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By Amarachi Orie - CNN Sciences

Marine archaeologists have discovered that two shipwrecks in Costa Rica are the remains of Danish slave ships missing for centuries — a finding that restores the ancestral lineage of an entire Costa Rican community more than 300 years after the vessels’ occupants reached its shores.

The wrecks had long been known to sit in shallow waters off Cahuita National Park, on Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coast, according to the National Museum of Denmark. However, for years, they were believed to be pirate ships, the museum said in a news release.

Fisherpeople who established themselves in the area in 1826 thought this because the ships’ remains were dispersed and broken. They believed the two ships might have been engaged in a fight and capsized, Maria Suarez Toro, founder of the local community initiative Ambassadors of the Sea Community Diving Center, told CNN Friday.

The ships’ identities were only called into question in 2015, when American marine archaeologists found yellow bricks in one of the wrecks.

This discovery was significant because yellow bricks were produced in the German town of Flensburg in the 18th and 19th centuries for use in Denmark and its colonies. They were not in fashion in other European countries at the time, according to the museum.

Historical sources had recorded that two Danish slave vessels were shipwrecked off the coast of Central America in 1710: The Fridericus Quartus was set on fire, while the anchor rope of the Christianus Quintus was cut and the ship was swept away.

But the location of the wrecks was not known — until now.

Marine archaeologists from the National Museum and Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum carried out an underwater excavation of the Costa Rica wrecks in 2023, taking wood from one, as well as samples of bricks, and finding several clay pipes.

Researchers at the National Museum and the University of Southern Denmark then carried out scientific analyses that confirmed the historical accounts, the museum noted.

Tree-ring dating revealed that oak wood from one of the wrecks originated from the western part of the Baltic Sea, which encompasses Denmark, northeastern Germany and southern Sweden. The wood was from a tree cut down between 1690 and 1695, according to the museum.

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