The Boundless Sea
Page 93
The Danes made full use of the north Atlantic when sending their ships out to India and China, generally sailing round the top of Scotland, between Shetland and the Faroes, to reach the open ocean – indeed the Atlantic leg was the most dangerous part of a journey out east that could take seven months, for ships set out around December, not the best time to face Atlantic storms. Even so, the Danes lost few ships once they had mastered the routes through the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean – sixty-three ships were sent to China after 1772, and all survived the voyage.8 Maritime trade was the foundation of the Danish kingdom’s prosperity. The royal castle at Helsingør was world-famous as the gateway to the Baltic even before Shakespeare put ‘Elsinore’ on the stage, for it was a magnificent source of revenue from ships passing through the narrow opening of the Sound.9 Within the Baltic, the Danes enjoyed close links to the inhabitants of Brandenburg–Prussia, who muscled in on their West Indies trade. Finally, one of the distinguishing features of Danish trade in India was its strong emphasis on local networks, so-called country trade, reducing dependence on European supplies of silver to pay for goods purchased in India and also in China, which became an increasingly important focus of interest. The main Danish possession in India, Tranquebar in the south-east, was able to carry on its business independently of Europe, inserting itself into the maritime networks of the Indian Ocean peoples and therefore enabling one to glimpse what is often invisible, the magnitude and profitability of maritime trade outside the monopolistic spheres of the Dutch and the Portuguese. There was a twenty-nine-year period when no ships reached Tranquebar from Copenhagen; even so, business carried on, because the colony simply did not depend on metropolitan Denmark for its survival.10
II
In 1616 King Christian IV issued the first licence for Danish voyages to the East, which were to be led by the Dutch entrepreneurs Jan de Wilem, from Amsterdam, and Herman Rosenkrantz, from Rotterdam. The king wanted to make full use of Dutch experience. They set out at the very end of December 1618 en route to Ceylon, cheered by the offer of exemption from customs dues on the voyage. These two provided around 12 per cent of the initial capital of the Danish East India Company, whose organization was quite closely modelled on that of the VOC; this was more than the king put up.11 Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the bloodthirsty governor-general of the Dutch Indies, issued a ban on French and Danish traders even before the ships had left Copenhagen, and this hostility continued for several years, as the Dutch watched the success of the Danes with growing alarm. They were irritated that local rulers seemed to have taken to the Danes. The less aggressive stance of the Danes towards the native peoples of the Indian Ocean, compared to the Dutch, made them not just easier to deal with but genuinely more popular. A VOC agent in Trincomalee, an important port on the east coast of Ceylon, reported with alarm on the willingness of one ruler to assign the Danes a fort at Tranquebar, only twelve miles from the well-known trading station of Negapatnam.12
Well might he feel alarm: the Dutch had still not seen off the English, and here was a new threat; besides, the Danish voyages to Ceylon were proving profitable: news spread, and a Latin chronicle from the German–Danish borderland concisely stated that ‘in the same year [1622] the king of Denmark received two ships from the island of Ceylon in the Indies, loaded with ebony and spices’. After buying a great deal of pepper, the Danes set their sights on cloves, and an expedition of 1624 managed to obtain 9,600 kg of cloves, trumping the English, who just at this point were suffering humiliation at Amboyna and on Run.13 If the Danes could make their own capital city into a redistribution centre sending the luxuries of the East across northern Germany and beyond, the Dutch might have cause to worry. The Danes were well aware that their core possessions of Denmark, Schleswig and Norway could not absorb all that they brought. By the end of the eighteenth century 80 per cent of what they brought from India and 90 per cent of what they brought from China was re-exported from Copenhagen, often deep into the Baltic.14
