The "The Search May Never End!" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Leafing through my latest AARP magazine when I turned the page and saw a fellow dressed in a wet suit with what appeared to be a pair of air tanks on his back.  The 30 point type under his photograph read: "A Dive Into a Painful Past."  As I began reading I realized the story was about a gentleman named Ken Stewart who was a retired customer engineer who began a search for underwater traces of the slave trade.  I couldn't stop reading until I had read the entire article as well as Googled his Tennessee-based nonprofit organization known as Diving With A Purpose (DWP).

Logo for the group "Diving With A Purpose."

 Ken was one of the  two founders of the organization along with the late Brenda Lanzendorf, who was the park archeologist for Biscayne National Park.  Most of the initial members were African-American, though present-day participants are very diverse.  Ken's interest into diving for slave ships began when he first explored a slave ship in 2004.  The ship was the Henrietta Marie which had run aground off the coast of Florida in 1700.

Ken Stewart, co-founder of Diving With a Purpose.

 He said, "I was overwhelmed with emotion: I could feel the souls of the Africans who had been held captive on the ship.  I decided to form a nonprofit, Diving With a Purpose, to teach veterans and young divers how to identify and document underwater shipwrecks."  Later that year, he and Brenda founded DWP.  During the past four years DWP and the National Park Service have been surveying the Biscayne National Park, searching for the Spanish slave ship known as the Guerrero.  The Guerrero was an infamous slave ship that had wrecked in December of 1827 on a reef in North Key Largo.  The ship had been kidnapped by Cuban pirates and was on it's way to Havana to sell the slaves.  When the ship went down it carried 561 Africans who were chained and bound to the ship.  41 of the slaves went down with the ship.  Almost 200 years later the wreck has yet to be positively identified.  Brenda had told Stewart and the trainees of the DWP ship that she would show them where the Guerrero was, but she unfortunately took it to her grave when she died in 2009.

Members of DWP diving for slave ships.

 Ken said, "I don't know if she did know or not, but to this day, we have not found it.  Ken and his members of DWP have last tried to find the ship in 2018 and have still not located it.  People all over the world have come to participate in DWP's training program, hoping to dive on a slave ship.  Ken said, "Only six have been found or known, and two are still in the Keys.  One is the Henrietta Marie, 35 miles off of Key West, and the other, we think is the Guerrero, wherever it is.  Stewart never learned the details about slavery or the African diaspora during high school.  When he eventually did, he knew he just had to find remnants from that horrible period in history and will continue to search until he can answer those questions.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.