Locals Thought These Shipwrecks Had Belonged to Pirates. They Turned Out to Be 300-Year-Old Danish Slave Ships

Locals Thought These Shipwrecks Had Belonged to Pirates. They Turned Out to Be 300-Year-Old Danish Slave Ships

The two vessels had been trafficking hundreds of enslaved Africans when a navigational error led them astray. They sank off the coast of Costa Rica in the 18th century

Centuries-old ‘pirate’ shipwrecks in Costa Rica identified as 1710 Danish slave ships

Two previously long-misidentified shipwrecks off Costa Rica’s southern coast have at last been conclusively determined to be 18th-century Danish slave ships, rewriting one chapter in local and Danish maritime history. For decades, the wrecks—resting in shallow water near Cahuita National Park—were thought to be pirate ships. But new scientific analyses by a Danish-Costa Rican research team reveal that the ships did indeed exist as Fridericus Qua…