, chocolate, all these things that you mentioned highly addictive.

Yes.

And all of them grown by the Africans who were shipped in the millions.

Sugar is the engine behind the emergence of coffee drinking and the proliferation of coffee shops in the city of London.

Like this one.

This coffee shop becomes the focus point for merchants, for seamen, from the slave corners of the empire.

Right here in the 1600's people sat down and made deals that effected slavery?

Not only made deals about slavery.

But you would come and find out what the price of sugar was and what the price of slaves were.

What was the fate of the ships that were traveling back and forth?

It's a centre of information and it becomes a focus for the business concerned with the slave trade.

♪ [AFUA] To fulfill Europe's massive demand for sugar, Brazil became its biggest supplier.

So I've come to Brazil to see first-hand where it all started.

♪ Professor, so nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you!

You ready to go?

Let's go.

♪ This was the first place in the Americas that the sugar industry started to rely on slave labor.

At first Europeans enslaved indigenous people.

But so many died when they were exposed to European diseases that they came up with a solution... enslave Africans.

Millions and millions of African slaves were brought here just to cultivate this crop.

♪ ♪ So this is ground zero for sugar in the Americas, plantations just like this one where we are standing.

Yes.

♪ [waves] ♪ With first light, we set out with Dr.

Balai on a journey in search of the lost slave ship, The Leusden.

-Hi.

-Nice to meet you.

Kinga Phillips.

Hi, Alannah.

Yves, nice to meet you.

♪ The ship was stuck on the sandbank and water came into the ship.

They tried to mend it, to prevent the water from coming in, but it didn't stop.

♪ The captain decided the ship was lost.

He also decided that the "cargo" was lost.

The captives were of no value anymore.

The 664 Africans who perished could have survived, but the captain had a different idea.

I want to show you what was supposed to be the final destination of the enslaved Africans on board The Leusden.

♪ [animal noises] ♪ Around this whole territory there were all slave plantations over here.

So, these were the highways basically.

These were the highways and also the slaves digged those creeks.

They digged it out until the Atlantic Ocean.

A hundred miles... If you look around you can't imagine that there were thousands of Black people living over here, died over here, were massacred sometimes over here because they had to make sugar and coffee.

Sugar was the curse of Black people, because Europeans wanted sugar.

♪ Watch your head.

♪♪ You have to be careful in the creek because everything is overgrowing now.

Nature takes everything back.

♪ So, nature is covering up the crime.

Yes.

[speaking native language] Snake, snake, snake.

Easy, easy.

We can continue.

We can continue.

[speaking native language] No it was in the tree right there.

-On the branch.

-It's a Boa.

♪ Head's up.

♪ Are we getting off?

Yes, we are getting off.

[speaking native language] ♪ You, you can come.

♪ This place was flatland, [thunder] with sugar canes.

Thousands of slaves working day and night.

This was all flat, clear, no jungle?

No jungle.

♪♪ The slave owners were so inventive to stop the slaves from running away that they planted cactuses around the plantation so you couldn't get in or out.

♪ In the middle of the jungle, we suddenly discover, what Leo brought us here to see.

♪ What is it?

This is part of a sugar factory.

♪ Leo... ♪ -Oh, wow Leo.

-This is huge!

♪ These are silent witnesses of an enormous crime.

[birds chirping] You had hundreds of people working over you.

Some of them at the plantation to cut the cane.

And then you have the people who work in the factory to process the cane.

Imagine yourself being a slave over here, then you can see how horrible it was.

♪ [whip cracking] Get up in the morning, work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.

Every mistake you make, the whip comes out.

[whip cracking] So the life expectancy of an African here was about eight years?

Yeah, they reckon about eight to ten years and then it was over.

Alright, I am trying to imagine this, right?

You get captured in Africa and then once you are here... You get branded.

♪ You get branded, right, bought and then tortured for eight years in a sugar plantation, and then you die.

♪ What did all of this look like?

What are all these pieces?

We are looking at skeletons.

It was powered by steam, I think.

[YVES] It was a steam machine.

Right there was the oven.

[fire burning] Some parts of the engine you can see over there.

[fire burning and machinery clanging] But the most important part was this.

This was the press.

♪ Come take a look.

This is like say, sugar cane and then they pressed it inside and then the juice will come free.

[machine clicking] But sometimes, it could be that your hand was stuck into the press.

