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n June 14, 2002, Dr. Corey Malcom and a small team of researchers headed out to an area of Higgs Beach, a 16-plus-acre parcel of land on the southernmost shore of Key West, Florida, with a ground-penetrating radar detector. Malcom, a historian and director of archaeology at the island’s Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, was searching for unmarked graves he believed were underfoot. He had recently come across records that dated back to 1860, documenting the burials of 295 Africans who’d been rescued from Cuba-bound slave ships by the U.S. Navy and perished on Key West’s shores, having fallen ill at sea. If the GPR detector’s radio waves bounced off an object deep underground, a unique hyperbolic reflection would appear on a screen attached to the small push mower-like machine.

“We started getting parabolas again and again and again through here,” Malcom says, gesturing with his hands across the space on a warm day last March. “We took the data, processed it, and found in this zone right here 15 graves lined up, more or less in three rows, all side by side. And it was exactly where the 1861 map said they would be.”

The discovery was only the beginning of Malcom’s years-long effort to uncover and properly commemorate the truth of what happened on that stretch of sand more than 140 years ago. “We know, OK, there’s still people missing,” Malcom says, reflecting on his reaction to the early findings. “We’ve got 15 graves; there’s 295 people that died. Where are they?”

THE U.S. OUTLAWED the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1808. Nonetheless, some American slavers continued the trade illegally, bringing kidnapped Africans to Cuba and other places outside of the United States, often hiding their ships under the Spanish flag. By 1859, the U.S. Navy had already been fighting the illegal slave trade for years, with little to no impact. But the addition of three steamships to its patrol fleet, which could maintain 10.5 knots, or 12 miles per hour, brought success. The steamers captured six slaver ships in 1860 alone. Three of those ships — the Wildfire, William, and Bogota — were towed to the closest American land: Key West. The 1,432 Africans on board, many of them sick upon arrival, were to be housed there temporarily until they could be returned to Western Africa.

Hundreds of Africans were on board the Wildfire when the USS Mohawk intercepted the ship off the coast of Cuba on April 26, 1860. Upon boarding the slave ship, Lieutenant Tunis Craven, the Mohawk’s 47-year-old captain, found 510 Africans “packed below in as dense a mass as it is possible for human beings to be crowded,” according to a letter he wrote to U.S. Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey later that year. At some point during the journey to land, the 450-odd men and boys on board were brought up on deck and sat huddled together with their heads resting on their bent knees. The women and girls remained in the hold until they reached land.

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Key West, a city of roughly 3,000 at the time, did not immediately have the room or resources to handle 500 new residents. The day the ship arrived, the sickest Africans — around 40 people — were taken ashore and treated by doctors. Each person was provided clothes by U.S. Marshal Fernando J. Moreno, who later took custody of the Africans from the William and the Bogota as well.

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The healthy Africans remained aboard the Wildfire for two additional days, until Moreno had “completed a large, airy building,” according to a reporter writing in the New York City-based political magazine Harper’s Weekly, who had traveled to Key West to document the scene. The Africans were then moved into the newly-constructed nine-room, 225-by-25-feet barracoon at Whitehead’s Point.

Today that land is called Whitehead Spit. Just eight minutes’ walk away, at the official southernmost point of the continental U.S., hundreds of thousands of people line up for a photograph with a red, black, and yellow striped buoy each year, many with no idea of the land’s true history.

THE ‘HARPER’S’ REPORTER visited the Africans again after they had moved into the housing structure. He described the kidnapped people positioning themselves much like they had been seated on board the Wildfire, squatting along the sides of the building. After some time, and “no small efforts,” the reporter wrote, Moreno and his assistants managed to convince the Africans that they were free to roam the building and the island. Before long, the Africans would go out all together to bathe in the sea each day, according to historian Jefferson B. Brown in his 1912 book Key West: The Old and the New.

On May 11, 1860, the William arrived, bringing an additional 550 Africans to Key West, followed by the Bogota two weeks later. At that point, Key West’s population had grown by 50 percent in less than a month — a situation that was deemed untenable.

Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson wrote to President James Buchanan on May 21, 1860, that “it is of the highest importance that early measures be taken for [the Africans’] removal from Key West.” Buchanan forwarded this letter, and his own, to the House of Representatives, writing that Key West, “both on account of a deficiency of water and provisions, and its exposure to yellow fever, is one of the worst spots” for the rescued Africans to be housed.

Buchanan was right. The Wildfire had not been docked for long before its population suffered their first death. It was May 1, 1860; a child, just six weeks old. The child’s mother, who “was barely in her teens,” according to the Key of the Gulf newspaper, had likely given birth while on board the Wildfire. The infant, whose sex is not known, was far from the last of the group to die, but their funeral was among the only recorded. 

