'Slave payments' and 'expensive and exclusive shoe' discovered on 17th-century Danish ship that sank after deadly mutiny
Maritime archaeologists investigating a 17th-century shipwreck off the coast of Sweden have discovered a fancy shoe and two metal rings used as currency in the transatlantic slave trade.
Key points
- Because the shoe was likely owned by an upper-class individual, experts think it could have belonged to Iversen, the Danish West Indies governor who was thrown overboard.
- It was "undoubtedly an expensive and exclusive shoe that only the elite could afford to buy," Andersen said.
- "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.
The items were lost during a mutiny on a slave ship in 1683, during which the governor of the Danish West Indies was thrown overboard.
Denmark continued to engage in the transatlantic slave trade for more than a century after the Havmanden sank.
Additional details
- Although King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway banned the trade in 1792, slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848, when hundreds of enslaved people revolted and were finally granted their freedom.
- "I see a great many shoes from shipwrecks, but I have never before seen a shoe of such high quality," Vivi Lena Andersen, director of the Rudersdal Museums in Denmark, said in the statement.
- But due to a shortage of food and water, several crewmembers and convicts aboard seized control of the ship near the Azores in the North Atlantic and began sailing it back to Copenhagen.
- Archaeological divers discovered the rear half of a man's "unusually fine" shoe in the wreckage, according to the statement.
- The mutineers shot the ship's captain and threw other officers — including Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, the first governor of the Danish West Indies — overboard in the English Channel.
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