Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

on this day
The remains
of the Danes
The Danish West Indies? It’s a part
of Caribbean history that’s little
remembered today. James Ferguson
explains how and why the Kingdom
of Denmark got into the colonisation
business — and sold its
Caribbean possessions to the
United States, exactly a
century ago
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
The Caribbean, as we know, is a part of the world with a long,
complex, and quite often unpleasant colonial history. We
also know who the main colonial powers were, and which
islands and mainland territories they controlled. They
were, of course, Spain (first to arrive on the scene, courtesy
of an Italian navigator named Columbus), England
(before union with Scotland created Britain), France, and the Netherlands.
These four European nations accounted for the vast majority of Caribbean
colonisation, and their West Indian assets changed hands at a regular rate
during three centuries of superpower rivalry played out in the region.
But there were other, less known, colonisers. Sweden owned the
island of St Barthélemy from 1784 to 1898, while colonists from the
now-disappeared Duchy of Courland (in present-day Latvia) had a
precarious toehold in Tobago for five years before surrendering
to the Dutch (who, in turn, relinquished the island to English
forces). And then there were the Knights of Malta (or, to
give them their full title, Sovereign Military Hospitaller
Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta),
who between 1651 and 1665 ran St Barth, St Kitts, St Croix,
and St Martin. This religious and chivalrous order, born out
of the medieval crusading tradition and allied to early French
colonisers, understandably favoured islands named after saints.
110 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM