The yacht Wanderer illegally landed more than 400 enslaved Africans on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November 1858. It was among the last documented ships to bring captives from Africa to the United States before the Civil War. Many survivors and descendants preserved memories that official records obscured.

The Wanderer has entered African American poetry and historical writing as evidence that the Atlantic trade continued long after its legal prohibition. Poets use the ship to connect named descendants and local landscapes with the vast abstractions of slavery statistics.