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. 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.
The Danish frigate Havmanden (which translates to "Merman") was en route to St. Thomas, a Caribbean island that is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, with convicts and indentured servants aboard destined for work on the island with the Danish West India Company. The plan for the Havmanden, after dropping off the new colonists, was to sail to West Africa to buy enslaved Africans. 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.
The mutineers shot the ship's captain and threw other officers — including Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, the first...
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