When your hand gets stuck in the machine, the only thing they did was to chop your hand off.

Because they couldn't, wouldn't stop the machine... So, someone will come running and cut it off... There was always someone around here with a machete.

Someone stood here with a machete, just in case that happened.

Just in case, and it happened often because the people worked 16 to 18 hours a day and you get tired.

And a mistake with such a machine often happens.

That is the price of sugar.

That is the price of sugar, of course.

And the Africans on The Leusden, they didn't even give them this chance to come here or try and live their eight years of life expectancy or to get away.

They were murdered because the captain took a wrong turn.

They weren't even worth the chance.

♪ [footsteps] ♪ I've come to where the slave trade, which became the biggest business in the Western Hemisphere began: Lagos.

Here, Portugal's ruler, Henry the Navigator, established the first naval trade routes to West Africa.

♪ In 1444, the very first enslaved Africans were brought to this square.

So, I see a statue there of Henry the Navigator who's celebrated here as some kind of visionary.

But in reality, he also started the slave trade.

So, take me back to this moment in history where Africans, right in this square, were sold like objects.

Africans buried in a mass grave were recently found here.

And today, the site has been turned into a mini-golf course.

-They were Africans?

-Yeah.

How many skeletons did you find?

How many humans?

It is very strange for me to be looking at a mini-golf, and imagining that it is a mass grave.

His hands are tied behind his back.

She's holding a baby?

Mhm.

It kind of shows you that the suffering of the Africans is not part of people's consciousness.

Instead of building a memorial here, they built a golf course.

♪ [bird caws] ♪ After navigating the jungle creek successfully, we're now deep in rural Suriname, halfway to the mouth of the Maroni River where we will search for the location of The Leusden.

Our next stop is a small town called "Albina".

Here we're meeting Dr.

Balai's colleagues who will take us to the river mouth and help in the search process.

Hi how are you, this is Jerzy Gawronski.

Long-time no see.

Kramer, nice to meet you.

I am the archeologist.

The Leusden, it is somewhere out there by the mouth of the Maroni River, so I invite you aboard and let's find it.

-Awesome.

-Okay, let's.

[waves crashing] ♪ Archeologist Jerzy Gawronski and marine expert Steve Moore have spent years researching with Dr.

Balai.

Now we're joining them in their efforts to pinpoint the location of the shipwreck and expose the story to the world.

♪ [JERZY] Okay guys.

With these historical maps together with the crew's testimony, we were able to identify several target areas for the wreck of The Leusden.

The ship arrives here around the 30th of December, 1737.

They described that they followed the coast from the east and then early morning on the first of January they saw a river mouth.

[waves crashing] There was very heavy rains, like a wall of water, very heavy winds.

[gulls chirping] And then in the fog, they saw the corner of land.

They hit a sandbank [screaming] and got stuck, they lost the rudder and there was a big massive hole.

[screaming] And at that point they knew there was no saving the ship.

They called it already in the account they called it a "wreck".

They called the ship not anymore "the ship" but they call it "the wreck".

In order to get an idea of what happened, we also have a map from that period.

This is a map from 1777 indicating more or less the situation during the wreckage.

And you see a number of sandbanks.

And on one of these sandbanks, the ship must be stuck.

Jerzy, I'm wondering with the silt and the currents going through - how that is going to affect the dive.

Well in these circumstances the visibility is reduced sometimes to zero because of the presence of all this silt floating in the water.

But let's hope for the best.

So we won't know until we get out there, huh?

No... and it can change day by day.

♪ This river mouth is huge.

Over three miles wide, so the first step in pinpointing the shipwreck is to scan the possible targets on the riverbed with a specialized metal detector.

♪ [splash] The mission now is to find a trail of metallic debris.

We go back and forth over the square mile we've targeted as the last resting place of The Leusden.

♪ The work takes days.

♪ There has never been much shipping activity in these waters.

So if we find any sign of metal, that would strengthen our theory that this is the site of the underwater wreck.

[speaking native language] The Leusden is so important for the history of the slave trade.

We have to find it.

After five days we still haven't picked up any signals.

♪ But then, suddenly... Yeah, we are coming to the end of that line, I think we got something... -Yes, there is something there.

-Yeah, yeah definitely.

We are seeing some sort of target or something magnetic down there.

