Danish West Indies

“ In reviewing the literature of Denmark, one is surprised to see, not so few but so many authors—many, when the limited size of the country and extent of the population be taken into consideration. It must be remembered that the Danish language is not much known, and that it is spoken and read only by the inhabitants of Denmark Proper, its dependencies, and a portion of its colonists in the East and West Indies; yet it can boast of more writers than countries of an equal or larger size—than Holland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. ”

“ Thomas harbor, the owners demanded twenty-five hundred dollars an acre for it. We must maintain all the grants, concessions, and licenses left by the Danish Government. 317“Det Vestindiske Kompagni” retains most of the harbor privileges; another Danish company, of which the principal shareholder is Prince Axel, cousin of the king, holds the coaling rights, the electric lighting rights, the right to operate a dry-dock. We cannot even use American money in our new possessions. The Danish West Indian bank has the exclusive concession for issuing notes until 1934, paying a ten per cent. ”

“ It is equipped with a floating dock, which can accommodate ships up to 3000 tons, a patent slip for smaller vessels and a repairing yard. Danish is the official language, but English predominates, while French, Spanish and Dutch are also spoken. ”

“ Greenland is a Danish colony, inasmuch as the west coast and also the southern east coast belong to the Danish crown. The scattered settlements of Europeans on the southern parts of the coasts are Danish, and the trade is a monopoly of the Danish government. ”

“ Various attempts were also made to improve trade and industry by abolishing the still remaining privileges of the Hanseatic towns, by promoting a wholesale immigration of skilful and well-to-do Dutch traders and handicraftsmen into Denmark under most favourable conditions, by opening up the rich fisheries of the Arctic seas, and by establishing joint-stock chartered companies both in the East and the West Indies. Copenhagen especially benefited by Christian IV.’s commercial policy. ”

“ After it was governed by the kingdom of Norway in the thirteenth century, the Norse colonization of south-west Greenland faded away under the attacks of the Eskimo, until it ceased completely in the fifteenth century. When Denmark united herself with the kingdom of Norway in 1397, the Danish king became also the ruler of Iceland. In the eighteenth century the Norwegian and Danish settlements were re-established along the south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland, mainly on account of the value of the whale, seal, and cod fisheries in the seas around this enormous frozen island ”

“ They left the old ruins of the Norsemen and built their own dwellings. These people form the present population of Southern Greenland, who kill the eider duck and prepare the skins, try out the seal and whale oil and take the polar bear and fox pelts which bring each summer to the settlements the ships of the Royal Danish Trading Company.
One of these vessels, flying the crimson and white-crossed flag of Denmark, was steering up the West Greenland coast from Cape Farewell when a steam yacht with the pennant of the New York Yacht Club at its peak appeared from the southwest. ”

“ The business language is everywhere Danish, even in the West India islands. In Iceland, and less purely in the Faroe islands, the old Norwegian or Icelandic is spoken. The Danes are an industrious, patient, and contented people, and make good soldiers and seamen. They have regular features, blue eyes, and light hair. The religion of Denmark is Lutheran, but all creeds are tolerated. ”

“ When this ship was in Europe before, Schleswig-Holstein and Lauenburg belonged to Denmark; but now they belong to Prussia, and Jutland is all that remains of continental Denmark. This peninsula has an area of nine thousand six hundred square miles, or about the size of the State of New Hampshire. With the several islands, the entire area of Denmark is fourteen thousand five hundred square miles. Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and several small islands in the West Indies, belong to her. ”

“ The expedition across Greenland led by Knud Rasmussen, a Dane born in Greenland, is of very special interest because it inaugurates what is intended to be a permanent system of exploring work, which at the same time undertakes the protection of the Arctic Highlanders, that most interesting tribe, quite uncontaminated by contact with civilisation when first discovered by Sir John Ross in 1818 and visited by the writer in 1850. Under modern conditions the protection of the Danish Government is much needed by these well-intentioned but simple and isolated people. ”

“ The Norwegians, fully occupied by their activities beyond the seas, in Iceland, in parts of Scotland and Ireland, and even in far-away Greenland, never acquired much strength at home. Denmark was usually the most powerful kingdom of the three. Under the Kings of the Estridsen line the Danes vindicated their independence of the Empire, and conquered large territories from the heathen Wends and Esthonians on the shores of the Baltic; in fact, there was a time, under Valdemar the Victorious (1204-41) , when the Baltic was to all intents and purposes a Danish lake. ”

“ Eastwards, after Jutland, comes the Isle of Funen, cut off from the mainland by a very narrow sound of sea. This faces Jutland on the west, and on the east Zealand, which is famed for its remarkable richness in the necessaries of life. This latter island, being by far the most delightful of all the provinces of our country, is held to occupy the heart of Denmark, being divided by equal distances from the extreme frontier; on its eastern side the sea breaks through and cuts off the western side of Skaane; and this sea commonly yields each year an abundant haul to the nets of the fishers. ”

“ Denmark chartered the Danish West Indian Company and began colonizing St. Thomas (1671) and then St. John (1684) . Denmark purchased St. Croix from France in 1733 and, except for a brief period of English occupation of St. ”

“ The interior is washed and encompassed by the ocean; and this, through the circuitous winds of the interstices, now straitens into the narrows of a firth, now advances into ampler bays, forming a number of islands. Hence Denmark is cut in pieces by the intervening waves of ocean, and has but few portions of firm and continuous territory; these being divided by the mass of waters that break them up, in ways varying with the different angle of the bend of the sea. Of all these, Jutland, being the largest and first settled, holds the chief place in the Danish kingdom. ”

