Original subtitles

NARRATOR: They're watching you.

More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.

Every day, they uncover new mysterious phenomena

that defy explanation.

The ship-killing monsters of the Bermuda Triangle.

Every legend is usually based on

at least a little nugget of truth.

NARRATOR: The CIA site that doesn't exist.

MUNOZ: It's pretty clear classified operations

take place on the property.

NARRATOR: And America's forgotten apocalypse.

This was a really big disaster.

But no one seems to know about it.

NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.

What on Earth are they?

[theme music playing]

**

NARRATOR: Every day, NASA's fleet of 26

Earth-observing satellites circle the globe,

capturing every square mile of our planet in

incredible detail.

Yet this is just one part of the space

agency's mission to map our world from the heavens.

Satellites are great for showing us pictures of

what's happening on the surface of our planet.

But they can do so much more.

NARRATOR: By using computer modeling to

combine data from satellites

and ocean-based instruments,

scientists capture something truly incredible.

RUBEN: What we're seeing is the movement of ocean currents

but on an epic global scale.

NARRATOR: The data has revealed what is

invisible to us on Earth --

tens of thousands of currents traveling across

some 41 million square miles of ocean.

FANARA: This is absolutely gorgeous.

It looks like a Van Gogh painting.

KOUROUNIS: This is really remarkable.

You would never be able

to perceive this without satellite technology.

NARRATOR: A patch of turbulent ocean

intrigues analysts.

KOUROUNIS: The first thing that really catches

my attention are these swirling whirlpools.

There are dozens of them out there.

NARRATOR: What's weird is that the mysterious

whirlpools are concentrated around an area

some call the Hoodoo Sea.

Others know it as the Bermuda Triangle.

This stretch of water from Miami to the island of

Bermuda down to Puerto Rico

is said to be the most treacherous in the world.

NARRATOR: Reports of strange phenomena

in these waters date back to 1492,

when Christopher Columbus describes seeing lights

and flames in the skies.

Since then, the 500,000-square-mile triangle has

claimed hundreds of ships and thousands of lives.

Mariners have talked of terrifying maelstroms,

capable of sucking ships down to the sea floor.

Legends of giant whirlpools have been around for centuries.

KOUROUNIS: This satellite imagery really reminds me of

some of those old tales, and every legend is

usually based on at least a little nugget of truth.

NARRATOR: Analysts wonder if the satellite data can shed

light on some of the strange disappearances

reported in the Bermuda Triangle.

KOUROUNIS: Looking at the image, something really stands out

to me in that a lot of these swirls

are happening around the edges of the most powerful

current in that part of the Atlantic,

the Gulf Stream.

First charted by Benjamin Franklin in 1775,

the Gulf Stream forces vast amounts of warm water up

the coast of Florida and onwards towards Newfoundland

and western Europe.

It can transport four billion cubic feet of water per second,

more than all the world's rivers combined.

KOUROUNIS: As that water flows around

the underwater topography,

these mountains, these valleys, that we never see,

because they're submerged beneath the waves,

you end up with these rotating currents that can spin

in one spot on a gigantic scale.

NARRATOR: Recent studies have discovered that

these colossal gyres have parallels

with a phenomenon that's just as mysterious

as the Bermuda Triangle.

Amazingly, mathematicians have

found similarities between

these giant whirlpools and black holes in space.

The way they suck in water is similar to the way

a black hole sucks in light.

Just as light cannot escape from a black hole,

the water cannot escape from the gyre.

NARRATOR: Scientists believe black holes form

when the core of a dying star,

sometimes a million times more massive than our sun,

collapses in on itself,

creating gravitational forces

so powerful that they deflect all light

and force it to travel in endless circles.

The light just sort of orbits the black hole.

Einstein called this a photon sphere,

and it effectively creates a barrier

from anything else trying to get into that vortex.

Water traveling around in circles creates a closed loop,

trapping water inside it,

so wherever it travels, there's no escape from these

giant whirlpools.

NARRATOR: In the Bermuda Triangle,

another phenomenon could increase the power of

these vortices.

The hurricanes that sweep through this region

every year can supercharge these swirling whirlpools,

creating gyres that can cover thousands of square miles

and contain billions of gallons of water.

RUBEN: It's like if you just release a fire hose

in the middle of a field, it's going to go everywhere.

You end up with these currents going around

and around and effectively trapping the water inside them.

NARRATOR: In 2012, scientists attempt to study

these epic vortices by launching

underwater probes in the Sargasso Sea

on the edge of the triangle.

