Texas researchers have discovered the wreck of the slave ship Trouvadore, which slammed into a reef off the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean Sea in 1841, freeing the 193 Africans who were being taken to the U.S. South for a life of servitude.

It is the only known wreck of a ship involved in the illegal slave trade, said marine archaeologist Don Keith, president of the underwater archaeology institute Ships of Discovery in Corpus Christi.

One of the female Africans on board was shot by the crew, but the rest escaped and were rescued by local authorities. Their descendants might now make up a significant proportion of the 30,000 residents of the British island territory.

The Spanish crew was captured and sent to Cuba for trial. The members' fate is unknown.

The team also found the wreck of the U.S. brig Chippewa, a War of 1812 naval vessel that had been pressed into service to patrol the Caribbean and stop the African slave trade. It sank in 1816 after striking the same reef and was identified by its unique "carronades," a form of cannon.

"We have the two halves of a cat-and-mouse game of illegal slave ship trade," Keith said this week at a news conference organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which partially funded the search.

The Trouvadore had been largely forgotten by the islands' natives, Keith added.

But in 1993, Keith and the late Grethe Seim, founder of the Turks and Caicos National Museum, found an 1878 letter - now stored at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington - describing the sale of two glass-eyed, wooden African dolls. The dolls were said to have come from the wreck of a slaver, and the letter gave details about the location of the shipwreck and its passengers.

The letter said the ship went down near a local landmark called Black Rock on the coast of East Caicos. Eventually, the team found the remains of the ship in nine feet of water about two miles west of Black Rock, where it apparently had been pushed by wind and current. The wreck had been stripped for salvage, but careful measurement of the hull remains provided the link.

"We have compelling evidence that this is the Trouvadore," Keith said.