Photograph by Yarminiah Rosa/National Geographic
Imagine mistaking a colorful fish as friendly until it unceremoniously bites a chunk of your finger off as you hold up your hands to block your face. Congratulations, you’ve been initiated as an underwater adventurer.
Such was the case for Tara Roberts, a storyteller, author, and award-winning, globe-trotting explorer—frequently underwater. Roberts, who lives in Atlanta, is a National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence, a program that supports individuals doing unique and meaningful work around the world, helping them share their research with a wider audience.
Roberts has spent much of the past six years below the sea, exploring shipwrecks that date back to the transatlantic slave trade. Her new book, Written in the Waters: A Memoir of History, Home and Belonging, is a reflective quest through history, equal parts memoir and narrative reporting, which explores the ocean and the way it bears silent witness to the atrocities of our colonial past.
“If you’re willing to take the leap, the universe catches you,” Roberts says of her unique career. Several years ago, while living in Washington, D.C., she learned about Diving With a Purpose, an all-Black scuba-diving team and volunteer archaeology group focused on preserving Black maritime history.
Ever a risk-taker, Roberts leapt at the chance to join them, becoming scuba certified and mapping shipwrecks off the coasts of Mozambique, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. She developed that experience into a podcast, Into the Depths, which was produced by National Geographic.
Roberts’s new book dives deeper into the waters of history—and into the impact of slavery on her own family’s story. She was initially resistant to investigating her own lineage: “It wasn’t until I met the descendants of the Clotilda,” she says, that she was inspired to hire a genealogist and dive into her family’s past.
The remains of the Clotilda, the last known ship to ferry enslaved Africans to the United States, were discovered in 2019 at the bottom of the Mobile River in Alabama. The ship belonged to Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher and was captained by William Foster, who sailed to the Kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Benin and purchased 110 captives kidnapped from other tribes. Foster covertly traveled with them back to Mobile in 1860, decades after the United States had banned the international slave trade (domestic trade remained legal until the Civil War).
After the war and abolition of slavery, 32 of the 110 people who were trafficked on the Clotilda worked for nine years and pooled their money, $300 total, to buy 57 acres in Alabama from the Meaher family to build a thriving community called Africatown.
Roberts came to know many of the descendants of Africatown and learn the stories and traditions their families had passed down with pride from generation to generation. “I realized their [enslaved ancestors’] lives were about more than their pain,” says Roberts.
Written in the Waters uncovers sunken legacies eager to be brought to light. While the book is about the complexities of Black identity, the harrowing history is a worthy read for everyone. “These stories are important for us collectively,” says Roberts. “It’s important for the world to hear them.”
This article appears in our March 2025 issue.