One of the instruments is irretrievably lost,

sucked deep into the ocean,

suggesting the true power of the swirling currents lies

beneath the surface.

The real danger of these whirlpools are called

deep eddies, and those pose a serious threat

for underwater vehicles.

Deep eddies are like underwater tornadoes and can

stretch thousands of feet into the abyssal depths.

And what makes them even

more terrifying is that they're invisible.

In 2014, a Chinese submarine got caught up in one of

these oceanic vortices and started to suck it down

into the depths.

The captain of this sub actually described it like

a fast car spinning off the side of a cliff.

If they hadn't acted swiftly in closing valves

and releasing gas to increase the submarine's buoyancy,

that sub would have been crushed like a can.

NARRATOR: Any connection between these sub-sea cyclones

and the disappearances reported

in the Bermuda Triangle remains unclear.

Yet the satellite data has revealed

extraordinary hidden forces within our oceans,

forces that as well as sustaining life

can also destroy it.

It just shows you the immense power

of these gyres and why it's so important we track them.

NARRATOR: Coming up, New Mexico's atomic hell.

This isn't just the site of a radioactive spill.

It's the biggest on U.S. soil.

NARRATOR: And World War Weird.

The absolute audacity continues to blow my mind.

NARRATOR: May 15, 2020.

A camera orbiting New Mexico

captures something in the landscape below.

HEIMLER: What we're seeing is a pattern of six

perfect circles that don't have any business being there.

It looks like a six-shooter cylinder

imprinted onto the Earth.

NARRATOR: To Martin Morgan,

this resemblance maybe more than a coincidence.

MORGAN: The first thing that comes to mind when you think

about strange things in the New Mexico desert is

military testing.

NARRATOR: Over the years, the vast empty spaces of

New Mexico have been ground zero for some of

the U.S. Military's most dangerous experiments.

These include the detonation of The Gadget, the world's

first nuclear device.

The test firing of captured Nazi rockets.

And Project Mogul, rumored to be

the origin of the Roswell incident.

So you've got a legacy of military testing of

the most cutting-edge quality taking place in New Mexico.

But then there's also Kirtland Air Force Base.

NARRATOR: The 80-square-mile Kirtland Air Force Base

is the closest major military installation

to the site in the image and is a center

of nuclear weapons research,

including clandestine biological

and chemical weapons testing.

What's interesting is when I look into the records,

the people around this area had been getting sick.

They saw things like cancer.

They saw things like kidney disease.

CAVELL: It begs the question of do those illnesses have

something to do with the circles that we're seeing here.

NARRATOR: When analysts turn to historic images,

they spot a clue.

PEPPER: I can see these large piles of

what looks like sand -- checking the geological records,

I see that this area is really rich in uranium.

It has to be some sort of mine.

NARRATOR: The records reveal the shapes in the image

were once part of the Church Rock uranium mine.

And in 1979, it is the site of a catastrophic accident,

one that continues to plague the health

of those living nearby to this day.

PEPPER: This isn't just the site of a radioactive spill.

It's the biggest on U.S. soil.

NARRATOR: The disaster has its origins

some 3.5 decades earlier.

the nuclear bombs that devastate the cities

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War II to an end

and kickstart the atomic age.

In the middle of the 20th century,

the demand for uranium went sky high.

NARRATOR: The U.S. government needs uranium to make bombs.

But the demand for the element

extended well beyond the military.

PEPPER: Uranium was considered a new wonder material.

It was worth a huge amount of money,

so people came in droves looking for it

and prospecting for it.

NARRATOR: The government offers the equivalent of

a $100,000 bonus to anyone who discovers uranium ore.

And when vast reserves are found in the deserts of

New Mexico, dozens of mines

spring up across the state, searching for

the radioactive treasure.

The potential to become very, very wealthy very, very quickly

through uranium mining

set off a tidal wave of industry and mining operations

being set up all over the region.

ANNOUNCER: At $7 a pound, the uranium search

rivals the Old West's gold rush.

NARRATOR: Much of New Mexico's uranium

lies under Native American reservations,

including Church Rock.

In 1968, the largest underground uranium mine in the country

opens here, employing 200

Navajo workers who produce more than 200,000 tons of

uranium oxide a year.

When processing uranium ore, you're left with

something called tailings,

and those were stored in these large, open ponds.

Because this stuff is so toxic, it needs to be kept

secure and if it isn't,

it can lead to disaster.

