On September 19, 1861, a steamboat caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, two nautical miles from the Yucatán port town of Sisal. There were dozens of confirmed casualties, passengers and crew alike. But the full death toll will likely never be known, because the enslaved Indigenous Maya people held on the ship were never counted in the first place—they were simply listed as cargo. Archaeologists from Mexico’s Sub-Directorate of Underwater Archaeology (Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática, or SAS) announced recently that they’d identified the underwater remains of this…
