The ship was built in Copenhagen in 1753 and originally christened Cron Prindz Christian after the crown prince who would become King Christian VII of Denmark and Norway. She was fitted out from the start as a slave ship and entered the triangular trade, the route connecting Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean that moved manufactured goods, enslaved people, and plantation commodities in a brutal commercial loop. After an unsuccessful period in the triangular trade, her operations were limited to the Caribbean, where she sailed as a trader until 1756. A new Danish company then purchased her and renamed her Fredensborg, after Fort Fredensborg, one of the Dano-Norwegian trading stations on what was then called the Danish Gold Coast in present-day Ghana.

The Fredensborg departed Copenhagen on 24 June 1767 under Captain Espen Kioenigs and reached the West African coast on 1 October. At Fort Christiansborg and Fort Fredensborg, 265 people were loaded aboard as cargo. The ship sailed for the Danish West Indies on 21 April 1768 and arrived at St. Croix on 9 July, where 235 captives were disembarked. Thirty people, more than one in ten, had died during the crossing. Of the crew of 40, twelve also perished en route. The logbook records these losses with the flat precision of a commercial ledger, each death a line item in a transaction. Denmark's role in the Atlantic slave trade is less widely known than that of Britain, Portugal, or the Netherlands, but it was real, sustained, and profitable. The Fredensborg was one link in a chain that connected Danish capital to African suffering to Caribbean sugar.

After delivering its human cargo at St. Croix, the Fredensborg loaded goods for the return voyage to Copenhagen and sailed on 14 September 1768. At some point during the journey, Johan Frantzen Ferentz replaced Kioenigs as captain. The ship never reached home. On 1 December 1768, a violent storm drove the Fredensborg onto the rocks off Tromoya island, near the town of Arendal on Norway's southern coast. The crew of 29, three passengers, and two enslaved people aboard managed to survive under what accounts describe as dramatic conditions. The ship broke apart, scattering its cargo and structure across the seabed, but the captain and supercargo saved the logbook and other journals, preserving a documentary record that would prove invaluable two centuries later.

In September 1974, three divers, Leif Svalesen, Tore Svalesen, and Odd Keilon Ommundsen, discovered the wreck off Tromoya. What they found beneath the water matched what the archives held on paper: the Fredensborg became the most completely documented slave ship ever located. Leif Svalesen later wrote the definitive account, Slave Ship Fredensborg, published by Indiana University Press in 2000. Artifacts from the wreck are now exhibited at the KUBEN museum in Arendal. The discovery forced a reckoning with a chapter of Scandinavian history that many preferred to forget. Denmark was not a passive bystander in the Atlantic slave trade. It operated forts on the Gold Coast, maintained plantations in the Caribbean, and built ships in Copenhagen specifically designed to carry enslaved people across the ocean. The Fredensborg, lying broken on the Norwegian seabed, is physical proof of that history.