This article considers how enslaved salvage divers cooperated and conspired with slaveholders and white employers to salvage shipwrecks and often smuggle recovered goods into homeports, permitting them to exchange their expertise for semi-independent lives of privileged exploitation. Knowing harsh treatment could preclude diving, white salvagers cultivated reciprocal relationships with divers, promoting arduousness by avoiding coercive discipline while nurturing a sense of mutual obligation arising from collective responsibilities and material rewards. Enslaved salvagers were, in several important ways, treated like free, wage-earning men. They were well fed, receiving daily allowances of fresh meat. Most resided in seaports, were hired out, and received equal shares of recovered goods, allowing many to purchase their freedom and that of family members. Divers produced spectacular amounts of wealth for their mother countries, owners, and colonial governments, especially in the maritime colonies of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cayman Islands. Their expertise was not confined to maritime colonies. Even as plantation slavery was taking root during the mid-seventeenth century, salvage divers provided an important source of income for planter-merchants.

中文翻译：

---

水线以下的历史：被奴役的打捞潜水员在早期现代大西洋收获海港的后海

本文探讨了被奴役的打捞潜水员如何与奴隶主和白人雇主合作并密谋打捞沉船，并经常将回收的货物走私到母港，使他们能够用他们的专业知识换取特权剥削的半独立生活。知道严厉的待遇可能会妨碍潜水，白人打捞者与潜水员建立了互惠关系，通过避免强制性纪律来促进艰巨性，同时培养集体责任和物质奖励产生的相互义务感。在几个重要方面，被奴役的打捞者被视为自由的、挣工资的人。他们吃得很好，每天都能吃到新鲜的肉。大多数人居住在海港，被租用，并获得同等份额的回收货物，允许许多人购买他们的自由和家庭成员的自由。潜水员为他们的母国、所有者和殖民政府创造了大量财富，特别是在百慕大、巴哈马和开曼群岛的海洋殖民地。他们的专长不仅限于海上殖民地。即使种植园奴隶制在 17 世纪中叶扎根，打捞潜水员也为种植园主提供了重要的收入来源。