The English began to worry about their own access to southern India. An English captain named John Bickley was already complaining in 1624 that the Danes ‘had formed [farmed] all the seaports of the Kinges between Napagapatan and Pullacatt for use and benefit of the Kinge of Denmarke; therefore willed us agayne to bee gone, or else they would send us awaye in haste’. For when it came to relations with the other Europeans, the Danes proved rather less charming than they were towards Indian kings: ‘moste of all Danes were our deadly and most cruell enimyes.’ The value of their trade along the Coromandel coast in the late 1620s was the same as that of the English East India Company, roughly 30,000 rikstalers in the best years.15
In the event, there were interruptions, as Denmark became sucked, like its neighbours, into the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany. Investors were not, in any case, impressed by the returns, since only seven ships came back from the East between 1622 and 1637, so about one every two years.16 Trying to help with making ends meet, the king pumped more and more money into the Danish company; by 1624 he was already owed over 300,000 rikstalers. This was unsustainable, and the first East India Company was wound up in 1650, but a new one was up and running from 1670. This did not mean the end of the Tranquebar colony, for, as has been seen, there were excellent opportunities to pick up Indian calico cloths and carry them from Tranquebar as far as the Moluccas – this was already happening in 1625. There was a very lively spice trade within as well as beyond the Indian Ocean, notably in cloves, nutmeg and other products that could only be produced in a restricted area – only Indian cuisine cleverly combines spices from all over the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The Danes were as good at shifting different spices around as they were at moving cloth.17 However, they worked a standard set of routes and, after gaining Tranquebar, they did not manage to break into new markets. An attempt by the Danish ‘President’ in Asia, Pessart (who was in fact Dutch), to follow his former compatriots into Japan in the 1640s ended in disaster when the Dutch dissuaded him; he travelled instead to the Philippines, and was killed there.18
Paying for eastern goods, as everyone knew, used up silver. Those who followed the mercantilist doctrines popular in contemporary Europe argued that the conservation of silver was vital to national prosperity but that national prosperity would be fostered by vigorous foreign trade. New opportunities offered themselves, now that vast amounts of silver were pouring out of the Peruvian mines, some of it destined for Macau and Canton in payment for the Chinese silks that came via Manila. The pause in trade between Copenhagen and Tranquebar actually did the Danes a favour, because it stimulated the country trade in India, and at the same time the Danes became less interested in obtaining their pepper and spices from their own factory out in India, and began to see that Indian cotton cloths were a better source of profit, whether they were sold in China or taken back to Europe. By the start of the eighteenth century, Danish trade with the East diversified further: increasing demand for Chinese porcelain was accompanied by a passion for tea and coffee. The Danish tea trade became very big business by 1800. A landing document of 1745 from Canton lists seven different types of tea, including Pecco, Pekoe tea, as well as sugar, sago, rhubarb and 274,791 teacups with saucers (who counted them so precisely?, one might ask), tens of thousands of coffee cups, and thousands of butter dishes and chocolate cups, plus more than 1,000 teapots.19 The Danes were not the only Europeans to find this happening. Chinoiserie was now in vogue throughout northern Europe, and the presence of the European trading companies was barely able to satisfy demand for porcelain and other exotic goods – so much so that attempts were being made to imitate Chinese and Japanese pottery in English and continental kilns.
