Costa Rica is obviously a major spot for tourism for people from all over the world, particularly other parts of North America, but most tourists who visit for the beaches stay on the Pacific side of the country in cities like Jaco, Tamarindo, and Santa Teresa. The Caribbean side is a bit harder to get to and somewhat isolated from international airports and hospitals. I don't like to tell people this because I don't want it to become over-visited and overdeveloped — though I fear it's heading that way anyway — but I actually like the Caribbean side of the country better, specifically the Southern Caribbean town of Puerto Viejo near the Panamanian border.
While I love all of Costa Rica really, the Puerto Viejo area has become something of a second home to me in recent years, and one reason for that is that I've never seen anything like it. It's a beautiful blend of people and cultures. You have your typical Latino Costa Ricans, along with a unique hodgepodge of expats and some tourists from the United States, Canada, and Europe. There are people from other parts of Latin America — I've met many Argentinians there. There's also a large population of black people who are native to the country. It's a true melting pot. And for the most part, everyone just seems so accepting of everyone else. I've never felt more welcome or less judged in any other place I've ever been.
Until I visited that part of the country for the first time in November 2023, I had no idea that Costa Rica even had much of a black population. Many of them are descendants of Caribbean nations — mostly Jamaica — who came there during the 19th century to work and find a better life, helping to build a railroad and eventually working for the banana companies that are still spread throughout the country today.
Well over a century later, those Caribbean migrants' descendants still wear their heritage and culture proudly. It's evident throughout Puerto Viejo, in the restaurants, in the shops, on the beaches, and on the streets. You hear it in the music and the stories the locals tell, you see it in the art, and you taste it in the food. But not everyone descended from Caribbean natives. Others came to the Western Hemisphere from Africa via the transatlantic slave trade and may not know quite as much about their history.
But thanks to a recent discovery, they've potentially unlocked a new understanding of their past, or at least one piece of the puzzle. For decades, locals believed that two shipwrecks located just off Costa Rica's Caribbean Coast near Cahuita National Park — which is just north of Puerto Viejo — were pirate ships. It was something of a legend in the area. But scientists and archaeologists from Costa Rica, the United States, and Denmark have recently confirmed that this isn't the case at all. They're actually two Danish slave ships that sank in the Caribbean Sea centuries ago.
According to the Smithsonian, the two ships that belonged to the Danish West India Company — the Fridericus Quartus and Christinus Quintus — "departed Copenhagen in December 1708. They stopped in Ghana, where they picked up hundreds of enslaved Africans and began sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the island of St. Thomas."
In 1710, the ships got lost in the fog near where Costa Rica is located today. If you've ever swum in those waters, you know that there is a lot of coral reef within them — I can attest to that and have had the bloody feet to prove it — and the ships got stuck in the reefs. They were carrying around 800 people, including 700 Africans meant to be part of a slave trade, but when they lost course, the Africans and some of the ships' crew members staged a mutiny. One ship even caught fire.
Apparently, there were arguments over whether to actually try to get to the shore to find food and water, but the ships' captains were afraid they'd encounter pirates or unfriendly natives, and everyone else had had enough. Crew members wanted to release the slaves so they could keep any remaining provisions for themselves. It's also been said that the Africans had already rebelled once off the coast of Ghana, but they failed. In order to teach them a lesson, the Danes cut off their leader's hands and decapitated him.
In 2015, a group of archaeology students from East Carolina University visited the ships, and they noted that the bricks there resembled Flensburg bricks, which are made from clay found near the border of Germany and Denmark. They were often exported to Danish colonies to build plantations and forts. To make a long story a little shorter, over the last decade, many experts took a renewed interest in the shipwrecks, and through numerous tests and examinations, they were able to confirm that they were indeed the Fridericus Quartus and Christinus Quintus. They were even able to confirm the legend that one of the ships caught fire.
Andreas Kallmeyer Bloch, a marine archaeologist and curator at the Danish National Museum, called it "the craziest archaeological excavation I’ve yet been part of."
As for the people who were aboard the ship, the story goes that about 100 of the Africans were, unfortunately, recaptured and made to work in cacao plantations located further north, but the majority escaped after making it to the beach and are the ancestors of some of Costa Rica's modern black population.
"The discovery is significant for Danish history, and the fact that we can tie our history to Costa Rica. But it is even more significant for the local population in Costa Rica as it has a direct meaning for the identity of the local people," Bloch added.
According to CNN, Celia Ortiz, a Costa Rican woman whose 103-year-old mother is said to be a descendent of Miguel Maroto, one of the Africans who was aboard one of the ships, stated that her mother welcomed the news, claiming it "brought new light to our lives."
I'm not sure how much more information is out there about these 600 people who potentially found freedom due to a twist of fate, but I know I'm interested in learning more and plan to do additional research. Hopefully, the confirmation of the identities of these ships will shed even more light on these Costa Ricans' history for their sake, as well.
