Ocean of Bones: The Hunt for the Pirate Slave Ship Guerrero

by David Kushner

In the tradition of Shadow Divers and The Wager, the incredible true story of the pirate slave ship Guerrero, which wrecked in the Florida Keys, and the scuba divers who tracked it down nearly 200 years later.

In 1827, the brig Guerrero was racing across the Florida Straits with 561 kidnapped Africans in its hold. Though Britain and the United States had banned the Atlantic slave trade, outlaw captains like José Gomez still attempted to get around their Navy patrols and make for Cuba, where markets remained open. The Spanish captain was particularly ruthless—not only a trader, but a pirate, who didn’t hesitate to use his terror-inspiring fourteen-gun ship with a dragonhead on the prow to steal captives from other vessels.

In 2004, Ken Stewart, a Black diver and Vietnam veteran, learned that the Guerrero might still be in American waters. He marshalled a group he called Diving with a Purpose to go looking for the shipwreck, not only as a historic site but as a graveyard of buried stories that demanded recovery. In partnership with Corey Malcom—a marine archeologist whose affiliation with a famous Floridian treasure hunter made some initially wary of his motives—the group began to piece together what happened to the survivors of the Guerrero. The saga they uncovered involved President John Quincy Adams, an African princess turned American slaveholder, and the founders of Liberia. It was a tale of tragedy as well as survival, connecting ancestors and descendants across thousands of miles of ocean.

Ocean of Bones is a powerful and thrilling book that immerses readers in two connected one in the 19th century, and one in the 21st. It illuminates a forgotten history that reminds you why the lessons of the past must be kept alive in the present, and tells a story that will stick with you for a lifetime.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication November 3, 2026

About the author

David Kushner is an award-winning journalist and author. He is a contributing editor of Wired, Rolling Stone, and Spectrum and is an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.

Reviews

[Lydia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read an advanced copy of this book provided by Edelweiss.

This is such a good fucking book. It's an oversimplification of this book to just describe it as about the discovery of the wreck of the slave ship Guerrero because this book is actually about so much more: the racially divided history of scuba as a hobby, the empowering effect of having agency and responsibility, the detrimental environmental and historical effects of shipwreck hunting, the cultural impact of restoring the history of enslaved Africans and re-establishing the connections between the communities men, women, and children were kidnapped from with the communities built by the African diaspora pre- and post-slavery. This book contains multiple threads that a reader can pull on and start following down infinite Wikipedia rabbit holes. I cried so many times.

Really my only critique -- and it could very well be because the ARC I got was rough with lots of formatting errors, repeated sentences, etc. that makes me think editing isn't completed -- is that this book was kinda... short? It's a lot of summaries of a lot of things -- summaries of the lives of people involved, summaries of books they've written, summaries of historical events. It's not a very deep book -- I suspect for the depth I'm looking for I need to read Dr. Artemus Gaye's A TOSSED AMERICAN PIE: THE CONTROVERSIAL CONCEPTION AND CREATION OF LIBERIA BY WHITE AMERICANS, BLACK REPATRIATES AND LIBERATED AFRICANS or the report of the Guerrero's identification by Corey Malcolm.