“ For trading purposes Greenland is monopolized by the Danish government; its Esquimaux and mixed population amount to about 7000 souls. About 1000 Danes reside constantly there for the purpose of conducting the trade, which consists almost exclusively in the exchange of European goods for oil and the skins of seals, reindeer, and a few other animals. ”

“ The commercial history of Denmark, during the period to which we are at present confined, presents no other circumstance sufficiently striking or interesting to detain us; for the establishments of this country in the East Indies are too trifling to deserve or require notice in a work whose limits and objects equally confine it to those points which are of primary importance. ”

“ In December 1801 he went out to the lucrative post of vendue-master in the newly ceded settlement of Trinidad, and also as commissioner to deliver up the Danish West Indian islands to a Danish official, when he acquitted himself so well that the British merchants made him a handsome gift, and the king of Denmark presented his widow with 2,000l. ”

“ Some of the islands were much affected, especially those of the Danes, which were frequented by British vessels, and were largely English in their sympathies. Here the negroes soon learnt what had happened, and began to express dissatisfaction with their own position. However, Denmark saw that something had to be done, and in 1847 enacted laws for gradual emancipation in her islands. From the 28th of July of that year all children born of slaves were to be free, and at the end of twelve years from that time slavery was to cease altogether. ”

“ The natives have concentrated their stations round the Danish settlement and have received help during periods of want and hunger. Nearly the whole East Greenland population, numbering 550, have now been baptized, and the people have adapted themselves to the use of the articles the Danish store contains. South of Angmagsalik the whole of this coast is depopulated, the last Eskimo in the extreme south having moved in 1900 to the west coast. ”

“ Denmark resembles Holland in this: that in both, nature presents little luxury of emphasized colour or accentuated majesty of form. Broad flats are everywhere to be seen—vague, almost indefinable, in outline. Danish art is as demure and staid as the Danish landscape. As in Holland, the painters make no bold experiments, attempt no pretentious subjects, no rich colouring, nothing sportive or light. Like the Dutch, the Danes are somewhat sluggishly tranquil, loving dim twilight and the swirling mist. ”

“ Thomas, and from an agricultural standpoint it offers but few opportunities. Its inhabitants, aside from about two hundred whites, are all negroes. The Danes were unable to teach them their language, and practically all speak English with that peculiar drawl that has become familiar to us in Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies. ”

“ Acres of the most fertile country in the world lie fallow within the confines of this island, whose name is written large in Britain’s naval history. Virgin forests of wild fruit trees still cover vast tracts of a country which one day will be claimed by English husbandmen. Like Jamaica, Dominica cries out for men—new men, new energy, new enterprise. In England we associate our West Indian islands with only a dead prosperity. In the West Indies one encounters ample evidence of present wealth and great promise of future riches. ”

“ We forget that these Western islands were at one time the richest of England’s possessions; we do not realise how rich they, some day, will again become. If Britain only understood aright she would know that it is only through her own neglect, through her half-hearted, penurious West Indian policy, that our Caribbean Empire is not in the front rank of her richest possessions to-day. The riches of the West Indies played a large part in the formation of Britain’s greatness. We swept the islands clear of all their surface wealth at a period when England was most in need of gold. ”

“ The eastward expansion of Germany across and beyond the Elbe had begun; but in Canute's day Teutonic control of Wendish territories was very slight.
We find the Danes in Wendland as early as the age of Charlemagne, when they were in possession of a strong and important city called Reric, the exact location of which is not known. [211] The Danish interest appears to have been wholly a commercial one: horses, cattle, game, fish, mead, timber products, spices, and hemp are mentioned as important articles of the southern trade. ”

“ Round you spread the tropics. Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. ”

“ The Danish colonists, even in the north of England, were much mixed with Norwegians, and this was still more the case in the Scottish Lowlands. The more north the districts lay, the farther were they removed from Denmark, and the nearer did they approach Norway; whilst the features of the country much more resembled the Norwegian fiords, valleys, and rocks. Whilst, therefore, the Scandinavian colonists in the Lowlands were of Norwegian-Danish descent, the Highlands and islands farthest towards the north and west, were conquered, and in part peopled, by Norwegians only. ”

“ We are not informed that Denmark and Norway were emptied of their population in consequence of these great emigrations, or even that there was any sensible want of inhabitants to supply agricultural labourers and soldiers. In the immediately following centuries Denmark was powerful enough to make the Baltic a Danish lake. ”

“ Great Britain now appeared rather as a champion of the freedom of the sea than as an advocate of mare clausum. This was particularly shown in connection with the rights claimed by Denmark in the northern sea, especially at Iceland and the Danish portion of Greenland. As already stated, Denmark tried in the preceding century to keep alive her ancient rights to the fisheries and trade in these remote regions, and having failed in her efforts, introduced a fixed limit of forty geographical miles from the coast, within which whale-fishing by foreigners was forbidden (see p. 529) . ”

“ It was now, that the three principal Scandinavian tribes, the Norwegians, Swedes, and the Danish Goths, got each their king.
We have thus seen how the antiquities and barrows serve to prove, that the flat fertile Denmark must have been peopled earlier, than the northern parts of Sweden and Norway, which were full of immense forests and mountains. The monuments shew the peopling of Scandinavia in a natural point of view; which view finds confirmation, and that in a remarkable degree, rather than contradiction, in the most ancient and trustworthy of our historical records. ”