Free Republic

The National Museum of Denmark has confirmed that two 18th-century shipwrecks in Cahuita National Park, long thought to be pirate ships, are the Danish slave ships Fridericus Quartus and Christianus Quintus, which sank in 1710. The identification was announced on Sunday, resolving decades of speculation about the wrecks off Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. The ships were identified through underwater excavations in 2023, which analyzed ship timbers, cargo blocks, clay pipes, and other artifacts. In 2015, U.S. archaeologists from East Carolina University discovered yellow bricks, specific to Danish manufacturing in Flensburg, among the wreckage, prompting renewed investigation. The wrecks, located on...

What have I done to be placed on the sanctions list of the Russian Foreign Ministry, alongside several distinguished historians of eastern Europe? My normal hunting ground (not the right word for a maritime historian) is the Mediterranean and the oceans beyond. But maybe Russia’s mandarins know that I am now writing about the Black Sea. Since the reign of Peter the Great in the 18th century, Russia has seen the Black Sea as a vital gateway to the wider world. The Ottoman sultans blocked Russian attempts to reach warmer waters via Istanbul. Russian ships bound for intended conquests had...

“What do floods in Texas have to do with the coming Ice Age?” asks reader Caroline Snyder. “Quite a lot actually! “Looking at the historic record, we only have to go back to the 16th Century; a time when the Little Ice Age was causing devastation across Europe, but what of the South-West US?“ This article, amongst other things, looks to first hand accounts by Europeans amongst other things. Little Ice Age (Excerpt) – “…if you think it’s cold here in the Southwest now, you should have been around back in the days when the Spanish, Mexicans and Anglos settled...