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Marine archaeologists have discovered that two Costa Rica wrecks are ruins of Danish slave ships that have been missing for centuries – A discovery that restores ancestral lineages across the Costa Rican community more than 300 years after ship residents reached the coast.
According to the National Museum of Danish, the remains were long known to be sitting in shallow waters in Cajita National Park on Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coast.
But for years they were believed to be pirate ships, the museum said in a news release.
The fishermen who established themselves in the area in 1826 thought of this because the relics on the ship were dispersed and broken. They believed that the two ships had engaged in battle and capsized, Maria Suarez Toro, founder of Sea Community Diving Center, the local community initiative ambassador, said CNN on Friday.
The ship’s identity was only questioned in 2015, when American marine archaeologists found a yellow brick in one of the shipwrecks.
This discovery was significant as yellow bricks were produced in the German town of Hunsburg in the 18th and 19th centuries for use in Denmark and its colonies. According to the museum, they were not fashion in other European countries at the time.
Historical documents documented the shipwreck of two Danish slave ships off the coast of Central America in 1710. The Frideriksquats burned, while the anchor rope of Christ Skintus was cut and the ship was wiped out.
However, the location of the shipwreck was unknown – up until now.
Marine archaeologists at the National Museum and the Danish Viking Ship Museum conducted an underwater excavation of a Costa Rican wreck in 2023, taking wood from one, finding samples of bricks and several clay pipes.
Researchers from the National Museum and the University of Southern and Denmark later conducted scientific analysis confirming the historical account, the museum noted.
Treering dating revealed that oak timber has been born from one of the shipwrecks that originated from the western Baltic Sea, including Denmark, northeastern Germany and southern Sweden. According to the museum, the timber was from trees cut between 1690 and 1695.
The yellow bricks were measured and found to be the same size as those made at Friendsburg for the Danes.
clay Used with bricks It turns out to be from southern Denmark, from the small town of Egernsand, or from Illerstrand, where the large brick-making industry was in the 18th century.
It has also been revealed that the clay pipes are Danish, indicating that their size, shape and design were made just before 1710, when the ship was destroyed.
“The analysis is very persuasive and there is no more question that these are the wrecks of two Danish slave ships,” said marine archaeologist David Gregory, a research professor at the New Maritime Research Centre at the National Museum of Danish National Museum, in a news release.
“Brick is Danish, and the same applies to wood. The wood is further burned and sipped from the fire. This fits perfectly with the historical account that one of the ships burned,” he added.
Rebellion and rebellion
Gregory led the excavations along with marine archaeologist Andreas Kalmeyer Bullock, who is also a curator of the National Museum.
“It was a long process and I was approached halfway through, but this is definitely the craziest archaeological excavation I have still been involved in,” Bloch said in a news release.
“Not only is it very important to the locals, but it’s because it’s one of the most dramatic shipwrecks in Danish history and now we know exactly where it happened. This offers two pieces that are missing from Danish history.”
Bloch told CNN on Friday that the discovery was important because of “dramatic events related to the (ship) journey from Copenhagen to West Africa, and to the coast of Cahita, Costa Rica.”
The rebellion by enslaved people, the “terrifying” navigational errors, and the rebellion by the crew when they arrived in Cahita are one of the events recorded in Danish archives, Brock said.
The rebellion took place on the Friderik Square, which had travelled from Ghana to the Dutch colony of St. Thomas. The uproar combined with the French and English Declaration War influenced the Dutch’s decision to send ships on their partner’s ships, Toro said.
There were 800 people on the two ships, but she said they got lost because of the smog. Instead of going north of the light they saw that they might have been Barbados, they went south and on March 2nd to Costa Rica.
Fear of pirates and indigenous people led to two days of debate The captain explores whether he should go to the beach to find food and water. This led to a rebellion between the sailors and enslaved people. After that, about 650 people remained.
“The most dramatic part is life that has been transformed due to this event. Today in Cahita National Park, more than 600 Africans were left on the beach,” Bloch said.
“This discovery is important to Danish history and the fact that we can link our history to Costa Rica. But it’s even more important for locals in Costa Rica, as it has a direct meaning to the locals’ identity,” he added.
The effort to unravel the identity of the ship and connect it to the identity of the community was a decade-long project managed by a group of young scuba divers of African and Indigenous origins, Toro said. They added, “I feel proud because they found their roots.”
The discoveries “also change the story about the region,” she said, adding that the Afro-Costa Ricans are proof that they are “100 years before they were registered in official history.”
The efforts by communities and scientists to identify the sinking slave ships appeared in the 2020 television documentary series Enslaved, hosted by Samuel L. Jackson.
Celia Ortiz, from Carthage, Costa Rica, said her 103-year-old mother was a descendant of Miguel Maloto, one of the enslaved men who disembarked from one of the ships, according to the sea ambassador. Ortiz said that even later in her mother’s life, she “bred a new light into our lives.”