NARRATOR: On July 16, 1979,

a tailings pond at the mine collapses,

releasing 1,100 tons of radioactive debris

and 95 million gallons of toxic

waste water into the Puerco River.

HEIMLER: This isn't just a trickle of

radioactive waste coming out of the dam.

This is a raging torrent flowing down into the river.

NARRATOR: The catastrophe releases

three times more radiation than

the reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island that same year.

This was a really big disaster,

but no one seems to know about it.

And so we're left with one question, why?

Why is Three Mile Island so familiar,

and this one remains completely obscure?

NARRATOR: Like the mine workers,

the local people affected by

the Church Rock spill are almost all Navajo.

Despite the scale of the disaster,

authorities fail to order an evacuation or declare

a state of emergency.

They carried on with life as normal.

They kept drinking from wells,

they kept rearing their livestock, unaware that this had

been contaminated with radioactive material.

PEPPER: The Navajo people are dependent on their livestock,

and so when they actually

took them to butcher, the fat had turned yellow

from all this radioactivity.

NARRATOR: Church Rock's owners begin a cleanup operation.

Yet only one percent of the spill is removed by

the time they reopen the mine just

three months later.

PEPPER: The cleanup plan was just

literally hands putting materials into buckets.

NARRATOR: In 2011, the land around the mine

is declared safe, but cleanup continues underground.

Yet since the disaster, one in six

Navajo workers have developed lung cancer, and large numbers

of local children suffer from birth defects.

Some believe the disaster's toxic legacy, like

the circles in the image, is being erased from history.

This is the largest spill in U.S. history,

yet it's relatively unknown,

and I would hate to think that the fact that it is unknown

is related to the land that it was on of the Navajo nation.

NARRATOR: Coming up,

inside the CIA's top-secret spy school.

You're taught how to get yourself out of any

and every scenario.

NARRATOR: And the mystery of the white mountain.

HORTON: Something's going on here

that's nothing to do with snow.

NARRATOR: August 2018.

A satellite scanning a highly classified Department of

Defense facility in Virginia captures something out of place.

ALBERTSON: When I look down at this image,

I see some things that makes sense

and some that don't.

On the one hand, I see an airfield, that makes sense.

And I also see this strange squiggly line.

NARRATOR: The weird, twisting shapes don't

appear to serve a military purpose.

MUNOZ: Some of them look like paved roads.

Others look like dirt tracks, but they don't lead anywhere.

They're almost in, like, a loop.

NARRATOR: Officially, there are no units

stationed at the facility,

but reports dating back many years contradict this claim.

Locals talk about hearing automatic gunfire

and things like that on a regular basis

inside the confines of the space.

[gunshots blasting]

MUNOZ: It's pretty clear that some classified types

of operations take place on the property.

NARRATOR: The veil of secrecy surrounding the site is

shattered when a local news agency drops a bombshell.

PAVELEC: A newspaper breaks the story

that this is a training facility

for CIA operatives that they have

nicknamed "The Farm."

NARRATOR: Declassified intelligence documents reveal

the 10,000-acre site

is one of four top-secret CIA training facilities.

They all trace their origin back to

perhaps the most catastrophic intelligence failure

in U.S. history, Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor is such an enormous shock

that almost immediately,

you get pretty extreme measures taken by

the U.S. government.

NARRATOR: Blindsided by Japan's attack,

President Roosevelt orders the creation

of the Office of Strategic Services,

or OSS.

After the war, the OSS

morphs into the CIA.

It's given a vast budget

and controversial powers to collect intelligence

and perform covert operations

to defend U.S. security.

Agents on the ground have to make contacts with

individuals who are willing to sell out their own government.

They are the ones on the front lines

recruiting assets,

gathering raw information to be processed into

actionable intelligence.

NARRATOR: At the site in the image,

recruits are put through an elite

training course known as the Clandestine Service

Trainee Program.

[indistinct shouting]

Though CIA staff records are classified,

it's rumored only a select few of

its estimated 22,000 employees ever enter The Farm.

Lindsay Moran was one of them.

Not everybody who works for the CIA gets sent to The Farm.

The Farm is a pressure cooker.

It's a place where you train specifically for

the clandestine service

and specifically for undercover and covert

activities overseas.

NARRATOR: Behind these walls, operatives are

plunged into a fictional foreign nation.

Inside a replica embassy building,

they are put through a crash course of spy skills,

including code breaking and how to recruit assets.

You're gonna need social situations training, where you

collect intelligence

at everything from an embassy party

to an academic conference.

You're gonna need things that teach

aspects of exploiting and disseminating intelligence.

