Of the six countries that were involved in colonizing the lands of the Western Atlanta, the Denmark-Norway Empire had the smallest footprint. But it should also be noted that their ancestors were the earliest Western Atlantic colonizers, establishing settlements on Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands as early as the 8th century. It may seem strange to think of the Norsemen and Vikings from that earlier age as colonizers. Weren’t they just adventurers and explorers, anxious for excitement and challenges and not so much for conquest and domination? Possibly, but they did invade and use land that wasn’t theirs; they did take captives either to serve as their own slaves or sold them into slavery; and they felt their actions were justified by their superior skills of conquest and domination. These Denmark-Norway ancestors converted to Christianity in the 11th century which began a steady decline in their practice of enslaving other Europeans, particularly other European Christians.
Since it doesn’t exist today, there generally isn’t much known about the Denmark-Norway Empire. Most Danish and Norwegian historians agree that the Empire officially began in 1524 and ended in 1814. There were some alliances before 1524 between the two countries, sometimes including Sweden, and there were also several temporary separations during that 300 year period. King Christian IV was the first monarch of the Empire to re-establish the exploration of the Western Atlantic and the search for the Northwest Passage. In 1605 he commission James Hall, an English explorer, to undertake a series of voyages to discover the Passage, and to also locate the abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland and re-assert the Empire’s sovereignty over that country. Hall did reclaim Greenland, found evidence of the prior settlements, but failed to discover the Northwest Passage.
In 1619, Christian commissioned another attempt to find the Northwest Passage, this time hiring Jens Munk, a Dano-Norwegian navigator for the task. Munk was the first European to explore the western shore of Hudson Bay and decided to follow a river that flowed into the bay from the west. Cold weather stopped that excursion before it was underway and Munk wintered at the mouth of what became known as the Churchill River. The brutal weather, along with illness and limited provisions, killed all but Munk and two of his men. Remarkably, the three of them managed to navigate home to Norway on what turned out to be the last attempt Denmark-Norway would make to establish a presence in the northern region of the Western Atlantic.
Government and business leaders in Copenhagen took note of the success the Dutch were having with the trading companies they had established in both the West and East Indies. In 1625 Christian granted permission to create similar corporations for the Empire, but due to a number of events and internal circumstances, it wasn’t until his successor, King Frederick III, that the organizations were founded and trading agreements arranged. For the next few years, the Danish West Indies Company had mixed returns, struggling at times with bad weather destroying their cargo ships and the cargo, piracy from competing nation states and individuals, illness in their few settlements on small islands, and diminished support from the Denmark-Norway Empire due to unwise alliances and regional wars. The companies began to see better results beginning in 1672 when the island of St. Thomas, which had been abandoned by the Spanish, was claimed for the Empire. The island is relatively small (32 square miles) but there was sufficient arable land to support a number of sugar and coffee plantations. In 1718, they annexed the even smaller nearby island of St. Johns (19 square miles), and in 1733 bought St. Croix Island (84 square miles) from France. Having sufficient farm land wasn’t the problem, it was finding a labor force to work on the plantations and ship the harvest. There wasn’t a sufficient number of Danes or Norwegians who wished to migrate, much less do that kind of work. The Indigenous Peoples had been virtually eliminated by the colonizing practices of the Spanish. The Empire thought the only other option was the importation of African slaves. So beginning in 1672 the capture and shipping of African slaves provided the unpaid labor force for the Empire’s Caribbean plantations. By 1802 when the slave trade was stopped, an estimated 85,000 Africans had been shipped to Danish-Norwegian West Indies plantations.
The enterprise was extremely profitable for both the Empire’s monarchy and for the Danish and Norwegian business owners. Part of the financial model which helped realize such impressive profits was the colonization practice of spending a minimal amount to ensure a healthy slave-force. The idea being that it was cheaper and easier to buy and transport replacement slaves than it was to keep the current slave population healthy and capable of working. The statistics are mind numbing. One in five of the slaves ‘stacked’ in the Danish cargo ships died before reaching the Caribbean plantations. Once there, more slaves were dying than were being born. And of those being born, 40% died before the age of 5. It was an explosive situation and it eventually resulted in a number of slave revolts. Being confined on a small island, the slaves had limited opportunity to escape and remain free. But, since they outnumbered the non-slave population, in some cases 12 to 1, overthrowing their masters depended on organizing their efforts. And they did that with some success, in one case gaining almost complete control of a whole island for approximately a year until the Danes enlisted the assistance from a French garrison in a neighboring island to suppress the rebellion.
The monarchy and other leaders of the Empire in Copenhagen took note of the situation and determined that subjecting the slaves to inhumane practices and then constantly needing to put down uprisings was counterproductive and would eventually affect the profits of the corporation. In 1755 King Frederick V issued a set of regulations that included rules that slave parents were not to be separated from their children and when sick or old slaves were to be provided medical care. However, the local administrators on the islands could amend the rules as they saw fit, so the new directives were not uniformly applied, and on some plantations, not at all. The basic characteristics of colonization in the Danish West Indies islands did not begin to change until the slave trade was stopped in 1802 and slavery itself was abolished in 1848.
NOTE: This group of Islands became known as the Danish Virgin Islands. Denmark sold them to the United States in 1917. They are a territory of the Unites States call the Virgin Islands.
Primary source: Niklas Thode Jensen, For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012.