III
The trade to India and China was only part of wider Danish ambitions. By working closely with colleagues in Brandenburg–Prussia and in Kurland, roughly corresponding to modern Latvia, the Danes hoped to become masters of the Baltic trade in exotic goods. For the Danish presence was far from insignificant. The Danes occupie
d parts of the Guinea coast for longer than the Portuguese, and for a time it appeared that their control would extend some way beyond their main trading stations into the hinterland of what is now Ghana. In the seventeenth century the Danes operated fourteen trading stations in Guinea, the English seven, the Brandenburgers three and the Swedes three, though the Swedish ones were all taken by the Danes; by 1837, thirteen years before the Guinea forts were sold to Great Britain, the Danes ruled over an African population of about 40,000 people.20 Danish entrepreneurs were involved in the sordid slave trade, though to a lesser degree than the Dutch or the English, as their main aim was to provide labour for their three West Indian islands rather than to supply the plantations of Virginia, the wider Caribbean or Brazil; and Denmark was the first nation in Europe to abolish the slave trade. Even so, in 1696 the governor of St Thomas, one of their Caribbean islands, boasted that ‘all other trade is nothing compared with this slave trade’.21
Their ability to obtain slaves depended on the willingness of local African kings to supply them; many were the subjects of rival kings and had been captured in war, while others were enslaved for debt. The cruelty began well before the slaves had even reached the Danish or other forts where they were sold to Europeans and packed away in the hold of a ship for transport to the New World, for many died during the arduous trek across country to the coast – by definition the slaves were not inhabitants of the areas closest to the European forts, whose rulers would not normally sell their own subjects to the slave-traders. Most captains, with an eye on profit rather than humane treatment, wanted to deliver as large and healthy a human cargo as possible. Therefore they did not make the conditions so absolutely dreadful that their captives died en masse; some time was allowed on deck and the slaves were generally fed well enough to keep them alive; if the conditions below deck were intolerable, disease would spread, infecting the crew as well. Yet some practices such as throwing live slaves overboard when the ship had been so long becalmed that food and water was running out only deepen the sense of horror the modern reader feels.22
The foundations of the Danish network in west Africa were in fact laid by the Swedes, their rivals, during the Thirty Years War. At this time the hyper-ambitious Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, imagined that, in addition to conquering vast tracts of Germany, he could draw income from a ‘General Commercial Company for Asia, Africa, America and Magellanica’, the last term signifying a supposed southern continent below Cape Horn. This company was the brainchild of a Flemish entrepreneur from Antwerp named Willem Usselinx who had traded out to Iberia and the Azores, and had been involved with the VOC since its early days but had been dismissed. He looked first to King Christian IV of Denmark, but did not find approval, so he approached the Swedish king instead. The company was chartered in 1626. It operated out of Gothenburg, which had only been founded in 1621, as a Swedish base on the North Sea; Gustavus Adolphus welcomed Dutch and German merchants to the city, and relied on Dutch architects to lay out its network of canals and streets.23 Usselinx’s company set up a colony in the Delaware River which kept going for seventeen years from 1638 onwards, until the Dutch overran it; it was acquired by England, along with New Amsterdam, in 1667.24 Aware no doubt of what Gustavus Adolphus was up to, Christian of Denmark did issue a charter to Danish merchants in 1625, but then and again a few years later the projects did not get off the ground.
This left the Swedes in pole position. Louis De Geer, a merchant of Liège, trading under the Swedish flag, brought an assortment of goods back to Sweden from a voyage to Guinea in 1648: tobacco, sugar, indigo, ivory, calico cloths and some gold – all very promising, except that some of the goods had been bought not in Africa but in Lisbon.25 De Geer relied very heavily on the Dutch for both ships and sailors, and he had family in Amsterdam who helped him run his business. The advantage for the Dutch shipowners in this case was that they were able to carry on business overseas under a foreign flag, free from the monopolistic policies of the VOC and its West Indian equivalent. Under the terms of the Swedish king’s charter, De Geer was able to run his own business with very little interference, though he did set up a fort named Carlsborg for the Swedish government, on the Guinea coast – oddly, the cornerstone was laid by a Swiss merchant, something of a rarity along these maritime trade routes. The site had been used in the past by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English, but they had left it empty: there was no proper harbour and ships had to stand out at sea while goods were laboriously brought to and fro from the shore on lighters or in African canoes.
