Archaeologists Study 1683 Mutiny Wreck Havmanden off Gothenburg, Sweden

Maritime archaeologists from the National Museum of Denmark have recovered new finds from the wreck of the Danish frigate Havmanden (“Merman”), which lies on the seabed near Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast. The museum announced the finds on 11 November.

In 1683 the Havmanden sailed for St Thomas in the Caribbean, now part of the US Virgin Islands, carrying convicts and indentured servants for the Danish West India Company. It was then meant to go on to West Africa to buy enslaved people. Short of food and water, some crew and convicts seized the ship near the Azores and headed back towards Copenhagen. They shot the captain and threw other officers overboard in the English Channel, including Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, the first governor of the Danish West Indies. The ship later ran aground, and the mutineers were tried in Copenhagen and sentenced to death.

Divers have now found the rear half of a man’s leather shoe of unusually fine workmanship. Its tiny, evenly spaced stitch holes could only have been made by a highly skilled shoemaker of the time. Experts say it was a costly shoe that only the elite could afford and think it could have belonged to Governor Iversen. They also recovered two manillas, ring-shaped pieces of metal used as money in the West African slave trade, which are rarely found in Scandinavia.

Researchers say the finds give a personal link to Denmark’s colonial past. Denmark-Norway banned its transatlantic slave trade in 1792, but slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848. Swedish waters hold many other historic wrecks, such as the 1480s warship Vrak 5 near Stockholm, while scientists in Wales recently cracked the code of a 1583 shipwreck padlock.

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