NARRATOR: Moran reveals the twisting shapes in the image

are from one of The Farm's most intense training exercises --

the defensive driving course.

[engine revving]

Here, operatives engage in high-speed chases

and learn how to detect roadside bombs and deal

with ambushes.

MORAN: The common nickname for the CIA's

defensive driving course was Crash and Burn.

You're taught how to drive fast and under pressure

to increase your confidence

in being able to get yourself out of

any and every scenario.

I started as a polite driver, and I ended up

as a rather aggressive driver and remain one to this day.

[tires squealing]

NARRATOR: After six months at The Farm,

a siren sounds across the camp.

[siren wailing]

Trainees are told to stop what they're doing, leave,

and, if they do their job correctly, disappear.

MORAN: The Farm is critical, not just to every

individual operative, but to the agency as a whole,

because these are the people

who tended to keep America safe.

NARRATOR: Coming up, jailhouse rock.

KAYS: They ended up attracting fugitives from the law

with no questions asked.

NARRATOR: And the weird swamp cipher.

It looks like a puzzle that's been stamped

into the swamp land.

NARRATOR: Autumn 2018, satellites scanning

the Apuan Alps

in Italy uncover a mystery 400 miles below.

DENNIE: This looks like a typical Alpine image,

but if I look at images of the same mountain range through

the seasons, the snow never goes away.

HORTON: Something's going on here in these mountains

that's nothing to do with snow.

NARRATOR: A detailed examination of the landscape confirms

that these are no ordinary Alpine peaks.

HORTON: I can see the roads zigzagging

their way up the valleys.

I can see industrial works and activities.

DENNIE: Based on the fact that this is an extremely white rock,

I think what we're looking at here is marble being quarried.

NARRATOR: Geological records confirm

that this is the Carrara quarry,

a vast marble mountain where 13,000 people mine four million

tons of the translucent rock every year.

But what makes this place truly

remarkable isn't just its immense size

but its long and often brutal history.

People have been mining marble here for thousands of years.

KAYS: These quarries have been active all

the way since ancient Roman times.

So you can go today and buy a slab of marble

from the same rock that, for example, Michelangelo

got his marble from.

NARRATOR: In the eighth century B.C.,

the soldiers of ancient Rome begin a campaign of conquest

that will see them create the largest,

most powerful empire of the ancient world.

As they subjugate and slaughter all in their path,

their rulers and emperors immortalize

their exploits in marble.

HORTON: In ancient Rome,

there was massive demand for sculptures,

and indeed, decorated buildings, as well.

Many of the most famous Roman

buildings were dressed with Carrara marble.

The Pantheon is perhaps the most famous of

these examples.

NARRATOR: At this time, there are five million slaves

in the Roman Empire,

around 15 percent of the entire population.

For those sent to work in the Carrara quarry,

it was tantamount to a death sentence.

Today, we have giant excavators, giant dump trucks,

conveyors, and cranes, things that help make

that easier, but it must have been a deadly process

to get it out 2,000 years ago.

It was a pretty dangerous place to work.

NARRATOR: When the Roman Empire fades from

history in the late fifth century A.D.,

Europe descends into the Dark Ages,

and the giant steps of the Carrara quarry falls silent.

But 800 years later, the rebirth of civilization on

the continent leads to an explosion of activity

on the white mountain.

HORTON: During the 15th century,

the marble became the material of choice

for the great sculptures of the Renaissance.

Michelangelo, da Vinci,

many of the famous statues in

Italy were created from the same marble.

NARRATOR: By the early 20th century,

Carrara has 600 separate quarries,

manned by six thousand men and boys.

Each massive block of marble is sawed, often by hand,

and, much like in ancient Rome,

the white mountain becomes stained with the blood of those

who toil there.

DENNIE: It takes a tremendous amount of physical

effort in order to mine these rocks,

and one idea back in the late 1800s was

to bring in convicts as that source of cheap labor.

KAYS: They ended up attracting fugitives from the law,

people that could go and get a job with no questions asked.

NARRATOR: In a twist of fate, the marble mined

by criminals is shipped to America,

where it is used to construct

the Peace Monument in Washington.

Forced to endure brutal conditions for minimal wages,

the workers' camps quickly become hotbeds of unrest.

You actually had revolution born from these quarry beds

because of the types of people and the work they were doing.

The Italian anarchist movement is born as quarry

workers descend into the nearby town,

barricading the road with giant marble blocks.