The service was afforded a brief description in the newspaper. Approximately 100 Africans, including the child’s mother, were present, with the interment taking place “some distance” from where the Africans were housed. Key West locals provided a coffin for the child. 

A shallow grave was dug into Higgs Beach, on a stretch of sand located just across the road from what is now one of the only dog parks in Key West. According to the Key of the Gulf account, the Africans sang and chanted, performing their native ceremony on a beach almost 7,000 miles from their homes. Wails and moans of grief interspersed the chanting, until the small coffin was lowered into the grave. When the chanting stopped, the gathered people walked silently back to their building.

The next 85 days saw at least one death almost every day; there were just four days on which no death was recorded. The population of the William saw 171 deaths, the Wildfire 96, and the Bogota 28. Each burial was carried out by local carpenter Daniel Davis, and each African buried in a shallow grave on Higgs Beach. U.S. Marshal Moreno kept detailed records, logging which ship each deceased person had arrived on. It was those records which Corey Malcom came upon in 2002, inspiring his search for the burial ground.

IN 2007, THE SITE UNCOVERED by Malcom and his team was fitted with a cement foundation that was later painted with a mural depicting the Africans’ journey across the Atlantic, from Congo to Key West, and surrounded by sculptures with African symbols. “On the columns are different West African symbols,” Malcom says. “With some assumptions, these are philosophies that would have informed the lives of those [buried] here.”

Right next to the site is a red-brick structure owned by the Key West Garden Club. Formerly, it was a portion of a Civil War-era fort, the West Martello Tower. By August 1861, Key West had concerns of being attacked by the rest of the state, being one of the only places in Florida to remain Union throughout the war. A number of defensive forts were planned across the island, including one to be erected right where the Africans had been buried. Before construction began, the government was repeatedly informed about the gravesite.

“There are two minor objections to your site No. 2, which I will indicate,” U.S. Army Captain E. B. Hunt wrote to his superiors in Washington in September 1861. “1st it is the burying grounds where some 300 Africans were buried last year.”

Despite Hunt’s protests, the fort’s construction began in 1862. As excavations for the foundation got underway, bones and decomposing bodies were found, releasing a horrid odor and spreading yellow fever across the island. With that and, soon enough, the end of the Civil War, construction of the red-brick fort was halted; the half-finished building is what remains today.

When Malcom began his work in 2002, it was not immediately clear what had happened to the decomposing bodies dug up during the Martello Tower’s construction. But in 2010, Monroe County, where Key West is located, sponsored further surveys of the land by Malcom’s team.

The researchers found another hundred graves. A few were on the beach to the west of the fort; some just 10 feet north of it. These graves, like those officially commemorated on Higgs Beach, likely hadn’t been disturbed during the fort’s construction. The rest, however, were discovered across the road under a 120-by-60-square-foot patch of grass, part of which served as a dog park. Malcom says these bodies are almost certainly those that were encountered in 1862, when the fort was initially being built, and relocated nearby. 

Seemingly little care was taken to rebury the bodies whole; an ossuary pit with an undetermined number of bones was also identified under that same patch of grass. It is still unknown if all 295 people are accounted for; more remains might lie under the road between the beach and the dog park, while some may have been lost to time and the elements.

“This was a dog park,” Malcom says, still sounding stunned. “We were surveying, [and] there were dogs running all around us. And it became pretty clear: You can’t have a dog park on the burial ground.”

Since 2010, the dog park fence has been pushed back, leaving that unsuspecting 120-by-60-square-foot patch of grass as one of the only remaining green spaces on Key West. A 2011 plan released by Monroe County proposed moving the road farther north and thus redrawing the parameters of the burial ground significantly, but the plan was never enacted.

The future of the unmarked cemetery is uncertain. On May 1, a transfer of ownership of the Clarence S. Higgs Memorial Beach Park from Monroe County to the city of Key West was finalized. As part of the agreement, more than $3 million will be transferred to the city for long-term beach cleaning and maintenance, seawall repair, and upgrades to West Martello Tower. What that could mean for the graves is unknown.

But many believe the work of commemorating the burial site is not finished. Kamau Sadiki, a retired civil engineer and a certified dive and SCUBA instructor who researches wrecked slave ships, emphasizes the need to document the slave trade despite — and even because of — any trauma or shame that may be associated with it.

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“These 15 to 20 million people that had this experience — deep, deep trauma … We can see it manifest in our society today, among descendants of those individuals,” Sadiki says. “We have to engage it. We have to remember. We have to deeply understand it if we want to come up with solutions that we all can live with going forward.”

“Without memory,” Sadiki says, “there’s no future.”