AVERY POINT, CONNECTICUT—A team led by Kroum Batchvarov of the University of Connecticut has discovered the seventeenth-century Dutch ship Huis de Kreuningen, which was lost on March 3, 1677, during a battle against an invading French fleet in the southern Caribbean. The Dutch controlled the island of Tobago and were repelling French forces when the Huis de Kreuningen, the largest ship in the Dutch fleet, was sunk by the better-armed Glorieux. “To find the Huis de Kreuningen—almost by accident, as she was outside the boundaries where we expected to find her—undiscovered and untouched for over 300 years was an exciting moment,” Batchvarov told UCONN Today. Some 2,000 people were killed in the battle, including 250 Dutch women and children and 300 enslaved Africans. The Glorieux also sank during the battle, killing 370 men. “Although we have some written records of the battle itself, we possess no detailed plans of seventeenth-century warships, so our only sources of information about the ships of the day are the wrecks themselves,” Batchvarov said. For more underwater discoveries, see “History’s 10 Greatest Wrecks.”
