Maritime archaeologists investigating a 17th-century shipwreck off Sweden have recovered a fancy shoe and two metal rings used as currency in the transatlantic slave trade, Live Science reported. The items were lost during a mutiny on the Danish frigate Havmanden, or "Merman," in 1683, during which the first governor of the Danish West Indies was thrown overboard. The wreck now lies on the seabed just east of Gothenburg, Sweden. A Nov. 11 statement from the National Museum of Denmark called the mutiny one of the most violent in the country's history.
The Havmanden was en route to St. Thomas, a Caribbean island that is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, with convicts and indentured servants destined for work with the Danish West India Company. After dropping off the new colonists, the plan was to sail to West Africa to buy enslaved Africans. A shortage of food and water led several crewmembers and convicts to seize the ship near the Azores and turn it back toward Copenhagen. The mutineers shot the ship's captain and threw other officers, including Gov. Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, overboard in the English Channel. After the ship ran aground, the mutineers were tried in Copenhagen and sentenced to death.
Divers have now found the rear half of the wreck and, among the artifacts, an "expensive and exclusive shoe" that experts think may have belonged to Iversen, given that it likely belonged to an upper-class passenger. "The shoe testifies not only to Jørgen Iversen Dyppel's life and dramatic death, but also provides a personal point of entry into the larger story of the establishment of the Danish colonies in the West Indies and the widespread slave trade Denmark was a part of," Andreas Kallmeyer Bloch, a maritime archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark's Center for Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage, said in the statement.
The team also found two manillas, ring-shaped pieces of copper, brass, or iron that European merchants traded for enslaved people in West Africa, particularly along the coast of what is now Nigeria. Manillas are rarely found in Scandinavia. "The manillas add another layer to Havmanden's story and underscore the connection to the slave trade, which was a central part of Denmark's colonial activities in both the West Indies and on the west coast of Africa," Kallmeyer Bloch said. Denmark continued that trade for more than a century after the wreck. King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway banned the trade in 1792, but slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848, when hundreds of enslaved people revolted and were granted their freedom. The verified finds are a shoe and two currency rings from a documented slave-trade voyage that ended in mutiny, not a newly discovered ship.