AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In southern Costa Rica, local lore has told of two sunken pirate ships just off the coast in the shallow Caribbean waters. Well, there are sunken ships there, and they do date to the early 1700s. But a new excavation shows they didn't belong to pirates. They were Danish ships carrying hundreds of enslaved people from Ghana. Andreas Bloch joins us now. He's a marine archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, and he worked on the excavation. Welcome to the program.
ANDREAS BLOCH: Thank you so much, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So let's start with the history of these two Danish vessels. They had a dramatic journey - right? - including a rebellion on board?
BLOCH: Oh, yeah, it was super dramatic. They already - when even leaving Denmark, they lost the medical doctor, and then there was a rebellion on board.
RASCOE: So it was a rebellion by the enslaved people? They rebelled?
BLOCH: Yes. For some reason, they were able to almost take the command of the ship. And yeah, there was a very brutal punishment of the people that tried to break free. But they completely missed the target. They were meant to go to St. Thomas, but they had a not very good captain who was not very good at navigating. So they missed the point where they had to turn up to St. Thomas, and they ended up in the Caribbean Sea by 2,000 kilometers actually missing the goal, ending up having a mutiny at the coast of Costa Rica at the national park of Cahuita.
RASCOE: Oh, wow. And so what happened to the Africans who were enslaved on the ships?
BLOCH: Well, that's a super interesting story, and it's sort of like it takes three different routes. So a bit more than 20 goes with the mutinists and the Danish crew to Portobelo in Panama. A bit more than a hundred are recaptured by the Spanish in the city of Matina and sold again by the Spanish to the people living there. And then there's a bit more than 500 that are unaccounted for. So they could have gone into the mountains. They could have joined with the Miskito Indians, with the Bribri Indians, with the British. So we really don't know where the remaining 500 went.
RASCOE: Do we know if there are any descendants from the ship still living in Costa Rica?
BLOCH: So there are people there who has a direct line. Also with the Danish sailors, there's also a direct line that we can trace. It actually sort of moves the date of when you have Africans coming to that particular coast and being sold as slaves, which is sort of pushing that arrival back by 150 years. So that's quite an amazing add-on to history.
RASCOE: What was the evidence that you found that helped confirm that these were Danish ships?
BLOCH: So we needed 20 samples of the bricks, the yellow bricks that were transported on the ships. This particular type of brick was Danish by size and color. And then we also found clay pipes, and the clay pipes - they date exactly up to the point in 1708 when the ships - they leave. And then sort of the absolutely best tool for identification was the wood and the ship frame, the area where this wood was actually cut down, which is in the western part of the Baltic Sea, which fits absolutely perfect with the wood being used in a Danish ship in this period. So everything fits.
RASCOE: So what do you think is the impact of this revelation for Danish history and for Costa Rican history?
BLOCH: I think the impact in Danish history is that people now are very aware of these two ships, and I think - I hope the impact will be that more people get to learn more about this period, this horrible period in Danish history. And then I think it's super important for the Costa Ricans to realize that the Afro Caribbean people in Costa Rica arrived much earlier than history says, and they are part of the culture, and they're part of the country and always have been, and that is why we are such a beautiful world because everything is mixed and interesting.
RASCOE: That's Andreas Bloch with the National Museum of Denmark. Thank you so much for joining us.
BLOCH: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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