Age of Invention: Knights of the Caribbean

In researching the relative strengths of English and Dutch merchants, I was surprised to learn just how many other European states also tried to get a slice of the seventeenth century’s intercontinental trade.

The Danes, for example, had an East India Company of their own. In 1620 they reached Sri Lanka, where they negotiated a treaty with the local ruler to found an outpost. But they seem to have been driven off by the Portuguese, who already had some forts on the island. The Danes thus hopped across to the Indian mainland, again negotiating a treaty with a local ruler to allow them to establish a fort of their own at the town of Tranquebar — the unimaginatively named Dansborg, or “Danish fort”. Although the Danes managed to hold onto it until as late as 1845, it was a poorly-supplied outpost in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Dutch and English often trying to purchase it cheaply. Nonetheless, this foray into the Indian Ocean was just the beginning of Danish expansionism. In the 1650s they acquired some forts along the coast of present-day Ghana, and then colonised the Caribbean islands of St Thomas and St John (now in the United States Virgin Islands) — bases from which Denmark could become involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

In 1685 the Danes leased part of the island of St Thomas to the electorate of Brandenburg, which in 1701 became Prussia — another surprising early European coloniser hoping for a slice of the slave trade. The Caribbean settlement was intended to complement several forts that Brandenburg had just acquired on the western coast of Africa, both in present-day Ghana and at Arguin, in present-day Mauritania. Yet the colonies proved too costly to defend and maintain. By the 1710s Prussia had begun to sell off its overseas possessions to the Dutch.

Then there were the Swedes. In the 1650s the Swedes also acquired some coastal land in western Africa, doing the usual thing of founding some forts. These did not last long, however, before being seized by the Dutch, the English, and even the Danes. The Swedes also attempted to colonise North America, establishing settlements along the Delaware River in the 1630s. But these, like many of its other possessions, were soon also seized by the Dutch.

More surprising, perhaps, is that the Knights Hospitaller — the crusading order that ruled Malta — also acquired some Caribbean colonies of their own. Many of the Knights were French-born noblemen who became involved in administering France’s colonial expansion, and in 1639 one of them — Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy — was appointed the French king’s governor for some of his possessions in the Caribbean. But Poincy went rogue, ruling the islands as his own personal kingdom from a lavish chateau he had built on Saint-Christophe (St Kitts). He then simply refused all attempts to replace him, eventually solidifying his position by persuading the Knights to officially lease many of the islands from France. A few years after his death in 1660, the French took them back.

Most surprising of all, however, were the colonisation attempts of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, in what is now western Latvia. This was not even a fully sovereign state, but a vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 1640s Duke Jacob von Kettler of Courland was financing the colonisation of Tobago in the Caribbean, and Couronian ships themselves were soon transporting hundreds of settlers across the Atlantic. From 1651, the duke also negotiated permission from local rulers to allow him to establish colonies and forts along the Gambia River, in West Africa. But these projects were beset by difficulties from the start. War between the English and the Dutch in the early 1650s meant that many of the neutral Couronian supply ships passing through the Channel were delayed or even seized on suspicion of being enemy vessels. And in 1658 when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was at war with Sweden, the duke was captured (kidnapped by one Robert Douglas, a Scottish commander in the Swedish army). Without the duke’s oversight, the flow of Couronian ships sending supplies to the colonies ceased. Desperate to ensure that they were at least supported by someone, the duchy’s ambassador to the Dutch Republic handed over the care of the Gambian forts to the Dutch.

Although Duke Jacob was freed upon the cessation of hostilities in 1660, the first expedition of the newly-founded Royal Adventurers of England trading into Africa — the precursor to the infamous Royal African Company — simply seized the Couronian settlements on the Gambia. This was on the flimsy pretext that they were (almost) uninhabited, and were thus at risk of falling into the hands of the Dutch. A diplomatic mess ensued, with Duke Jacob always somehow ending up the loser. Both the Dutch and the Couronians lodged official complaints with the English about the capture of the Gambian possessions, the Dutch apparently continuing to treat the settlements as their own. Their rival claims were fobbed off, each for contradicting the other. It then took almost a year for the duke’s envoys to remind the Dutch that the settlements were actually his, and thus to withdraw their claims.

The Couronian envoys were then fobbed off by the English for a few more years, before eventually striking a deal: in 1664 Duke Jacob agreed to relinquish his claims over the forts in the Gambia to the English, in exchange for the English recognising his claim to Tobago. But this time it was the Dutch who refused to recognise the Couronian claim to Tobago; during Duke Jacob’s imprisonment the Dutch settlers there had looted the Couronian colony, claiming the whole island for themselves. Although the deal with the English had also stipulated that the Couronians be able to trade freely in the Gambia, this was not always adhered to when their ships actually got there, and the Couronian settlement on Tobago fared extremely poorly. Periodically destroyed by natives, the Dutch, the French, and various other opportunistic buccaneers, it was only occasionally re-colonised, with many of the supply ships never arriving thanks to pirates, mutiny, and storms. Duke Jacob died in 1681, and in 1687 the Couronians finally gave up trying.

What is so striking about all of these unusual episodes is that they took place in such a short space of time — all within a few decades of each other. Perhaps the navigational and shipbuilding expertise of the Dutch and the English had simply managed to spread farther afield, suddenly manifesting in all sorts of expedition attempts in the mid-seventeenth century. Other than the Knights Hospitaller, however, who simply featured prominently among French colonial governors and naval commanders because they were French-born aristocrats with experience of fighting Algerian corsairs and the Ottomans at sea, all of the other unusual would-be colonial powers were Baltic. It seems to me that with the rise of the North Sea economies as the centre of European intercontinental trade, there was a bid by their various Baltic trading partners to grab themselves a share. If the fates of their colonies are anything to go by, perhaps they were simply too late.