We need to pull it in and have a look.

There's finally a lead, and we stop to verify the target.

Almost three hundred years after the disaster, fingers crossed, we may be floating right over the wreck.

♪ From a small business in the town of Lagos, Portugal the slave trade became a worldwide industry, creating cities like Rio de Janeiro.

♪ 4% of the enslaved were brought to North America.

The Caribbean received 36%, 14% went to Spanish America and 46% of the total came to Brazil.

During construction for the 2016 Olympic games, old ruins were discovered here.

Unveiling one of the darkest parts of Rio De Janeiro's past.

[Sadakne] This is called the "Valongo" and this dates back about two hundred years.

And the thing that might shock you to imagine, is that this is a wharf, so the water actually came all the way up to here.

So, if we had been standing here two hundred years ago, what would we have seen happening here in this wharf?

The Valongo was a port logistics infrastructure for human traffic.

If we were standing here two hundred years ago, we would have been deemed fit for market.

At that time, half of Rio De Janeiro's population was enslaved.

And you could come to the Valongo and you could buy enslaved Africans by weight.

Give me a sense of the scale, how many people were brought here?

We're talking three to four million stolen Africans over hundreds of years.

We are actually looking at the site of one of the greatest crimes of humanity.

In all of history.

In all of human history.

And just like in Portugal, the enslaved who were not of use anymore were simply discarded.

In 1996, a young couple bought this house.

And they started to dig up in the back to do some uh... improvements on the property.

And up came bones.

Bones?

And then more bones, and then more bones.

This is the cemetrey of "The New Blacks".

♪ Why does it have that name?

The New Blacks was a category of enslaved Africans.

This described the Africans who were what we might think of as "fresh off the boat".

These are the newly arrived, these are the people who barely survived the passage.

We're looking at something incredibly harrowing to see.

This is someone who was enslaved, who was a young woman around twenty years of age.

Initially, there was an intention to have a proper cemetrey with individual graves, and very quickly, this got out of hand.

And this place turned into a mass grave where bodies were just thrown into this area.

And then the residents of Rio De Janeiro, they began to throw their trash.

And then when the smell would get so bad, they'd light it on fire and burn it all down, and then start the process again.

Do we know how many Africans were disposed of in this incredibly inhumane way, in this cemetrey here.

At least 30,000.

♪ ♪ In the target area, Steve and Jerzy have managed to identify a set of coordinates as the potential location for the wreck of The Leusden.

We can see here the target we just got.

There's two passes here, identical.

So that is a definite hit ... and we've done it twice.

That's incredible.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we do know that The Leusden dropped more than one anchor, and it was carrying a number of cannons.

That's definitely something iron, an anchor, a few cannons, a cluster of shackles.

It could be something really big and really deep or it could be something not so big just under the surface.

Ah.., okay got it.

So we're in the right place, we have the right substance.

Yes, the right target, the right signal, the right everything.

Everything is right.

♪ Finally, we have a definite target and it's time to dive and see if we can find it.

♪ As the senior diver on the expedition, Kramer will go down first.

It's incredibly dangerous.

He has to try and overcome strong currents, low visibility and venomous stingrays that feed on the bottom of the riverbed.

Do you still want to put your jacket on in the water?

During the dive, there will be no direct communication between Kramer and us.

So, a rope is attached to him and, in case of an emergency, we can pull him up.

[all talking rapidly] It's just me, but it's not.

♪ I am sensing the souls of six hundred plus and I want to find them.

Kramer, let's just go over the signals.

One long pull: return the signal, "I'm okay, are you okay".

Two: "I am coming up."

Or, four: "there's a problem come up" or "we have a problem come up."

I want to be able to come up and say yes, they're here.

We've found them; we've done what Dr.

Balai called us for.

♪ To try and give them peace and hopefully, on some level, a proper burial.

[splashing] The currents are really strong, and the water is super murky.

This makes it much more difficult for Kramer and dangerous.

It'll be really hard to spot those venomous stingrays down there.

Kramer this is for sweeping on the bottom for any stingrays.

Good luck!

♪ [breathing through tank] [gentle waves] ♪ [thunder] The Leusden had hit a sandbank and was sinking in the river mouth.

[screaming] At that moment, the captain made a fateful decision.

[screaming] [hammering] [screaming] What he did was to tell the sailors to nail down the hatches.

