Over the years, the hunt for the remains of the last ship known to have brought enslaved people into the United States has been fraught with a mix of tumult and hope.

There was a discovery last year of wreckage that, after much excitement and international headlines, was determined a false alarm. Hopes were raised, then dashed, then raised again — not only among marine archaeologists, but also among the descendants of the ship’s human cargo, many of whom make their homes in a tiny South Alabama community called Africatown.

Then, on Wednesday, came an announcement from the Alabama Historical Commission: Another shipwreck, one of many marooned under a muddy stretch of the Mobile River, was almost certainly the Clotilda, a wooden vessel of horrors that carried 110 Africans to the United States in 1860, more than a half-century after the importation of slaves was declared illegal.

The find, historians said, revives a story of unspeakable cruelty, but also the story of a people who somehow survived this indignity and many others like it.