Wreck-Diving.org

There were three shipwrecks involved. In 1635, two Spanish slave ships sank near St. Vincent and the slaves found safety amongst the Arawak. Then it was a Dutch slave ship that sank off St. Vincent in 1675 and only the slaves survived. They, too, mixed with the Arawak. They were legally freemen of color in the middle of slave trading Europeans. There’s no number of how many slaves originally where shipwrecked on St. Vincent, but we do know several thousand were rounded up in the late 1790s and as many as 4000 were killed. They were also conscripted into the army or moved around from island to island, colony to colony. Many are the early colonists of Belize.