[screaming] [screaming] He decided at that moment to murder 664 human beings.

The sailors sat on the hatches all night.

[all screaming] By morning, all the Africans below deck were dead.

Drowned in shallow waters.

Then the captain and crew took the lifeboats, and made it to shore.

[calm waves] There he is, he is on the surface.

Coming around.

♪ You alright Kramer?

How was it?

-All blacked out... -Completely black?

Can't see a thing?

Can't see a thing down there.

♪ I was feeling around, to see if I could feel something down there.

Really didn't feel anything, right but... yeah just sandy and black.

♪ This is a murder scene and the souls of over 600 Africans are down there.

So, on some level, you want to feel like you can hear them calling to you, right.

Umm... But it was just silence.

Dead silence.

[gentle waves] Diving conditions are unlikely to get any better.

Dredging is now the only remaining option.

And if we're in the right spot that would involve bringing up the bones of the dead from the river bottom.

♪ We know that most likely, directly below us is the final resting place of 664 people who were murdered.

♪ We collectively decided, that at this moment, the best thing to do is to let the dead rest.

♪ There is one thing that I can't get out of my head.

Had the Africans been set free to flee into the surrounding jungle; would they have survived?

Dr.

Balai has one more secret to share with us.

♪ Lost ships like The Leusden and millions of Africans who died didn't prevent the slave trade from gaining momentum.

There was simply too much money to be made.

Bristol was literally built on the backs of enslaved Africans.

[MARK] So, this is the key site and all the warehouses down the side here, in fact, that one still survives today.

There is the church on the horizon.

It gives you an idea of what life is like.

The cranes, the forest of ship masts.

Can you give me a sense of the numbers of slaves that were actually carried on ships built right here in Bristol?

Well we are talking up to two thousand ships would have left this very spot.

And around 600,000 people were bought into slavery by Bristol merchants on Bristol ships.

♪ I can't help but notice one name seems to be absolutely prevalent in this part of the city.

The name "Edward Colston" is literally everywhere.

He is kind of one of the revered father figures of Bristol.

And is remembered as one of the great benefactors of charities, hospitals, and schools.

But his early career was involved with the Royal African Company that was set up to trade with Africa in ivory, and in gold, and in slaves.

♪ What do you see when you look up at this statue?

Well I see one of Bristol's, I suppose favourite, honored sons, Edward Colston, who represents a period in Bristol's history.

I think we should have a much wider narrative around who he is and what he did and a better understanding of who Edward Colston is.

In many cases, when slave ships went down no money was lost.

The ship's owner would make an insurance claim for the murdered Africans.

But the economics of the system began to unravel with the British slaver "The Zong".

The crew of that ship claimed that in November of 1781, supplies onboard were running dangerously low.

♪ [shouting and struggling] [whip cracks] [shouting and struggling] [blow lands] [shouting and struggling] ♪ So they threw more than 130 Africans overboard to lighten the load.

♪ These massacres were not unusual on slave ships.

What was unusual, this time, was that the insurance company refused to pay.

♪ And the case went to court.

♪ We're here to look at the original trial documents.

♪ [JAMES] What I have dug out here is an extraordinary document.

It is the report of the court case, 1783 of the infamous Zong case.

♪ These slaves, valued at thirty pounds a man.

They threw over this part of "the cargo".

"The case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard."

[gavel slams] This is just one case that illustrates a huge industry.

Usually, I guess prior to that, you make a claim they paid it.

It was that simple.

And the court had to make a decision... do the insurers pay or not?

♪ The matter left to the jury is whether it was from "necessity".

They said the reason we are throwing them overboard, there isn't enough water.

There was a navigational error.

They overshot Jamaica.

They ran out of water.

Said they were running out of water... Said they were running out of water.

The evidence proved there was still enough water to sustain the crew and the cargo.

There clearly was water.

So that argument falls flat.

And what happened in the hearing is the bad guys lost so to speak.

They wanted money for murdering people and they didn't get the money, but they didn't lose on morality, they lost on a technicality.

It was a technicality.

That was what the case was about, isn't it?

It is about legal technicalities.

Are the murders covered by the insurance policy?

Morality in this is actually out the window.

There is no sense that this is a moral debate.

[gavel slams] The judge is Lord Mansfield?

The judge is Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice.

