A 225-year-old Danish warship sunk by the British in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen has been discovered, just before construction crews buried the wreckage for good. Archaeologists at Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum announced Thursday that the Dannebroge shipwreck was found in waters set to be transformed as part of a massive new housing project that has a distant completion date of 2070. The wreckage site lies 49 feet underwater, and time is running out to resurface as much of the sunken ship as possible before the area is transformed into an active construction zone. A search team has already recovered two cannons, shoes, uniforms, insignia, and bottles from the wreckage, according to the Associated Press. They also found part of a sailor’s jawbone—one of the grim remnants left behind from the bloody centuries-old battle, which left approximately 3,000 killed or wounded. The Viking Ship Museum’s head of maritime archaeology, Morten Johansen, told the AP the wreck could offer an unusually intimate look at the violence of the battle. “We actually don’t know how it was to be onboard a ship being shot to pieces by English warships,” Johansen said, but “some of that story we can probably learn from seeing the wreck.”
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