HORTON: It was the introduction of more mechanical

technology towards

the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century

that meant that working conditions

in these quarries were greatly improved.

NARRATOR: Today, the Carrara quarry is one

of the oldest excavations on Earth,

and the rock first chiseled out by slaves 2,000 years ago

is now sliced out of the white mountain on an epic scale.

DENNIE: When you walk in, you're fronted with huge cliffs

of pure white marble, and those are created by

wire saws tipped with industrial diamonds, and those

saws slice huge slabs of marble -- 20, 30 tons at a time.

NARRATOR: The jagged scars revealed from space

tell the tale of more than

two millennia of world history,

etched in stone.

This white stuff on the side of the mountain is some

of the most valuable and sought after

building stone on Earth.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the crazy plan to defeat Hitler.

The most remarkable thing is that the plan actually worked.

NARRATOR: And death and terror in the Florida swamps.

These are a powerful reminder of

a really shameful episode in all our history.

NARRATOR: March 17, 2020.

The WorldView-3 satellite in orbit

some 380 miles above the coast of northern France

spots something lurking in the ocean.

MUNOZ: Now, this is really odd.

I see some dark structures in the water,

but they look like they're submerged.

You're seeing almost a grid pattern.

These shapes at first I thought were shipwrecks,

but they don't really look like that

upon closer examination.

NARRATOR: Zooming in reveals a three-mile-long line of

snaking blocks that appear to be made from concrete.

MORGAN: Some of them have a covering over them,

but in some cases,

it's stripped back, and it exposes

this grid-like support structure on the inside.

You can see that these are decaying.

These have eroded significantly.

NARRATOR: The crumbling structures

circle the town of Arromanches,

and to military historian, Kevin Hymel,

that's significant.

The fact that they're in the water outside of the French

town of Arromanches, Normandy,

tells us that we're looking at something very

specific to World War II.

NARRATOR: The satellite has captured a bizarre

yet hugely important relic of Operation Overlord,

or D-Day.

HYMEL: These are the remnants of a mulberry harbour.

They are part of the invasion of Europe

and a pretty radical and extraordinary idea by

the Allies.

NARRATOR: Mulberry was the code name given to lines of

temporary floating harbors used during the D-Day landings.

The need for them was created in 1942, when Allied forces

ramp up plans for a massive assault on Nazi-occupied France.

Facing them are some 850,000 German troops

and the Atlantic Wall,

a colossal 2,400-mile-long network of coastal defenses

and fortifications.

This is going to be the largest invasion in history.

One of the keys to D-Day is getting as many troops

and tanks and artillery pieces

ashore and pushing the Germans back as

quickly as they can.

NARRATOR: The Allies know that to defeat

the entrenched Germans,

the invasion forces need a constant supply of fresh

troops, tanks, and ammunition.

Yet while Normandy's wide beaches make them ideal for

an amphibious assault,

they are too shallow for military supply ships.

MORGAN: It's one thing to put armed men ashore

on an invasion beach.

It's another thing entirely to then keep them fed and supplied

in the days, weeks, and months that followed.

The Allies are looking for the long game.

The goal is Berlin -- you're going to need millions

of men, hundreds of thousands of tanks,

artillery, food.

NARRATOR: The disastrous attack on

the nearby town of Dieppe in 1942

had highlighted the perils of launching an assault without

proper support.

Within eight hours of landing on the beaches,

German forces had slaughtered,

taken prisoner, or injured more than half of

the 6,000 Allied forces.

MUNOZ: That entire operation really opened the eyes of

Allied commanders to realize that

a massive beach landing operation is not going to be as

easy as they thought.

NARRATOR: Faced with this mission-critical problem,

Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his generals

devise a bizarre plan.

MORGAN: They thought big.

They thought, "We'll just make a port here in

England and take it with us when we invade."

NARRATOR: Churchill's idea is to construct around 150 enormous

hollow concrete blocks, tow them

across the channel, and use them to make floating harbors

for the D-Day troops.

JANULIS: Imagine what's being proposed here --

build something the size of a skyscraper and sink it right

off the coast of a defended, German-occupied France.

It sounded crazy.

NARRATOR: This is the first time such a project has

been attempted in military history.

To build the giant structures,

8,000 workers used 31,000 tons of steel

and 600,000 tons of concrete.

The largest blocks are 200 feet long, weigh 6,000 tons,

and are the height of a five-story building.

There were many people who looked at this and went,

"This idea is balderdash. This is insanity.

What guarantee do we have that it will even work?"