Held up as the great architect of maritime law in 18th century.

He rules against the owners of the ship, but these guys don't get tried for murder.

He knows that if he makes a moral judgment about slavery and the slave trade and if he said there is something dubious about this.

He knows that begins to unravel the whole economics of the Atlantic slave system.

So, this Lord Mansfield did it all on a technicality?

He didn't really care.

No maybe not.

Let me show you something that might shed a new light on Lord Mansfield in terms of what this is and what happened at the time.

Hey guys!

Introducing Dido Elizabeth Bell.

♪ She's the daughter of Lord Mansfield's nephew and he brought her to live in Lord Mansfield's house.

She was raised with his daughter.

Supposedly, as equals.

Either way, the question is whether having her in that household coloured Lord Mansfield's... - Judgement.

- Judicial action.

Well I did not expect this.

A picture like this, a painting like this in those days.

Putting them on an equal footing.

We do know that when he died, he left her an equal share of his estate.

But, at the same time: was she really equal?

She's got the tropical fruit that was very common as an accessory for African servants, in paintings belonging to the aristocracy.

She's got the turban; it says I am exotic.

She's got the big south street pearls though.

She has the pearls and she's dressed in fine clothes.

So, in a way this painting conveys the ambivalence of her status at the time.

I was angry at Lord Mansfield for ruling for the good guys but on a technicality... Now you think he is a good guy because he had a black girl living in his house?

It's not just a black girl, it's family.

He is leaving money and that puts me into his mind and I'm thinking woah, maybe at that time, the only thing he could do is find on a technicality.

This reveals his soul, and at the end of the day, the fact is he just made a ruling that was the beginning of the end of the slave trade.

Most of the time we don't hear the voices of the African people, of Black people, of people who had a history of enslavement because they haven't left written records.

All we have to go by is paintings that were commissioned by their white benefactors, or diaries left by white people who met them.

I would love to know what Dido's life was really like.

♪ There is something more I want to show you.

We are going out to a place called Akaloi Kondre.

It's a "Maroon" village, as they call it.

And the Maroons are escaped slaves?

I call them "freedom fighters" because they fought the plantation owners, killed them, went away, took people with them.

Went into the woods and started new communities.

♪ Do we wait for someone to meet us?

Yes.

We are actually going to meet descendants of the escaped slaves from the plantations here in Suriname.

♪ [speaking native language] Kinga.

Kramer.

Hi, Alannah.

♪ The air was just thick with anticipation... It was two cultures meeting... ♪ We can walk with them?

Everyone wants to be on their best behaviour, us especially, for the Captain of that village.

Is that it?

Okay, is that it?

We'll follow them.

♪ [laughing] ♪ We all sat down kind of stiff.

It was a little awkward at first.

But then the first thing the captain did was say a blessing.

And perform a libation.

Yeeha.

♪ The overwhelming thing that I got from them was a sense of pride.

They live a very meager existence, but they're happy.

They're happy and they're proud.

They're very proud people because they fought and won their freedom.

Oh, that looks delicious.

[speaking native language] This is Tomtom.

We call it Tomtom.

It is peanuts with rice.

Peanuts and rice?

It smells delicious.

That was a couple of hundred years ago, right, but they are aware of what took place, their children are aware of what took place.

They teach their history.

♪ Yeah, an overwhelming sense of pride.

♪ It made me feel good that even in the midst of all that brutality the pride and the fighting spirit of African people remained.

♪ Good?

Thank you.

♪ I couldn't help but imagine or wonder, the African captives that were on The Leusden... they could have had this life.

♪ What if?

What if they hadn't been murdered?

What if they hadn't nailed down the hatches?

If they hadn't sat on the hatches to make sure that they drowned and killed every last one of them.

They could have saved themselves.

It could have been just another Maroon village.

Baisha, do you know what country in Africa you're from or where everybody is from.

[speaking native language] They said Ghana.

Ghana is the main place where they come from.

How do they know?

[speaking native language] Their ancestors.

From their grandparents.

The other told the other and so on.

As slaves they come from there.

Baisha, have you ever been to Africa?

No... -Do you want to go?

-Yeah... If you did get the chance to go, would you call that home?

Or is this home?

When we go there, I come back to here.

This is home.

This is my home.

Aw you guys, this is it!

Captain, thank you.

♪ [all laugh] ♪