Ken Stewart first learned to scuba dive in 1989 and immediately became hooked. But by 2003, after almost 800 dives, his beloved sport had become a bit same-old, same-old.
“All the fish start looking alike,” Stewart said. “If you go from Florida to any exotic country, you’ll say, ‘oh, man, that fish looks like the same fish, or the same corals.’ There were some places that look more exotic than the other. But after a while, it becomes repetitive.”
His diving life perked up when a documentary filmmaker named Karuna Eberl contacted him. By then, Stewart, a Nashville resident, was the Southern states representative for the National Association of Black Scuba Divers. Eberl asked Stewart to put her in touch with some Black divers willing to be interviewed for her documentary “The Guerrero Project.” The slave ship Guerrero, which has still not been found, sank in 1827 somewhere around what is now Biscayne National Park in Florida.
The project led Stewart to meet the late Brenda Lanzendorf, a park archeologist at Biscayne National Park. “We became instant friends,” Stewart said. “She had this infectious personality. She was unbelievable.” Lazendorf was congressionally mandated to monitor the 41 or so wrecks in Biscayne National Park. But she was a lone diver. And she needed a diving buddy.
Back home in Nashville, Stewart had an epiphany. He sent out an email to the divers who’d become involved in the Guerrero project. “I said, ‘Are you tired of the same old diving? Let’s dive with a purpose.’ And that’s exactly how it started.” Within a year, Lazendorf and Stewart had assembled the first Diving with a Purpose (DWP) program.
Diving with a Purpose today
Now about 20 years old, DWP is a leading volunteer underwater archaeology program. It provides education, training, and project support services for submerged conservation projects and heritage preservation. DWP focuses on the African diaspora but also works on many other shipwrecks.
More than 300 people have participated in DWP. Most are repeat attendees. Every year, a DWP group dives together in Florida, documenting wrecks. The program has expanded from Biscayne National Park to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).
Stewart is involved with DWP’s spinoff program, Youth Diving with a Purpose (YWDP), which trains young divers to be archeology advocates that help document shipwrecks. Additionally, DWP consults on projects worldwide.
Underwater archeology
If you’re like me, your first vision of diving into a shipwreck includes swimming around a whole ship on the seafloor, the vessel’s name clearly written on the side, and perhaps an old skeleton still at the helm. I probably saw this in a cartoon.
“In the Keys, any wooden ship that has sunk, it’s not intact,” Stewart informed me. In addition to deterioration caused by ocean activity, undersea worms eat the wood. Instead of an intact vessel, divers explore a field of artifacts on the ocean floor. “The worms can’t eat the artifacts,” Stewart said.
Divers map the artifacts with pin flags and strings called baselines. They use trilateration mapping, which lets them determine positions using distances from at least three known points. The baseline could be 300 yards long. The divers form groups of two to work sections of the wreck. While underwater, they’re mapping, writing figures down, and even doing in situ drawings that can involve staying in the same place for an hour or more.
Part of the process is figuring out what’s an artifact and what isn’t. “Usually the artifacts have some kind of crustaceans on it, so it’s very difficult to determine what an artifact is when it’s on the ocean floor,” Stewart said. “Sometimes you can take your knife and you can hit the artifact. Oh, it sounds like metal. So you know Mother Nature didn’t make metal. So they’ll do that with every artifact along those 300 yards of baseline. Every one.” Before the divers resurface, they remove all the flags and the baseline. Two architects work with DWP to turn the divers’ info into site maps.
This kind of detailed work takes a special kind of diver. It’s not for everybody. Many divers prefer working with DWP’s conservation program, Stewart says, which is more hands-on and helps restore coral reefs.
DWP and the African diaspora
A lot of people contact DWP because they want to help document slave ships, Stewart said. However, not many have been found. Stewart has only conducted dives on three of them. “We’re laying the groundwork for people who want to be involved in the documentation of a slave wreck when and if another one is found,” he said.
The first slave ship Stewart dove was the Henrietta Marie, an English ship that carried captive Africans to the West Indies. It wrecked in 1700, 35 miles off the coast of Key West. Since it was on its way back to England, no Africans were on board. Treasure hunter Mel Fisher found it in 1972, and Stewart dove it in the late 1980s.
“The eeriness of it is what kind of gets to you,” Stewart told me.
Eventually, the cleaned-up artifacts toured the United States in a traveling exhibit called “A Slave Ship Speaks.” “The thing that really brings tears to your eyes, and everybody who has seen it, is the shackles for the children,” Stewart said. In his work with youth, Stewart tries to convey the horror of finding oneself enslaved. “I tell the children all the time, here you are walking down the street and then somebody snatches you up and takes you to another country. You never see your family again. Can you imagine that? And most kids can’t. Most people can’t.”
The National Association of Black Scuba Divers placed a plaque at the site of the Henrietta Marie. Divers can use GPS to find the plaque and the ship’s hull, which is encased in sand.
DWP has also documented Tuskegee Airmen airplanes in Michigan’s Lake Huron. The men who flew these planes were the first Black military aviators in the country. During World War II, they escorted American bombers over Italy and protected larger bombers from German planes. Fifteen of the airmen died while training over the Great Lakes. DWP was able to document the plane flown by Lieutenant Frank H. Moody. The organization also helped raise funds to place a memorial to the Tuskegee Airmen beside Lake Huron.
As for the Guerrero, the wrecked ship that inspired DWP’s creation, divers are still looking. This July, YDWP is conducting what Stewart hopes will be the final search for the ship. “I’m bringing the crème de la crème, the best that I’ve got,” he said. “These kids are dynamic.” And if they finally find the Guerrero, DWP will have a whole new chapter in its documentation mission.
Want to help? Qualified divers with more than 30 dives (or 25 for youth) are welcome to get involved with DWP. You can also donate to Diving with a Purpose here.
Want to learn more about slave ships? The Africatown Heritage House in Mobile, Alabama, is opening its new exhibit documenting the Clotilda on July 8, 2023.