NARRATOR: On June, 6 1944, the D-Day invasion

fleet of more than 1,000 ships carrying

156,000 troops heads towards the Normandy beaches.

The sections of the mulberry harbours go with them,

towed by a flotilla of over 130 tugs.

Just getting to France

represents something that I assign

miraculous qualities to.

These aren't just these dull, dead chunks of concrete.

These are concrete boats, basically.

A mile from the French coast,

the Allies sink the giant caissons

and then add block ships, cays,

and pontoon roadways to connect the harbors to the shore.

The most remarkable thing is that the plan actually worked.

JANULIS: This was an ace up their sleeve.

The Germans did not expect them

to bring their own port with them.

They were expecting something out of the playbook.

Well, Churchill just rewrote it.

NARRATOR: A storm soon destroys one of the harbors,

but the other manages to land half a million vehicles,

2.5 million troops,

and four million tons of supplies.

It gives the Allies that continuous supply window that

they're going to need for the campaign across Europe.

The absolute engineering audacity that went

into it continues to blow my mind

Today, the strange structures in the sea

are a reminder, visible from the skies, of

the incredible events that took place here all those

years ago.

What we're seeing in the image are evidence of one

of the most absurdly successful logistical

operations in military history.

NARRATOR: Coming up, a stain on American history.

It was the most barbaric system.

NARRATOR: November 19, 2019.

A satellite scans the Florida wetlands

and captures something out of place among

the seemingly endless acres of sawgrass and mangrove.

It almost looks like it's a geometric puzzle

that's just been stamped into the swamp land.

WALTERS: You've got this whole network

of higgledy piggledy ditches and channels.

There's no particular kind of logic to it.

NARRATOR: Analysts dial up the magnification.

The spaces in between look to me like fields.

But looking at the image,

it seems these fields have been long abandoned.

There are very few crops

that grow in absolutely saturated conditions.

I think this is rice.

This does remind me of kind of rice paddies.

But rice in the United States? I -- I never really think of it.

NARRATOR: Local historical records confirm that

these flooded shapes are the remains of rice fields,

and they are a legacy of an era of death and terror.

WALTERS: These ditches, as innocent as they look,

are a really powerful reminder of a shameful episode

in all our history.

NARRATOR: The story written in these lines begins in 1513,

when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon and his crew, rumored

to be on a mission to locate the fabled Fountain of Youth,

become the first Europeans to set foot in Florida.

They established a colony late in the 16th century,

called it La Floride, and began cultivating right away.

They focused on things like citrus fruits.

[birds chirping]

Initially, the Spanish relied on indigenous labor,

but with the introduction of European diseases,

these numbers collapsed.

So by the early 16th century,

we see the development of a slave trade.

NARRATOR: Many historians claim that the first

Transatlantic slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619.

Yet recent research suggests that almost every Spanish

expedition to Florida

in the century preceding this date carried

enslaved Africans with them.

WALTERS: The Spanish, in the middle of

the early 16th century,

had actually brought in slaves to their colony,

and they end up on plantations.

NARRATOR: In 1763, the Spanish are forced

to hand over Florida to the British

in exchange for Cuba.

The state's new owners

dramatically accelerate

the work begun by the Conquistadors,

transforming thousands of square miles of fetid swamp

into fertile farmland.

You've got a very industrious set of British colonizers,

and they're all over the north and east of Florida area,

getting these plantations up and running.

NARRATOR: During British rule, the London Board of Trade offers

20,000-acre lots to anyone willing to move to Florida.

As more plantations spring up,

the trade in enslaved humans begun by

the Spanish more than a century before

goes into overdrive.

In Florida, slavery didn't only start earlier,

it went on a lot longer than it did anywhere else in

the continental United States.

HORTON: The appalling conditions, forced labor,

rigid systems of punishment and control --

it was the most barbaric system.

NARRATOR: According to local land records,

a British merchant purchases the swamp land

in the image in 1814.

Over the next decade, slave labor carves out 1,000

acres of irrigation and transportation canals,

making it the largest plantation in Florida.

The location of this plantation is just about

ideal, because waterways

were the main form of transportation in this area,

not roads.

NARRATOR: Crops of rice, sugar, citrus, and cotton

generate profits equivalent

to millions of dollars for the plantations' owners.

Cotton became increasingly in demand as

a result of the Industrial Revolution,

and that cotton was being produced

in these plantations in the American South.

WALTERS: You look at the remnants of

these rice paddies today, and they look fairly harmless,

but you can't really see the horror story behind them.