The Guerrero had made it all the way from Nigeria to the Bahamas. A Spanish slave ship bound for Cuba, it was veering south toward Havana when an English antislavery schooner, the Nimble, spotted its sail on December 17, 1827. The two ships were locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse. The Nimble was armed with 8 cannons, but the far more heavily powered Guerrero’s 14 guns could have blown the English patrol ship sky-high with a single broadside. The slaver’s captain preferred not to risk losing the payday his precious human cargo promised.
Trying to zigzag through the Florida Keys’ razor-sharp reefs was a deadly blunder for the Guerrero. Bad navigation aside, the ship had no business being there in the first place. The transatlantic slave trade was all but over. Britain and the United States had banned it for 20 years. That great profiteer, England, had turned from trafficking to policing, dispatching a Royal Navy squadron to patrol the high seas. Its mission was to seek and destroy slavers and free their captives.
The Nimble was cruising the Straits of Florida when it noticed a lone straggler. The Guerrero was sailing through Orange Cay in the Bahamas, down the Straits of Florida under the command of Captain José Gomez, in hopes of dodging the British patrolling Cuba’s north coast. It almost made it. Havana’s slave markets lay just 250 miles away.
Six miles off Key Largo, Florida, the Guerrero pretended to surrender. Then it sped off. Day turned to night. Cat and mouse fired relentlessly. All the while, the strong breeze propelled the combatants toward the Florida Keys, where all hell broke loose. On December 19, the Guerrero smashed onto a low-lying coral reef as sharp as a barbed wire fence. Its masts fell, and the hull ripped open. Forty-one of the 561 West African captives drowned, their cries “appalling beyond description,” according to a local newspaper report.
The screams echoed across two miles of ocean where the Nimble had also fallen foul of the Keys’ razor-sharp reefs. While the Guerrero turned over and started to slowly sink into the Atlantic, the Nimble’s well-drilled naval crew set about lightening the ship’s load to float away from imminent destruction.
Nearly two centuries later, in 2019, silver dive tanks gleamed in the early morning sun as divers checked that their mouthpieces were free of blockage. Orange hard cases secured high-tech metal detectors waiting to peer beneath the sands for the faintest trace of a 19th-century wreck.