The Danes riposted in several ways. They too had a port which had been founded as an outlet into the North Sea. This was Glückstadt, which lay in Holstein, so it is now part of Germany, and it was founded in 1615. Among its most important settlers were Dutch and Portuguese Jewish merchants. One of the Portuguese Jews even helped to negotiate a trade treaty between Denmark and Spain, and the Crown welcomed Sephardic Jews from both Iberia and the Mediterranean, ‘but no German Jews’, for the fundamental principle was not toleration but profit, and the Sephardim were seen as better businessmen. In the 1640s and 1650s a group of sea captains from Glückstadt set up their own company to trade in Africa, while two Portuguese Jews opened up a route across the ocean to Barbados, so business out of Glückstadt began to take off. Plans were laid for a company that would embrace all the lands, including Magellanica that the Swedes had already shown they hoped to penetrate, added to which was the Terra Australis, or ‘Southern Land’ – both being blanket terms for that vast southern continent that was assumed to reach almost as far as South America, and perhaps included Tierra del Fuego. Some of these activities did produce a return, and when a large cargo of sugar arrived in Copenhagen in 1658 a sugar refinery was built in the expectation that this was the beginning of something big. However, the most satisfying success was the capture of the Swedish forts on the Guinea coast, beginning with Carlsborg, even though it was ceded to the Dutch; they had offered their help to the Danes, more in the hope of expelling the Swedes than in the hope of creating a Danish network of forts.26
The Danes did, however, want to create their own bases, and the Glückstadt Company that now ran Danish operations across the sea established a fort at Frederiksborg in what is now Ghana at the end of 1659, with the assent of the local king of the Fetu people. It is no surprise that the Dutch were soon at the throats of the Danes, claiming that they had once controlled that patch of territory – so much for past friendship.27 But the Danes by and large managed to placate both the Dutch and the English, and their ability to do so reflected the fact that they were seen as only minor rivals. The history of Frederiksborg is a story of constant skirmishes for control, mainly with the Dutch, the effect of which was to soak up funds that would more profitably have been spent on commerce. It is also a history of disease, early death, and mismanagement by governors who were thought by observers to be far too fond of drink and of parties. When the money ran out the fort was pawned to the English, who had no great interest in it and let it decay. Reaching Guinea also meant running the gauntlet of the Salé Rovers and other Barbary corsairs off the coast of Morocco, as well as English pirates who considered that the Danes were fair game, even though they increasingly tried to present themselves as politically neutral.
A similar history can be written of what became the major Danish fort, Christiansborg, founded in 1661 in the region of Accra. One of its commandants held office for eleven days, which were given over to a spectacular feast during which he married a part-African woman; but the Fetu king was disgusted and had him removed from office (this is less surprising than it sounds, as the forts were not sovereign territory, but were at least in theory rented from local kings against a small tribute payment). The Portuguese were deeply irritated by these northern interlopers in what they still liked to think was their Gold Coast, even though fellow Portuguese were active among the Danish merchants – Moses Josua Henriques traded between Guinea and the West Indies around 1675 and became royal factor
for trade between Glückstadt and Guinea. Meanwhile the Danish West India Company, like the African kings, expected its share of the proceeds from the Guinea trade. A ‘recognition’ had to be paid, taking the form of a percentage of profits. For instance, Portuguese Jews based in Holland were permitted to pay a 2 per cent ‘recognition’ if they sailed under the flag of Denmark to the Danish bases in Africa.28
IV
The great scramble for Africa took place in the nineteenth century; but the seventeenth century also saw a scramble, this time for Guinea and the West Indies. Part of the impetus to develop colonies in the West Indies came from an unexpected quarter, soon after the Thirty Years War came to an end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This was Kurland, where Jakob Kettler was duke, and he was determined to promote the economy of his small but strategically important territory. He had spent some time in Amsterdam and had been inspired by the maritime glories of what was, after all, still a small nation. The Swedish king once described Jakob as ‘too poor for a king, too rich for a duke’. Kurland was rich in wood and other naval supplies, and Jakob could not be ignored; but his schemes proved overambitious. He could afford to build a fleet of forty-four men-of-war and sixty merchant ships, and from 1650 onwards he began to plant settlements across the Atlantic: in 1651 he established a fort in the Gambia River, and three years later he completed the purchase of Tobago, off the coast of South America, from its impoverished owner, the Englishman Lord Warwick. In one of the most curious episodes in the colonial history of the Caribbean, he sent Latvian peasants, as well as German and other settlers, to this island. This almost inevitably set the Dutch against him, while the English, then under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, proved to be better disposed and entered into a treaty that recognized Gambia as a Kurlander possession. In the end, the Kurlanders were unable to hold back their Dutch and French enemies, who were determined to flush them out of Tobago, setting up their own colonies on the island. First the Dutch seized the Kurlander fort, and then the Kurlanders managed to recover it; but their hold was precarious, and Tobago became a battleground between the Dutch and the English, putting to an end the dreams of this Baltic duke, who died not long afterwards.29