Welcome to Women Who Travel.

I'm Lale Aricoglu, and today I'm vicariously going scuba diving across four continents

to look for sunken ships.

My guest is writer and National Geographic Explorer, Tara Roberts.

There were 12,000 ships that brought Africans to the Americas.

There were approximately 1.8 million Africans who died just in the crossing.

We're not talking about the number of people who died on the march to the ships or the number of people who died once they arrived and were enslaved, just in the ocean.

And I wonder, like, who's acknowledging that loss of life? and were enslaved just in the ocean.

And I wonder, like, who's acknowledging that loss of life?

Who's grieving that?

And that's a grief that doesn't belong to the United States alone.

Like, that is a global grief.

I couldn't name a single one of those ships when I was growing up, but I could tell you about the Mayflower, the Titanic, but I couldn't name a single one of those ships.

That didn't feel right to me.

Tara's book, written in the Waters, a memoir of history, home and belonging, came out earlier

this year. It's a life-changing personal journey, but it's also an adventure. So the year was

2016. Nothing happened that year. Nothing happened that year. It was a very quiet year.

Yeah.

I just moved to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I'm from.

And I was unhappy.

I've been doing a lot of work in my life around gender equity.

But in 2016, it felt like all of these issues around race had just become so

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